Lots of people got contraptions into the air and crashed before the Wright Brothers . The Wright Brothers were from Ohio and just used Kitty Hawk because it has the most constant and consistent winds, which they used when developing the Wright glider. North Carolina was the site of the first flight due to an accident of geography.
The Wright Brothers patent claims did not even cover propulsion, even though their propeller and engine introduced a considerable amount of new art. There is simply no doubt that the Wright Brothers were the first to make a controlled flight, and clearly all subsequent successful airframes trace are descended from the Wright Flyer without exception.
There is simply no doubt that the Wright Brothers were the first to make a controlled flight, and clearly all subsequent successful airframes trace are descended from the Wright Flyer without exception. Actually, there is a fundamental design difference between the Wright Brothers' Flyer and all modern aircraft: the Flyer was designed so that in the absence of force from the elevators, it would assume a slight upward pitch, while modern aircraft are designed to assume a downward pitch. This meant two things--one bad, but one good:
- If the airplane's speed fell below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch, there would be no way to regain speed and thus avoid a relatively prompt return to Earth, regardless of altitude.
- If the airplane's speed fell below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch, it would remain below the minimum required to achieve a downward pitch; given friendly terrain, the consequent landing would be survivable for both the plane and occupants.
For today's purposes, having a plane which can recover from a stall while remaining airborne is more important than having a plane which, if only flown over friendly terrain, would be able to land safely in such case (especially since planes often need to fly over unfriendly terrain). On the other hand, in the early days of flight, being able to survive undesired landings was far more important than being able to reduce their frequency. Once the plane was developed well enough that one could reasonably expect not to be forced into an unwanted landing, then the controls could be reversed to the modern style.