And, it does so happen that every major aviation triumph was american. Anyone care to offer another opinion?
Good trolling.
Let's see. Cayley; Lilienthal; Santos Dumont; Bleriot; Alcock and Brown; Hans von Ohain (I don't know if he was a pilot, but he could have been); Alan Cobham; Igor Sikorsky (before he went to America); Hugo Eckener; Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. To pluck only a few names at random.
Face it: by most criteria that count, the Wrights were first. But apart from them, Chanute and maybe Langley, aviation in the US was way behind Europe, especially France, until the 1920s, which is the time frame relevant to this thread.