Connecticut Senate passes bill writing Wright Brothers out of history

The Connecticut Senate passed a bill Tuesday evening that would delete the Wright brothers from history, explicitly stripping recognition for the first powered flight from Orville and Wilbur and assigning it to someone else.

“The Governor shall proclaim a date certain in each year as Powered Flight Day to honor the first powered flight by [the Wright brothers] Gustave Whitehead and to commemorate the Connecticut aviation and aerospace industry,” reads House Bill No. 6671, which now sits on the governor’s desk awaiting passage into law.

"There’s no question that the Wright brothers retain their place in aviation history," Republican state sen. Mike McLachlan told FoxNews.com. And rightfully so. They just weren't first." The governor is likely to sign the bill as early as next week, he said.

In March, aviation historian John Brown unveiled what he calls photographic proof that Whitehead flew over Connecticut in 1901, “two years, four months, and three days before the Wright brothers.”

"At least in Connecticut, aviation history now appears to have been rewritten,” Brown told FoxNews.com Wednesday. “I have no information about whether school books will be reprinted in time for the start of Fall classes.”

There is simply no doubt that the Wright Brothers were the first to make a controlled flight, and clearly all subsequent successful airframes trace are descended from the Wright Flyer without exception.

Actually, there is a fundamental design difference between the Wright Brothers' Flyer and all modern aircraft: the Flyer was designed so that in the absence of force from the elevators, it would assume a slight upward pitch, while modern aircraft are designed to assume a downward pitch. This meant two things--one bad, but one good:

If the airplane's speed fell below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch, there would be no way to regain speed and thus avoid a relatively prompt return to Earth, regardless of altitude.
If the airplane's speed fell below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch, it would remain below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch; given friendly terrain, the consequent landing would be survivable for both the plane and occupants.

For today's purposes, having a plane which can recover from a stall while remaining airborne is more important than having a plane which, if only flown over friendly terrain, would be able to land safely in such case (especially since planes often need to fly over unfriendly terrain). On the other hand, in the early days of flight, being able to survive undesired landings was far more important than being able to reduce their frequency. Once the plane was developed well enough that one could reasonably expect not to be forced into an unwanted landing, then the controls could be reversed to the modern style.

First powered, sustained flight. I don’t see how a glider fits into powered.

If prior to the Wright Brothers' flight someone had produced a glider which was sufficiently efficient that it could remain aloft indefinitely in the presence of naturally-occurring thermals or other updrafts, I would have regarded such an accomplishment as being no less significant than that of the Wright Brothers. What was significant about the Wright Brothers was not that their plane was powered, but rather that it could remain aloft without continuous or repeated connection to the ground. By my understanding, all gliders before that time had enough drag that even naturally-occurring thermals would have been insufficient to keep them aloft.

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