The history of patents is interesting, and the Wrights' place in it is pretty famous. Many times inventions have a messy origin and development, which makes them hard to patent securely ( the steamboat is a pretty good example), but the Wrights very carefully went about their project in such a way as to avoid a lot of that. They maintained secrecy, and revealed their invention only when they were very sure it was a working plane: in contrast to the decades of inventors ( like Langley) who had managed to get something to hop a few dozen yards and claim they were flying. There was no doubt but that the Wrights had finally achieved controllable flight, and with a pretty straightforward device. And though the warpable wing was not Curtis' aileron, their patent did cover it. And, generally, if a guy patents something with a top and three legs and calls it a table, if another guy comes along and adds a fourth leg and makes it work better , he has to get the cooperation of the first guy. There are, however, many cases where the first guy wants too much, and the other guy has money and time to avoid paying it. There is a quality of supply-and-demand here: how much is too much, and how unscrupulous is the other guy? The Wrights ( and the corporation which they formed) were pretty inflexible in what they wanted. They had a strict Calvinist upbringing. Once denied what they saw as their due, they viewed it as a moral question upon which there could be no compromise. And, Curtiss was not scrupulous enough to pay their price or wait for all the legal issues to be resolved: indeed, he even secretly altered and publicly demonstrated an earlier airplane of Samuel Langley and tried to use it to challenge the patent. But to the immense frustration of Wilbur Wright, it was very hard to legally block Curtiss from making his planes- the US legal system often works very slowly, and Curtiss could keep delaying and appealing, continuing to make his planes and selling them.

The biggest effect of the patent litigation was on the innovations of the Wrights: I am not sure how much we can say they would have been able to manufacture planes if Wilbur especially had not been so distracted ( founders are often not good at becoming administrators and running a big business) but after he became fixated on justice they did not produce lots of planes, and their ability innovate was definitely hampered. Curtiss kept innovating. But, importantly, others continued to innovate as well. Because of the accessibility of the invention: the warpable wing/aileron is very easy to grasp, which made it dead easy to imitate, incorporate into other airplane designs. And not just designs manufactured by corporations, factories: airplanes were, really, not that hard to make. The Brazilian inventor Santos-Dumont created a simple ( and charming) little plane, the Demoiselle, and after the plans were published many were constructed- not by factories, but amateurs for their own use. Over home-built planes the Wrights had no control.

The Wright-Curtiss dispute was also very brief. If you want to claim it delayed development of the whole industry, that delay was very short. The dispute started in 1909, and Wrights sold out in 1916, and it was the company that bought them out, the Wright-Martin Corp., that would carry out even more litigation. And Curtiss' company sued other makers as well. But even that patent dispute ended only about a year later in 1917, when the US government forced the industry to pool its patents in preparation for WWI.

So, the case for the Wright-Curtiss dispute hampering innovation in aviation is weak. The case that it grew into a bigger patent mess after the Wrights had sold out is stronger: but, again, that did not last very long. And while the dispute lasted, innovation still continued to happen.

Katznelson, R. D., & Howells, J. (2014). The myth of the early aviation patent hold-up--how a US government monopsony commandeered pioneer airplane patents. Industrial and Corporate Change, 24(1), 1–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtu003

Goldstone, L. (2014). Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies. Ballantine Books.

It should be noted that the idea that patents generally hamper innovation is quite attractive to some libertarian economists and political theorists. Interestingly, for the airplane, innovation was actually improved in 1917 by government intervention, so you'd think it would be a bad example to use for them. Still, it is easier to assign blame to specific human actors than faceless corporations... we tend to like our heroes and villains to be people with names. So, just like Tesla vs. Edison, and despite it being weak, the Wright-Curtiss case is likely to keep getting re-argued. You can read one argument here:

https://mises.org/wire/how-patent-troll-wright-brothers-fought-stifle-innovation