He found a man who had actually helped the inventor fly the thing in 1901, and then another, and another. He rooted out oldtimers who remembered Whitehead. The Post said, 'Hell no, it was 1901.' They'd been spending so much time checking it out that the editor had to declare a moratorium on the subject." Somebody said it was a local plane that flew sometime around 1910, so I went to the Bridgeport Post and looked it up.
"I said, 'What the hell is this?' I was fascinated. He noticed some shots of a curious batwing airplane in a meadow. O'Dwyer, 65, was cleaning out the garage of a neighbor's estate in 1963 when he came upon three dog-eared photo albums full of faded black-and-white snapshots showing Fairfield at the turn of the century. O'Dwyer of Fairfield, whose life's passion is Gustave Whitehead. The Smithsonian, says the Whitehead camp, is committed to a 1948 contract with the Wright brothers estate forbidding the institution to "publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903."Ī much-handled Xerox of the contract's key provisions, carefully marked up with yellow crayon, is in the possession of retired Air Force major William J. 14, 1901, creating a tangled controversy that has flared up periodically ever since Whitehead died in obscurity in 1927. In a few days, the Connecticut State Senate is expected to act on a bill already passed by the House asking the Smithsonian Institution to investigate once and for all the claims that Gustave Whitehead flew a half mile in his powered craft on a back lot here on Aug.
The whole world would have to rearrange its thinking. If he did, it would create an uproar that would reverberate far beyond the aviation museums into every school in the land. Did an immigrant machinist in Bridgeport successfully fly a motorized airplane two years before the Wright brothers?
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