Push to Recognize Flight of New Zealander Takes Off

The Wright Brothers get all the credit, but a little-known New Zealand farmer and self-taught aviation pioneer deserves some recognition too, his supporters say.

On March 31, 1903, Richard Pearse flew his bamboo monoplane over the lush pastures of his farm before crashing unceremoniously onto a hedge, family members and other witnesses said.

It was his first successful flight and came months before Orville Wright took to the air in the Wright Flyer over the North Carolina dunes near Kitty Hawk on Dec. 17 that year -- a flight that landed Orville and his brother Wilbur in the history books.

The reason was the nature of the Wrights’ flight. Although several others are thought to have gotten machines off the ground first, the Wrights won acclaim because theirs was the “first powered, sustained and controlled flight by an airplane,” said Dick Knapinski, spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Assn. in Oshkosh, Wis.

Pearse himself conceded the honor to the Wrights, agreeing that none of his flights were fully controlled -- most ended in the farm’s hedges that grew high because he was too busy working on his plane to trim them.

A self-taught aviator and inventor, “Bamboo” Pearse -- he also built a bicycle out of bamboo -- got his plane into the air at least five times before the Wrights, his enthusiasts say.

A nephew, Richard Pearse, 83, said his uncle “deserves all the recognition that’s going.”

“He got airborne before the Wright brothers,” Pearse said from his home in Timaru, a city near his late uncle’s property.

Pearse’s backers are pushing for more recognition for his work.

The New Zealand division of the Royal Aeronautical Society has nominated him for the First Flight Hall of Fame at Kitty Hawk, but says that with only one inductee a year, the earliest Pearse may be considered is 2005.

“He should be in there,” said the society’s local vice president, Hugh McCarroll. “It will be appropriate recognition of his amazing work.”

Pearse is getting notice this year from the Experimental Aircraft Assn. He and other pioneer aviators will be featured before the U.S. group’s planned flight of a Wright Flyer replica Dec. 17 at the sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, Knapinski said.

Although there is little physical evidence authenticating Pearse’s flights, some of the plane’s parts have survived, and his devotees insist that there is no doubt he took to the air before the Wrights.

At least 20 family members and other residents of the tiny rural settlement of Waitohi, near Timaru, reported witnessing the first flight of the aircraft, which was powered by an engine Pearse crafted on his forge.

Richard Pearse said his father, Warne, told of being among those present for that March 31 flight and others. “My father used to help him, spinning the propeller to start the engine.”

A local photographer reportedly took a picture of the plane stuck atop a hedge, but the photo was lost in a flood years later, said Jack Melhopt, chairman of the Timaru Aviation Heritage Center.

People told of watching Pearse’s plane skim over paddocks and, in one case, land in a dry riverbed, the overhead engine frightening a horse.

Amos Martin, a farm worker, recorded a flight on May 2, 1903.

“It taxied 50 yards, rose 10 to 15 feet, flew 50 yards, then crashed into a hedge,” he wrote in a letter. “I got on my bike and hightailed off.”

Treated as a crank by many of his neighbors and even some in his family, Pearse eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where he died at age 75, unsung and alone, on July 29, 1953.

“Pearse was very much a recluse. He was laughed at by the locals. They called him ‘Mad Dick’ and ‘Bamboo Pearse,”’ said the Timaru aviation center’s secretary, Graham McCleary.

A lucky find of rusted parts from one of Pearse’s homemade engines and a propeller in an old rubbish heap have been used to give his pioneer work new life. Three replica engines and two planes based on his earliest designs were built to mark the centennial of his first flight.

Working virtually alone, Pearse designed and built his light-bodied plane with rigid wings, ailerons, flaps and rudder, all of which were “movable from one control column by the pilot,” said Geoff Rodliffe, a historian who wrote a book about Pearse.

Pearse’s nephew said he had a firm objective with the early flights: flying nine miles to the town of Temuka for shopping.

“But I can see that once he was in the air, he had a few problems controlling it, so he didn’t make the trip to Temuka and back as he intended,” Richard Pearse said.