March 18, 2013 Last week, in his foreword to the 100th edition
of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft — a reference work that those
of us in the aviation press have relied on for many years for
the facts of airplane production and specifications — editor
Paul Jackson refutes the long-held belief that the Wright
brothers were the first to pilot a powered, controlled airplane.
Instead, Jackson says, it was Bridgeport, Connecticut-native
Gustave Whitehead. Based largely on a Web site dedicated to
Whitehead, hosted by Australian John Brown, and under the
dramatic heading “Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied,” Jackson
states that the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight took place two
years after Whitehead made his breakthrough, concluding “The
Wrights were right, but Whitehead was ahead.” At the National
Air and Space Museum, home of the 1903 Wright Flyer exhibited as
the world’s first airplane, Wright biographer and senior
aeronautics curator Tom Crouch has heard it all before. Here is
his analysis of the evidence offered by