Originally Posted by
Frank Giger
I hate to be the contrarian, but I find all the claims of controlled flight prior to the Wrights to be dubious in the extreme.
Not that it couldn't have happened, but that it would have been disregarded considering what happened after Kitty Hawk.
The Wright brothers were, gently speaking, jerks of the highest order. Once they flew and got the patents, they immediately stopped building and flying and started suing the crap out of anyone building an airplane with six axis of control.
They even had the hubris to bid to sell the Army aircraft with the condition that they not be given a demonstration until they were paid in full for the contract (which the Army didn't go for).
In Europe the French claimed they were lying (resulting in the first public display of a Wright aircraft); the Germans went through some really circuitous path of obscure academic papers to allow manufacture; the Brits studiously ignored the Wrights, and poor Glen Curtiss spent as much time in court as he did making engines and aircraft in the USA. It is because of the Wrights that the USA flew French planes in WWI, as in the USA aviation was the domain of lawyers and ground to a halt.
It was only after WWI that the federal government stepped in and forced a patent pool on the Wrights to relieve the death stranglehold on the neck of aviation.
If there had been anyone that had produced a credible aircraft before the Wrights, no matter how dodgy the documentation, it would have been jumped on and the inventor brought into court to testify to the fact, no matter how reluctant they might have been.