I never heard of Richard Pearse before I visited Australia in 2008.

I heard about Alberto Santos-Dumont, the inventor from Brazil.

All I can say is that Wright Brothers’ claim is the best of them all. Simple. I say this as a person with slight anti-American sentiment. I am just trying to be objective here.

Let’s see about what constitutes an airplane:

This is important, because for regular people, you don’t want to confuse things. A drama movie is not an action movie. Sure Titanic has some action parts, but in general, it is different from Die Hard or The Expendables. A car is not a cart wagon nor a “railess train”. You need to be specific to get the public the correct perception. So here it is:

A Glider is Not An Airplane

It cannot fly “on its own”. So they have no thrust component.

This disqualifies Otto Lilienthal, Samuel Langley, Jean-Marie Le Bris.

An “Airship” is Not An Airplane

This disqualifies Santos-Dumont’s first claim. He produced airships far before the Wright brothers. Airship is like a ship: lighter-than-the medium fluid vehicle that simply “floats”.

It doesn’t have lift component on its own, other than utilizing different principle of physics than the one used by airplanes. Santos-Dumont didn’t actually produce an aeroplane until 1905.

An Airplane or a Kite?

Now, the most publicly accepted claims about Wright Brothers is that, their wing design or “aerofoils” are what sets the invention for airplane.

This is Pearse’s machine

As you can see, the wing is basically a “canvassed” bamboo construction, resmbling more of a kite than a wing.

Really? Are we nitpicking now?

Well, but even birds disagree too. It isn’t a wing.

Even bats disagreed.

LOL, is this mammals & avians’ conspiracy to undermine non flying birds like Kiwis?

Not even you, water mammal!

Nope, even insects do implement airfoils as well to achieve sustained flight, albeit with “corrugated” shape. This is the airfoil surface of a dragonfly wing:

Moths and butterflies:

They bend the front side of their nearly “flat wings” like a slat on a modern airplane to achieve the airfoil shape when they are tired flapping.

Heck, even helicopters have better claims as an “aeroplane” because of wings. This is the airfoil of their rotor blades:

They are called “rotary wings” for a reason.

Stop it you water creatures! You are not even flying… oh wait.

Pearse’s controllable kite

So Pearse’s plane is practically wingless, hence I call them a “kite”. This means that the plane has to maintain certain degree of angle to sustain its flight just like the angle of how you hold a kite, release, and make a dash to make it airborne. As a result, it only took off briefly for no more than a few metres and about a 100 metre before falling down again.

The kite wing also makes it nearly uncontrollable, since airflows will just “bump” the surface up instead of flowing through its contoured shape like in an airfoil design. This creates turbulent air that renders any control surface manipulations less effective.

The medal is worded as such as not to confuse with “airplane”.

Yes, it was a powered flight, 9 months before Wright Bros’ Flyer I did (the medal mistaken the year, it supposed to be 1903, not 1902). I wholeheartedly agree with it.

To Pearse’s merit, his “plane” has more modern looks: elevators, ailerons, rudders, monoplane configuration, tricycle landing gear, and tractor propeller.

Wright’s Flyer has a “twisting wing” to control roll instead of aileron. Alexander Graham Bell invented a more effective aileron control for that. Then he used pusher propeller, a skid, a biplane wing configuration. But it is the airplane. It can take off on its own, get airborne and you can practically tell it which way to go.

Pearse denying his achievements

Pearse claimed that his plane wasn’t as “practical”. Wright Flyer can fly almost as high as hundreds of feet off the air.

So it is clear then, the first maker of an aeroplane are the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur. December 17, 1903. Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

I mean, look at it! Stacked elevators at the front and a pair of stabilizers blown by pusher propeller just like a ship? What were they thinking? As if “warp wing” idea for control isn’t quirky enough. Alas, this is the machine that starts it all, from Sopwith Camel, Fokker Triplane, Spitfire, Mustang, Blackbird, to Concorde and the Jumbo Jet.