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."

FMI: http://www.auckland-airport.co.nz/pearse.html