People seem to get misled by the 1903 flights. By 1905 the Wrights had developed excellent control, using an airplane that didn’t look very different from the 1903 machine. It proved the soundness of their conception. And still no one else was even close. If they’d gone home in 1903 without flying at all it really wouldn’t have mattered because they made so many flights in 1904 and 1905.

It’s too bad they didn’t just fill up the tank, take off from Huffman Prairie, fly to Dayton, do a couple of laps around the city, and fly home. By the end of 1905 they clearly had that capability. Even by then, no one else had done more than hops ending in crashes. But that’s another story.