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George Bolt with the relics he found

Pearse's achievements were even more remarkable in that, unlike the Wright Brothers who employed skilled engineers and who later enjoyed the luxury of American Government sponsorship, Pearse designed, financed, and built everything himself. And he did not even have access to a university or library, but gained his knowledge solely through reading the magazines that he subscribed to. He was a great engineer and designer, and yet had no influence whatsoever on the course of history. Yet we can admire his inventiveness, ingenuity and pure achievement against huge odds - lack of resources, isolation, and ridicule by those who lived around him. He was a misfit in his community - a farming community where if you couldn't farm, you were an idiot. Yet he wanted to fly. The tragic irony of Pearse's life is that his pioneering and ingenious innovations were never recognised in his lifetime, or else they were developed and surpassed elsewhere.

In his lifetime Richard Pearse saw his efforts ridiculed and his patents ignored. Fifty years of research into the potential of flight had reaped nothing. His death had gone unnoticed and the wider world knew nothing of his work.

It was only through the serendipitous discovery of the model for Pearse's Utility plane, locked away in his Christchurch garage, that he is remembered at all. His reputation resurrected posthumously by the dedicated archaeological efforts of the late George Bolt (a former Chief Engineer for Tasman Empire Airways and himself a pioneer aviator), who rescued the relics of Pearse's life from almost certain oblivion, tracking down surviving witnesses and rescuing machinery from the Waitohi refuse dump.