By WARREN GAMBLE
Across the United States this year there are multimillion dollar celebrations of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first faint brush with the sky.
A federal commission has been set up to oversee centennial events, and big business and non-profit organisations have joined forces to recreate the Wright brothers' plane which flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
Celebrities such as flying enthusiast John Travolta are lending their profiles to the celebrations of what is widely recognised as the world's first heavier-than-air powered flights.
At the end of this month in a South Canterbury farming community a group of elderly volunteers will stage a homegrown recreation of an event which many believe beat the Wrights into aviation history.
With little fanfare and no Government support, they will be attempting to get airborne in a bamboo, cloth and metal replica of farmer Richard Pearse's monoplane, which they believe flew on March 31, 1903. One hundred years later the attempt to recreate history will take place on the Pearse farm, still owned by relatives, at Waitohi, 10km northwest of Temuka.
The plane has been faithfully reproduced from Pearse's drawings, but so far, despite the best efforts of engineers in Auckland, Timaru and Australia, a replica of the remarkable Pearse engine has yet to be perfected. A Japanese microlight motor might have to be used for the attempt.
The date when the reclusive Pearse first hopped into the air has been debated for 50 years since relatives found relics of his forgotten flying experiments after his death in 1953, and his feats were publicly resurrected.
Pearse himself, in letters to newspapers in the 1920s, gave credit to the Wrights for the first successful flight in a motor-driven plane, and referred to his own experiments taking place in 1904.
But biographers and researchers relying on affidavits from Waitohi witnesses believe March 31 of the previous year was the correct date.
Others question the memory of witnesses who were not approached for half-a-century, and the only documentary evidence, a photograph, taken the day after of the plane resting in a hedge, was destroyed in flooding.
Any record of Pearse's visit to a local hospital with a collarbone injury after the flight were destroyed by fire.
But no matter what the actual date, Pearse supporters argue that his innovative design, created without formal training in an isolated rural community, is worthy of more recognition than he has been given.
They point to the Pearse plane's superior features over the Wrights' flyer: single wing as opposed to biplane, wheels in preference to skids, propeller at the front, not the back, directly connected to a lightweight engine, and moveable wing panels.
The chairman of the South Canterbury Aviation Heritage Society, Jack Mehlhopt, will fold his 74-year-old frame into the Pearse replica plane on March 31.
Weather permitting, he will taxi along a prepared track at the Pearse farm next to the main Waitohi road where Pearse performed his public experiment.
Mehlhopt, who has 55 years experience as a pilot and aircraft engineer, says given a favourable wind on the day there is a good chance the plane will get off the ground, if only briefly, to a height of around 4m.
Most witness accounts say Pearse was airborne for between 100m and 150m before landing in a 4m-high gorse hedge. (The Wright brothers' first powered flights in December 1903 travelled around 40m, but at the fourth attempt the plane flew 280m in 59 seconds).
Mehlhopt says even if Pearse was not the first in the world to fly, he would have been the first in the British empire, "and we know Richard flew on more than one occasion".
He says Pearse was frustrated in his attempts and downplayed them later because he had sought to achieve aerial navigation, controlled flight from one point to another.
"All he wanted to do was to be able to get in his aeroplane and fly to Temuka to pick up his stuff," says Mehlhopt. "He was not wanting to be the world's greatest inventor but was trying to make something of practical use."
Mehlhopt says by Pearse's own strict definition, he had not flown, but his experiments were comparable with the Wrights' early attempts. When they mastered controlled flight in 1905 at Dayton, Ohio, flying for half an hour and making figures of eight, Pearse wrote that he decided to "give up the struggle as it was useless to continue against men who had factories at their backs".
Ridiculed by neighbours as "Mad Pearse" or "Bamboo Dick", Pearse became disillusioned with flight, turning his attention to other inventions such as a powercycle.
He had one more attempt at an aircraft in the 1930s, but his "utility plane" featuring a tilting engine for vertical takeoff never got off the ground. An increasingly paranoid Pearse died aged 75 in a Christchurch mental hospital. He never married.
Mehlhopt says he has written to the Government for the past two years seeking some greater recognition of Pearse and the centenary of his flight. The only reply he received was one informing him that because Pearse's flight was recognised on a 1999 stamp, another one could not be issued.
Like Pearse, who secluded himself in his converted farm shed to work on his plane, the replica for the March 31 attempt was built secretly in the Auckland shed of longtime Pearse researcher Geoff Rodliffe.
Rodliffe, author of three books on Pearse, is now in his mid-80s. A former RAF engineer, he was hooked on the Pearse story after a 1960s visit to the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology where he saw the utility plane. Auckland aviation pioneer George Bolt had painstakingly uncovered the lost strands of the inventor's life, retrieving parts of his plane from a Waitohi dump.
Rodliffe and Christchurch historian Gordon Ogilvie carried on the research, and Rodliffe constructed a replica of Pearse's first plane for a 1970s film. Although it never flew under power, during filming the plane was being towed by a horse which got spooked. To Rodliffe's amazement, the plane lifted off the ground for some metres. That replica, based on designs in Pearse's 1906 patent application, is now at Motat.
For the past year Rodliffe, former Air Force engineer Don Fleming and other enthusiasts have been working on another replica, with Motat assistance, in Rodliffe's shed.
Bamboo from a stand near the Waitakeres has been used for the wing frames. Pearse used bamboo from the same area, rail-freighted south. Synthetic cloth has been sewn over the wings (Pearse used calico), and tubular steel used in the tricycle undercarriage. Pearse created his undercarriage from scrap metal shaped in a homemade lathe.
Former engineer Fleming says the process of piecing together the plane emphasises the homegrown brilliance of Pearse.
While the debate about whether Pearse was the first or one of the first to fly will probably not be resolved, Fleming says he has no doubt that the lonely inventor had enough power and the right structure to get off the ground.
"I think he should be remembered as a man who had an incredible vision of a flying machine and, even more remarkably, put it into practice."
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from New Zealand
Ram raid at supermarket in Haumoana, coastal Hawke's Bay
Glass was left smashed on the ground outside after the supermarket was raided.