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Richard Pearse
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A New Zealand farmer and inventor who experimented with a powered monoplane in South Canterbury. Witnesses interviewed decades later described seeing Pearse fly and land a powered heavier than air machine on 31 March 1903, nine months before the Wright brothers, and the Museum of Transport and Technology regards that date as the most likely one for a publicly witnessed powered take off. Pearse himself complicated the record: in a 1909 newspaper interview and again in letters of 1915 and 1928 he dated his first practical attempts to 1904, suggesting he regarded his 1902 to 1903 efforts as insignificant early steps rather than genuine flight. Historians describe the record as genuinely ambiguous rather than resolved either way.
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Aviation, Modes Why this is disputed. A different, contested account of aviations pioneering: witnesses recalled a powered take off on 31 March 1903, but Pearse himself later dated his practical attempts to 1904, and historians regard the record as genuinely ambiguous rather than settled. See the open question first-powered-flight-priority-dispute.
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