'Their Tesla': Pioneering brothers' Wright Flyer III is designated Ohio's official state plane

COLUMBUS — Ohio has adopted the 1905 Wright Flyer III as its official state airplane. Described as Orville and Wilbur Wright's crowning achievement, the world's first practical fixed-wing aircraft made its seminal sustained flight in an Ohio cow pasture called Huffman Prairie, outside Dayton. A grandniece to the pioneering Ohio brothers, Amanda Wright Lane, testified in February that the 1905 plane was "their Tesla," and represented the beginning of a human flight plan to Mars. Wright Lane noted that NASA's experimental Martian helicopter, Ingenuity, succeeded using what officials called Wright-like flights. The space agency subsequently named its air strip on Mars "Wright Brothers Field." "Present-day Ohio engineering ingenuity was a part of that Ingenuity mission. Why wouldn't we adopt the Wright Flyer III as an inspiring symbol of the genesis of human flight?" she said. "Ohioans lessened the distances between world peoples 125 years ago, and currently, Ohioans are lessening the distances in space." The Wright Flyer III featured a host of improvements to the Wright Flyer I, the plane in which the Wrights pioneered powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903. Those included a larger rudder, a vertical stabilizer relocated rearward and separate yaw and roll controls, the Ohio History Connection's Kevin Boehner told the committee. Choosing the later plane as Ohio's designee glances past the state's long-running dispute with North Carolina over which can rightly call itself the "birthplace of aviation": the one where the Wrights did their inventing, or the one where they flew. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed its new state designation into law Wednesday. The plane, designated a historic landmark, can be seen at Dayton's Carillion Historical Park.