Connecticut lawmakers hoping to adopt the coveted “First in Flight” slogan for their state have been urged to stick with the generally acknowledged claim that the Ohio-born Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were the first to pull off powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft, in December 1903 in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.
The controversy over who was really first to fly erupted in 2013 when Paul Jackson, the editor in chief of J_ane’s All the World’s Aircraft,_ wrote that German-born Whitehead and not the Wright Brothers was probably the first to fly a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in 1901, some two years before the Wright’s feat. Jackson’s conclusions were based in large part on the research of Australian pilot-historian John Brown, who has been engaged in a war of words and evidence with the Smithsonian over the controversy. The Smithsonian has as part of its agreement to display the Wright Flyer a clause that it will never recognize a different first to fly claim than the Wrights.
