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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
What's all this fuss about the Wright brothers? All good Kiwis know New Zealand's Richard Pearse got there first.
Aug 22, 2002 | I was 13 when I first questioned whether the Wright brothers really were the world's first men to fly. It was Easter break in New Zealand. I'd hopped on a bus 200 miles down south from Christchurch to my dad's cattle farm in South Canterbury, famous for its parochialism, arid plains and pristine views of the Southern Alps. Every Easter, Dad hosts a "fly-in." Ultralight pilots from around the country congregate on his 480-acre farm for a laddish aviation pig-out of rallies, barbecues and races.
My dad builds and flies ultralights -- or what we in New Zealand call "microlights." He built South Canterbury's very first microlight from a kit he imported from the States in 1980. The day before Good Friday on their way to the fly-in, pilots would tear up Gardiner Road in their motorized half-glider pterodactyl-like planes. They'd scare the hell out of me, coming up close to the kitchen window, swooping over the roof and rose garden. The pilots would wave before heading to the paddock down below. Even a mile away their engines sounded like gigantic blow flies.
In 1983, Dad asked me to copilot his plane in the flour-bomb competition and to help with the prize giving. At the Waitohi Country Hall that night I gave the "pilot of the meet" award to a speedster daredevil pilot, a deer farmer from Invercargill who won all but one game. The prize was clunky -- a dilapidated bronze plane in a glass case with the words "Richard Pearse Memorial Trophey for Aviation Excellence" inscribed in gold. Richard Pearse, Dad explained on the drive home, was the first man in the world to fly. The infamous first flight took place on this very bitumen road, he said proudly. The fly-in rallies were held in Pearse's memory and honor.
Historians describe my great-great-uncle, Richard William Pearse, as a simple cellist, a shy cattle farmer and an aloof inventor. Both Gordon Ogilvie, who published "The Riddle of Richard Pearse" in 1973, and Geoff Rodliffe, the author of "Wings Over Waitohi" (1993) and "Flight Over Waitohi" (1997) spoke with several witnesses of Pearse's pioneering flight. The witnesses were schoolboys then and in their 80s by the time of the interviews. All agreed that late one summer, after considerable taxiing, Pearse flew a plane up 50 yards in the sky before crashing into a gorse fence on Main Waitohi Road. It was March 31, 1903, eight months before Wilbur and Orville's Dec. 17 flight of that year, making Pearse, not the Wrights, the first to fly.
Now, nobody in New Zealand claims that Pearse flew in a controlled fashion before the Wright brothers. Everyone who's heard of Pearse knows he was disastrous at landing. But if you're asking who got their plane in the air first, as my dad says, "Richard's the boy."
In the United States, preparations for next December's celebrations of the Wright brothers are well underway. In January the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission joined with the Wright Experience, a nonprofit organization, to promote the 100th anniversary of the flight. The pilots who will fly the reproduction of the 1903 Kitty Hawk were selected in July.
Pearse fans are well aware that the rest of the world believes it was the Wright brothers who flew first. But they are not perturbed. They've begun their own preparations in New Zealand to celebrate the Easter centenary, in March 2003, of Pearse's first flight.
What makes Pearse's achievement great, for New Zealanders, is its expression of "You can do it, mate!" Kiwi ingenuity. Legend has it that Pearse worked alone. He was a reclusive guy who educated himself on aviation from reading periodicals from the United States. He had no financial backing or university degree. But in the backblocks of New Zealand (a mile from Dad's farm) he constructed a bamboo-framed monotype bicycle plane.
