A new exhibition celebrating the life of a Dundee pilot who could have been the first man to fly has been unveiled in the city.
A full-scale model of Preston Watson’s plane has now gone on display at Dundee Museum of Transport as part of a display marking the centenary of his death.
According to local aviation historians, Mr Watson made the world’s first powered flight in Errol in 1903 four months before the Wright brothers’ first flight.
The replica of Plane One, built by the Dundee Model Aircraft Club, was unveiled at a ceremony in the museum on Tuesday night.
Alastair Blair and Alistair Smith, co-authors of The Pioneering Flying Achievement of Preston Watson, which brought to light the claims about Mr Watson’s first flight, also spoke at the event.
Mr Blair said: “The whole story of the inventive young pioneer aviator Preston Watson would simply have been submerged with the passage of time had it not been for the fact that his elder brother, James, who was involved in some of Preston’s earliest endeavours, felt that he had to honour his late brother’s memory by assembling the available information on his aeronautical activities.”
Born into relative prosperity, Watson studied physics at Queens College in Dundee and began building his own aircraft.
Witnesses said he achieved a series of powered “hops” in the summer of 1903.
Mr Watson was killed in a flying accident in 1915, at the age of 35, and is buried in Dundee’s Western Cemetery. His claim to the first powered flight did not surface until nearly 30 years after his death, however, when, in 1953, his brother James attempted to establish that Preston had flown before the Wright brothers.
This claim had cold water poured on it by the leading aviation scholar of the time, Charles Gibbs-Smith Mr Blair and Mr Smith have since re-evaluated the claims.