All he actually flew was a series of large steam-powered models. His ideas were sound, but his dream was too large. It's as though the person who invented the boat had tried to begin with the Queen Mary. His ideas about the internal structure of the dirigible and the partitioning of the airbag were eventually used in the successful airships. If Porter had been a better manager and money-raiser, he could well have flown first.
Failure is a teacher.
Porter honed the technologies that gave us the really grand Zeppelins. And the people who did succeed were buoyed by the very magnitude of Porter's eerie, visionary, gold-driven dream. Two Centuries of the Balloon in America . Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.