An illustration of their flight in Takanini / Manurewa where they lived, and also where Jean Batten landed after her record-breaking flight from England to New Zealand in 1936. They called their plane Manurewa, which is Maori for Drifting Kite. Although they managed short flight before this, their first sustained flight was on 5 February 1911.
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Possibly the best claim to successful powered and controlled flight before the Wright Brothers comes from New Zealand. Richard Pearse of Waitohi worked on the problem of powered flight beginning in 1899, and developed an aircraft that quite resembled a modern ultralight. Pearse would have beaten the Wrights by eight months if he hadn't crashed at the end of his 140 meter flight on 31 March 1903. Or maybe it was the lack of photographs, logs, or written records of the flight. The few eyewitnesses couldn't agree on the length of the flight, or even the exact date. Some accounts place the flight as early as 1902; some as late as 1904. Since the landing wasn't really any rougher than the Wright's landing during that first flight at Kill Devil Hills, the lack of documentation probably kept Pearse out of most history books.
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