At least Orville did not use the &#x27;nuclear option&#x27;. From the article:<p>The dawn of 1914 brought good news, as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Wrights’ patent suit, agreeing that Curtiss had infringed. This would have been the perfect time to shut down the competition by re-establishing the Wright monopoly. But Orville did not make a move, as the company manager Grover Loening lamented later: “In no time Curtiss…could have been closed down or bought up, and we would have seen a totally different development of flying starting here and spreading to Europe exactly as the telephone monopoly did…&quot;<p>If he had shut down Curtiss and his other competitors, the development of aviation would probably have stalled for a while, at least in the US. Perhaps Orville realized that his company was well behind the state-of-the-art by then.