Historian: Smithsonian aviation curator should resign

BRIDGEPORT, CT — John Brown, the aviation expert and historian who has given new life to the argument that Bridgeporter Gustave Whitehead flew first, on Saturday ripped into the Smithsonian Institution for its insistence that the Wright Brothers were first, and he demanded that Tom Crouch, its senior aviation curator, resign his post.

 

It was Brown who earlier this spring persuaded Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, the bible of flying machines, to list Whitehead, not the Wrights, as the first person to break the bonds of gravity in a heavier-than-air controllable airship. In his speech on Saturday before a packed lecture hall in the Discovery Museum, Brown said that the evidence supporting that Whitehead flew first would easily stand up in a court of law, while the Wrights’ claim “would fall far short.”

 

Whitehead’s supporters say that on Aug. 14, 1901 — more than two years before the Wrights, the German immigrant achieved sustained, controlled flight in Fairfield. Saturday’s event at the Discovery Museum celebrated the 112th anniversary of that flight, and it was attended by Mayor Bill Finch, Stratford Mayor John Harkins, Fairfield First Selectman Mike Tetreau and other VIPs.

 

The Wright camp maintains that Whitehead’s flight lacks witnesses.

 

“In fact, Whitehead’s flights were witnessed by a policeman, a bank vice president, a newspaper reporter, the local undertaker, two engineers and several other people,” Brown said. “Eighteen in all, and the Smithsonian will tell you that all of them are liars.”

 

Brown said that one of the five witnesses to the Wrights’ flight, John Daniels, didn’t make his statement until 32 years later.