Mon, Jun 02, 2003
New Zealand Celebrates Its Own Centennial Of Flight
Orville Wright. Wilbur Wright. Richard Pearse.
What's wrong with this picture? Certainly, in this year marking
the centennial of flight, we're out to celebrate man's leap into
the heavens. Thousands of people - many of them pilots and aviation
enthusiasts - will flock to Kill Devil Hill (NC) this summer to
commemorate the first flight of the Wright Flyer. But was it really
the first time man took to the skies under his own power?
Nope. At least, not the way they tell it down under.
Richard Pearse: Sheep Farmer, Aviation Pioneer
Perhaps a little resentfully, the folks in New Zealand claim the
whole Wright Brothers thing is overblown. They're out to celebrate
the feats of home-grown aviator Richard Pearse.
On March 31, 1903, more than eight months before the Wright
Brothers made their famed attempt, "Mad Richard" Pearse rolled a
rickety bamboo-and-string concoction out into a field and took off.
One account has it that Pearse flew 50 feet before wedging himself
- and his bamboo aircraft - in a hedge near the New Zealand town of
Waitahoi. "His landing was apparently awful," says freelance writer
Debbi Gardiner. "It was a clumsy flight. But he got the thing up in
the air."
So, for New Zealanders, the centennial celebrations are already
over. About 4000 people got together on the Pearse family farm to
celebrate what they see as the real birth of flight, complete with
a statue of Pearse and his plane atop a pole, forever
nose-into-the-wind.
"I was raised to believe he made the first flight," said Ms.
Gardner, in comments published by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
"That's what my parents taught me. They're simple people. They have
no reason to lie."
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