Pearse’s plane on display in U.S.

Press, 15 February 1982, Page 16

Pearse’s plane on display in U.S.

NZPA staff correspondent Washington The bank was just closing in San Diego when 15 New Zealanders and spouses of New Zealanders arrived with crowbars and a vast assortment of other tools. They did not rob the Great American Federal Savings and Loan Association, though. They assembled an aeroplane. The plane is a replica of the' one the New Zealand aviation pioneer, Richard Pearse, flew along the bank of the • Opihi River, near Waitohi. on March 31, 1902, 21 months before the Wright brothers. The replica, owned by the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, is now on its way back there after being on show in Los Angeles and San Diego. In San Diego the plane was displayed in the bank’s enormous lobby, which is covered with a vast scarlet New Zealand wool carpet. The assembly team, headed by a helicopter mechanic, Anton Ayres, of Westport, who now lives in San Diego, found there were no instructions with the plane, said Patricia Thornton, the president of the Australia, New Zealand, America Club, which organised the San Diego display. That meant they had to work from the sketches that

the museum supplied to go on display with the replica, with 15 people arguing over which bit went where. The exhibition was a success. with wide newspaper, publicity drawing a constant stream of visitors. Businessmen even climbed over the ropes to lie on the floor to study the underneath of the plane, and at least one man drove for five hours to see it' , At least one San Diego ' newspaper accepted that Pearse was the first man to fly an aircraft. Jane’s “All The World's Aircraft" is about to give him that recognition. though whether it was a controlled flight is still an open question. Nearby in San Diego, how-

ever, there was competition. The San 'Diego Aerospace Museum was holding a concurrent Wright Brothers exhibition . . . and there visitors were being told the Wright brothers were the ’ first to fly. Pearse’s plane, which he ’ built himself, had a two- ' - cylinder engine, a tricycle ' undercarriage, and a wingspan of 6.3 metres. A farmer’ at the time, Pearse died in 1953 at the age of 75. A M.O.T.A.T. booklet on Pearse says no responsible researcher has ever claimed he achieved fully controlled flight before the Wright brothers, but that the Wright brothers’ first flights were not controlled either. ■