Let take look at individuals one at a time. Let start with the Firnas.
So lets look at Lynn White's citations due to the amount of citations.
No. 1910: 'Abbas Ibn Firnas which cites J. Vernet, 'Abbas Ibn Firnas.
Dictionary of Scientific Biography. This book is very obscure with all copies signed out at this time in my area. I put a hold on the next available copy. For now lets look at Lynn White's Eilmer of Malmesbury. On page 100 Lynn makes note of Firnas.
"Perhaps some word ha reached Malmesbury along the the great pilgrimage road from Compostella of a more successful attempt at flight which appears to have been made in Andalusia about 875 AD. The Moroccan historian Al-Maqqari whi due d ub 1632 AD but who used many early sources no longer extrant, (22), tells of a certain Abul-Oasim Abbas b. Firnas who lived in Cordoba in the later ninth century. Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz?), a student of music and the inventor of some sort of metronome. (short description of the metronome). "Among other very curious experiments which he made," continues al-Maqqari, "one is his trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and, according to testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but, in alighting again on the place he had started, his back very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight cone down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one." (23)
"This sounds as specific as William of Malmesbury's account of Eilmer's adventure, and it is amusing that in each case the crack-up is ascribed to failure to provide a tail. No modern historian can be statisfied with a source written 750 years after the event, and it is astonishing that, if indeed several eye-witnesses recorded b. Firnas's flight, no mention of it independent of al-Maqqari has survived." (24) Lynn further continues contradicting what is acceptable to historians by accepting the one source.... The rest of the book covers later work in flighted covering kites and machines.
(22)
https://archive.org/stream/lespenseursdelis01carruoft#page/162/mode/2up which says nothing about the topic.
(23) Ahmed ibn Mohammed Al-Makkari,
The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, Royal Asiatic Society Books, 2002. Page 148. This is the poem.
(24) Is the translation of the poem by Dr Wilhelm Hoenerbach of the University of Bonn
That is all there is one source 7 centuries removed from the events with no other source. That is ridiculously weak to claim the man discovered flight or anything else the man is claimed to have done. This is what happens when you research using a wiki and do not check the source. It can be quote mined and distorted.
Class dismissed.