News
Ohio Panel OKs Measure Rejecting Claim Connecticut Was First In Flight
By: Associated Press
Posted on:
An Ohio House panel has approved a resolution rejecting 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 okayed the measure by an 11-0 vote Tuesday. Its next stop is the full House.
The measure repudiates 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.”
A 2013 Connecticut law declared 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.
Connecticut state Sen. Kevin Kelly says that state “must stand strongly behind the history we know to be true.”