Columbus OH — Ohio is ready to deliver its formal comeback to another state’s claim that a rival aviator beat the Wright brothers as first in flight, defending what one witness described Wednesday as “a marketing brand of enormous value.”
A resolution repudiating Connecticut’s claim cleared its final committee hurdle Wednesday. Senate passage was expected and its sponsor said the third state in the Wright fight – North Carolina – was supportive. The Wrights were born in Ohio and took their first flight off Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.
The Ohio measure responds to a 2013 Connecticut law honoring aviator Gustave Whitehead as flying in 1901, two years ahead of Dayton residents Orville and Wilbur Wright.
“I heard Connecticut was also laying claim to Sasqatch and the Loch Ness monster,” Ohio state Sen. Bill Coley quipped as the resolution cleared his committee.
The Ohio resolution’s sponsor suggests Connecticut is changing history without evidence and Ohio must respond. Backers argue aviation historians have examined and dismissed accounts that Whitehead flew a powered, heavier-than-air machine of his own design on Aug. 14, 1901 “or on any other date.”
Connecticut Sen. Kevin Kelly wonders why Ohio’s leaders “aren’t even intrigued.”
The dispute over the historical aviators has escalated in recent years, launching documentation fights among aviation experts, defenses of the Wrights citing the scholarship of major institutions such as the National Air & Space Museum and publication this summer of a 432-page book laying out the case for Whitehead’s claim.
“We are an educated people who deserve to know the truth, to know what actually happened, rather than a glorified fairy tale,” author Susan Brinchman wrote in releasing the book.
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