Other early flights
At the time, a number of other inventors had made (or claimed to have made) short flights. Gustave Whitehead reported that he had flown a powered aircraft on 14 August, 1901. He failed to document the flight, but a later replica of his Number 21 was flown successfully. Lyman Gilmore also claimed to have achieved success on 15 May, 1902. In New Zealand, South Canterbury farmer and inventor Richard Pearse constructed a monoplane aircraft that he reputedly flew on March 31 1903. However, even Pearse himself admitted the flight was uncontrolled and ended in a crash-landing on a hedge without having gained any altitude.
Karl Jatho from Hanover conducted a short motorized flight in August 1903, just a few months after Pearse. Jatho's wing design and airspeed did not allow his control surfaces to act properly to control the aircraft.
Also in the summer of 1903, eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Preston Watson make his initial flights at Errol, near Dundee in the east of Scotland. Once again, however, lack of photographic or documentary evidence makes the claim difficult to verify. Many claims of flight are complicated by the fact that many early flights were done at such low altitude that they did not clear the ground effect, and by the complexities involved in the differences between unpowered and powered aircraft.
The Wright Brothers conducted numerous additional flights (about 150) in 1904 and 1905 from Huffman Prairie in Dayton, Ohio and invited friends and relatives. Newspaper reporters did not pay attention after seeing an unsuccessful flight attempt in May 1904.
Public exhibitions of high altitude flights were made by Daniel Maloney in the John Montgomery tandem-wing glider in March and April of 1905 in the Santa Clara, California area. These flights received national media attention and demonstrated superior control of the design, with launches as high as 4,000 feet and landings made at predetermined locations.
Alberto Santos-Dumont made a public flight in Europe on September 13, 1906 in Paris. He used a canard elevator and pronounced wing dihedral, and covered a distance of 221 m (725 ft). Since the plane did not need headwinds or catapults to take off, this flight is considered by some as the first true powered flight. Also, since the earlier attempts of Pearse, Jatho, Watson, and the Wright brothers received less attention from the popular press than Santos-Dumont's flight, its importance to society, especially in Europe and Brazil, is often considered to be greater despite occurring some years later.Two English inventors Henry Farman and John William Dunne were also working separately on powered flying machines. In January 1908, Farman won the Grand Prix d'Aviation with a machine which flew for 1 km, though by this time many longer flights had already been done.
For example, the Wright Brothers had made flights over 39 km long by 1905. Dunne's early work was sponsored by the British military, and tested in great secrecy in Glen Tilt in the Scottish Highlands. His best early design, the D4, flew in December 1908 near Blair Atholl in Perthshire. Dunne's main contribution to early aviation was stability, which was a key problem with the planes designed by the Wright brothers and Samuel Cody.
On May 14, 1908 the Wright Brothers made what is accepted to be the first two-person aircraft flight, with Charlie Furnas as a passenger.
On 8 July 1908, Thérèse Peltier became the first woman to fly as a passenger in an airplane when she made a flight of 656 feet with Léon Delagrange in Milan, Italy.
Thomas Selfridge became the first person killed in a powered aircraft on September 17, 1908, when Orville crashed his two-passenger plane during military tests at Fort Myer in Virginia.
In late 1908, Mrs Hart O. Berg became the first American woman to fly as a passenger in an airplane when she flew with Wilbur Wright in Le Mans, France.
On 25 July 1909 Louis Blériot flew the Blériot XI monoplane across the English Channel winning the Daily Mail aviation prize. His flight from Calais to Dover lasted 37 minutes.
On 22 October 1909 Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to pilot and solo in a powered heavier than air craft. She was also the first woman in the world to receive a pilot's licence.
Controversy over who gets credit for invention of the aircraft has been fuelled by Pearse's and Jatho's essentially non-existent efforts to inform the popular press, by the Wrights' secrecy while their patent was prepared, by the pride of nations, and by the number of firsts made possible by the basic invention. For example, the Romanian engineer Traian Vuia (1872 - 1950) has also been claimed to have built the first self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft able to take off autonomously, without a headwind and entirely driven by its own power. Vuia piloted the aircraft he designed and built on March 18, 1906, at Montesson, near Paris. None of his flights were longer than 100 feet (30 m) in length. In comparison, in October 1905, the Wright brothers had a sustained flight of 39 minutes and 24.5 miles (39 km), circling over Huffman Prairie.
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