The license plates are referencing the flight by the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. Both states are eager to claim this momentous event in history. While the flight occurred in North Carolina, the Wright Brothers were born in Ohio and developed most of their plans in the Buckeye State.
So which state is right when it comes to the great license plate debate? Perhaps neither. The first self-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air machine could very well have occurred 13 years earlier in France. Clement Ader built the Eole, a bat-winged plane, that apparently flew 160 feet in 1890. The Wright Brothers first flight, in contrast, went 120 feet. The Eole was wrecked after Ader's flight and there remains plenty of controversy surrounding him and whether or not he should be given the "first in flight" credit typically attributed to the Wright Brothers. One of the main reasons why there is so little known about Ader is that he was working for the French military and therefore his forays into flying were not highly publicized. The Wright Brothers' flights were very well documented. Also, the Wright Brothers plane looks a lot more similar to what we think of us as an aeroplane as opposed to the inventions of Ader.
Something that's cool that I ran into during my "research" for this blog is the Discovery Channel has simulations of the first flights of the Wright Brothers. More inexplicably, they also have computer simulations of the first flight in Kitty Hawk next to a line of T-Rex dinosaurs!So, what I am going to do about the great license plate debate? I was hoping to abstain, and just pick a plate that didn't have the phrase "First in Flight" on it. But North Carolina likes putting that statement on almost all of their license plates. In my opinion, North Carolina doesn't have the speciality license plate selection of Virginia, but after poking around I did run into this classic! Maybe it's an "all's well that ends well" situation after all!
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