Alexander Pfitzner

Alexander Pfitzner, also recorded as Sandor L. Pfitzner, was a Hungarian engineer and inventor who emigrated to the United States and became an aviation pioneer in the earliest years of powered flight. He began his career working for several automobile manufacturers designing engines, experience that he carried into his later work on aircraft propulsion, before turning his attention fully to aviation. His most significant achievement was designing and flying the Pfitzner Flyer, described as among the first American monoplanes, an aircraft notable for using wing-tip control surfaces to achieve lateral control instead of the wing-warping method that the Wright brothers had patented, an engineering choice that let American designers work around the Wrights' patent while still solving the same control problem. Pfitzner also worked on biplane designs and continued to develop aircraft engines during this period. His career ended abruptly and mysteriously in 1910, when he disappeared under circumstances that were never resolved and his body was never found, cutting short a career that had already produced a genuinely original approach to aircraft lateral control at a formative moment in American aviation.