Oh, Ohio, how can you be so Wright and so wrong?

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran, intended to help the state’s popularity soar with a new state license plate, but it quickly hit turbulence and had to make an immediate course correction, which was a bit difficult with all that egg on their face.

The Associated Press reported back in October that Ohio debuted its new license plate. It’s a beautiful illustration with an art deco flair depicting the essential elements of Ohio’s self-identity — a glorius sun emanating rays of white light rising over green hills, a waterway, a field of golden grain, a child using a rope swing attached to a lush tree, a hint of magnificent city-scape and in bold across the center top is an image of the Wright Flyer towing a banner that reads “Birthplace of Aviation.”

It’s easy for the brain to remember all those photos of the Wright brothers on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, making man’s first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft. But misters Orville and Wilbur Wright were from Dayton, Ohio, and they had, in fact, done all their initial research and development out of their bicycle shop in fair Dayton, as well as commissioning one of their employees to design and build the engine for that flight.

Heady stuff.

Gov. DeWine is, it seems, quite proud that the Wright brothers were from the same county in Ohio that he was from and had a “particular interest” from the start to have the Wright Flyer on the new plate, which he and his wife took point on designing, a followup AP article from Jan. 4 says.

The trouble is — and you knew there was trouble a-brewing — the DeWines and their license plate design team failed to actually research their beloved Wright Flyer, which had what is called a canard configuration with small wings at the front of the airplane. These little wings on the Wright Flyer look like a strange horizontal tail. But it bears repeating that they are on the front of the plane.

Can you see the wreck coming?

Some 35,000 license plates were printed and a big, splashy public unveiling made, all to showcase Ohio’s first new license plate since 2013, and — ta-daaaaah — the Wright Flyer was backward on the license plate.

The pride and glory of Ohio was not towing the banner, but rather flying straight into it.

Oops.

Apparently, Ohioians better steeped in their Wright brothers history were quick to say “What in the Kill Devil Hills were you thinking?” The 35,000 license plates were tossed into the nearest recycling bin, and the new new-design with the forward-flying flyer was announced unceremoniously in a tweet later in the day, saying that the new new-plates would be coming ASAP.

North Carolinaites had a field day with the error, what with the two states being in direct contention for bragging rights over the Wright brothers’ accomplishment.

The Wrights went to Kitty Hawk for their major flight tests because the beach at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk had the best wind conditions for test flying the plane. They made and flew many configurations of non-powered gliders while camping on the beach starting in 1900 before their first powered flight in the Wright Flyer Dec. 17, 1903. In-flight steering mechanisms came later, but that’s a story for another day.

In a contentious compromise — that still has people, even major power players, in each state bickering and cat-calling over who has top positioning in aviation history — North Carolina has come to call itself “First in Flight,” as depicted on their license plates since 1982, versus Ohio’s brag of “Birthplace of Aviation.”

The Wrongway-DeWine error has fueled more elbowing and eye-poking between the two states.

“Y’all leave Ohio alone. They wouldn’t know. They weren’t there,” tweeted the Department of Transportation in North Carolina, referencing its state’s first flight status.

We here in the newspaper industry are keenly sympathetic to printing error tragedies in the way that one can’t look away from a horrible crash scene, like “Oh my, is that the governor’s pride laying there, dead on the tarmac? I don’t want to see this ... but look how it was impaled by his words, ‘particular interest.’ We should leave him to gather his dignity up from the crash site — right after we investigate to see if his pride has little X’s in its eyes.”

So the AP kept on top of the investigation and reported Jan. 4, a week after the new new-plate was released, that its Wright Flyer artwork is based on a 2009 Ohio license plate that ended up in a legal brouhaha. Designers used Wright Flyer clipart that wasn’t approved for commercial use.

Oh, Ohio, how did you take a historic airplane flight, and turn it into a train wreck?

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I always say it takes a village to really screw things up at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .