An Ohio House panel has scheduled a vote on legislation that rejects Connecticut's insistence that one of its aviators beat the Wright brothers to the first successful airplane flight by two years.
The Ohio House Transportation Committee vote is scheduled for Tuesday.
If passed, the Ohio resolution would repudiate Connecticut's claim “that Gustave Whitehead successfully flew a powered, heavier-than-air machine of his own design on August 14, 1901, or on any other date.”
Connecticut passed a law in 2013 declaring Whitehead's 1901 flight as beating the Wright Brothers' December 1903 flight off Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Aviation historians generally agree the Wrights won the race to flight by being first to combine airplane lift, control and thrust systems, but a forward in the aviation publication, “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft,” mentioned research into Whitehead and his flight of a plane called the “Condor” in August 1901, two years before the Wright Brothers took to the skies over North Carolina.
The Dayton-born Wrights' great-grand-niece was among proponents of the Ohio measure.
