Warbird Information Exchange

Nice photos. I have not seen them before.
Does anyone have specifications on Whitehead's aircraft?
span, wing area , type engines?

With respect to "First in Flight" and "Birthplace of Aviation" - read carefully. They're both true.

The first flight did take place in NC.

And there can be no doubt that Ohio (and specifically the Dayton area) was the Birthplace of Aviation. That's where all the work up to the first flight, and the subsequent attempts to perfect it at Huffman Prairie, happened.

There's room for both plates for sure.

As to Whitehead - read the link from Air & Space mag quoted above, which I've quoted here again for emphasis. No matter how badly one wants a claim that someone other than the Wrights flew first (oodles of evidence points to their flight as the first - very scant and incredible is that for anyone else), the fact is, even if someone else did it first, the Wrights did it best. Because everyone else since 1903 followed their lead - not anyone else's. With respect to engines, wing warping, design, etc., etc. All modern heavier than air flight derives from their successes and most importantly, their failures. All of which they did a very good job of documenting.

I'm from NC and IMHO they're both WRONG....

Ohio was actually only the "birthplace" of just one of the Wright Brothers. Older brother Wilbur was born in Millville, IN in 1867 (maybe the state of Indiana should be getting in on some of this action, too.) Orville was born in Dayton, OH in 1871.

"Aviation" on the other hand, both as an idea and a practical fact, had been "born" or realized long before the Wright Brothers came on the scene. The Montgolfier Brothers were flying hot-air balloons in Paris in 1783 - 120 years before the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, NC. That qualifies as "aviation". So does Otto Lilenthal's glider experiments in Germany in 1893 (10 years before the Wrights flew) during which he achieved successful flights of up to 250 meters (820 feet) - far outdistancing the Wright Brothers' first powered flights.

That is the difference: North Carolina was only "First in Powered, Heavier-than-Air Flight" and Ohio was only "Birthplace of One of the First Significant Pioneers of Powered, Heavier-than-Air Flight" - but all of that just won't fit on a license plate!

BTW: prior to using "First in Flight" on its license tags, NC used "First in Freedom" in reference to it being the first Southern state after the Civil War (aka the War of Northern Aggression) to free all of its slaves in accordance with President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. That kind of lame-a$$, weak, back-handed claim to fame didn't sit well with too many folks from the peak of the Civil Rights movement in 1964 and onward and it was in the early 1970's that they changed the license tags to what they presumed was the less controversial "First in Flight"

Note however that it wasn't until another 35 or so years later that the US Congress, in one of its seemingly never ending "fits" of nothing-better-to-do passed a non-binding resolution "officially" recognizing the state of Ohio as the "Birthplace of Aviation" - I suspect simply in recognition of the efforts of then Senator John Glenn.

By the same token, according to the US Congress, a tomato is a vegetable (although it is biologically classified as a fruit) just so that ketchup can qualify for school lunch subsidies.

_________________
“To invent the airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything!” - Otto Lilienthal

Natasha: "You got plan, darling?"
Boris: "I always got plan. They don't ever work, but I always got one!"

Remember, any dummy can be a dumb-ass...
In order to be a smart-ass, you first have to be "smart"
and to be a wise-ass, you actually have to be "wise"

Of course, onw could argue that the "birthplace of aviation" is Germany, where the oldest complete fossils of birds - Archeopterix - have been found. These are of Jurassic age (155,000,000 years ago), but then someone would remind us that the earliest flying insects are of late Carboniferous age, about 150,000,000 years earlier. Seed casings that were adapted to be transported by the wind are likely earlier than that, but we might argue that is not powered flight.

But all that brings us back to the question of what constitutes "powered flight": if flight is being able to fly in a circle and land where you want to, then the Wright brothers in 1905; if getting off the ground for a short and not particularly controled distance, then any of a variety of people before 1903, Whitehead being perhaps the last not the first in that category; if a lengthy distance is the criterion then Langley's Model 5; and of course there were engine-powered dirigibles before that.

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Kevin McCartney