Its been 100 years since the first crossing by aircraft of the English channel.
http://tinyurl.com/ks957x Celebrating the Centennial of a Dream Flight By NICOLA CLARK Published: July 24, 2009 PARIS â Suspended from the vaulted arches of the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, on the grounds of the Musée des Arts et Métiers here, hangs a flying machine. It is an improbable contraption, composed of wood, wire and canvas, with moth-like wings and three wheels, no larger than those on a childâs bicycle, mounted on an axle no thicker than a broomstick. One hundred years have passed since it last took to the air, bearing its designer and pilot, Louis Blériot, from a seaside farmyard near Calais to Dover, on the southern coast of Britain. It was the first international flight over water. Standing beneath its delicate frame, it is hard not to be impressed by the mixture of courage and madness required to set out on such a voyage without so much as a compass as a guide. To mark the centennial of Mr. Blériotâs crossing of the English Channel on Saturday, a handful of intrepid aviators are gearing up to re-enact the event, some aboard replicas of the historic plane, the Blériot XI, others flying restored versions of vintage similar to the one on display in Paris. All are hoping to recapture some of the emotion, if not the glory, that Louis Blériot might have experienced that day as he flew across 35 kilometers, or 22 miles, of churning sea. âI expect to feel a bit of apprehension to look down and see the Channel under my wings, but that is also part of the charm,â said Edmond Salis, 40, grandson of Jean-Baptiste Salis, a French World War I fighter ace, who has made just a half-dozen short flights in his 1919 Blériot XI replica. âThen to land and have the earth beneath me again, I think will be something of the same relief and joy that he would have felt,â he said. With a centuryâs hindsight, Mr. Blériotâs hop across the Channel may seem like a modest achievement. But his feat was an international sensation and became a landmark of aeronautic progress. Within weeks of the crossing, Mr. Blériot had received 100 orders for his plane, many from European militaries that suddenly recognized the airplaneâs strategic potential. Mikael Carlson, a 49-year-old Swede, has been flying his 1910 Blériot for 16 years, after discovering it, dismantled, in a barn. It took him a year to reassemble it, relying on drawings found in an aviation museum, and another six months to get it flying. A professional pilot, Mr. Carlson has 12,000 hours of flight experience under his belt, 45 of them on Blériots, and his plane has already made one successful Channel crossing, in 1999. Compared with modern aircraft, the Blériot handles miserably, Mr. Carlson said, using a colorful phrase to describe it. âYou have to conquer the elements,â he said. âThatâs where the challenge is.â The weather conditions on Saturday, therefore, will have to be just right for the re-enactments to go ahead. âIn that sense, we face the same constraints that Louis Blériot did,â Mr. Salis said. Aviation was a second career for Mr. Blériot, a graduate of LâÃcole Centrale Paris, the prestigious engineering school, who acquired his first fortune making and selling acetylene headlights for automobiles. He turned to flying machines in 1901, when he was 28, experimenting first with an ornithopter, a device with flapping wings that was a total failure. In 1904 he built a biplane glider mounted on floats, which he tested, unsuccessfully, on the Seine in 1905. Beginning in 1907, Mr. Blériot began experimenting with monoplane designs, the first of which, the Model VII, managed to stay aloft for a distance of 500 meters, or 1,600 feet, before tumbling to the ground. Several more iterations â and accidents â followed, earning Mr. Blériot a reputation among his friends and colleagues as âlâhomme qui tombe toujours,â the man who always falls. But after eight years and numerous injuries, his luck changed. The Blériot XI first flew in January 1909. Within six months, the plane made progressively longer flights, the longest lasting nearly an hour. Yet the years of effort had nearly ruined Mr. Blériot financially. He had sold his vast family estate and borrowed heavily from his father-in-law to finance the development of his airplanes â which nobody was interested in buying. âHe had used all his money,â said Mr. Carlson, whose flight Saturday is sponsored by Bremont, a luxury watchmaker. âHe had nothing to fall back on.â Crossing the Channel in an airplane had seemed an impossible feat in 1908 when Alfred Harmsworth Lord Northcliffe, publisher of The Daily Mail in London, offered a prize of £1,000, a significant amount of money at the time, to the first pilot to make the flight in either direction. Frustrated at the international attention being given to the Wright brothers in the United States â who had made the first powered flight in 1903 â Lord Northcliffe hoped his contest would, in addition to bolstering sales of his newspaper, fan popular interest in aviation in Europe. But early airplanes were unstable in the air and their engines were temperamental. Few pilots at the time, the Wrights included, had dared to stray far from an airfield. âThese old aircraft were built for one purpose: to take off and land,â said Mr. Carlson. âThey did not care about stability, they just wanted the lift and power to fly.â Still, by July 1909, two pilots had stepped up to Lord Northcliffeâs challenge: Hubert Latham, a wealthy French adventurer with English roots, and Charles de Lambert, a Russian-born count. Mr. Blériot made the decision to compete only belatedly, and against the advice of his doctor: He had severely burned his right foot in a flying accident two weeks earlier and was hobbling around on crutches. On July 19 he learned that Mr. Latham ditched his Antoinette flyer in the Channel after its engine failed. Days later, Mr. Lambert crashed his Wright biplane in a test flight. As Mr. Latham, who was unhurt, prepared for a second attempt, Mr. Blériot informed The Daily Mail of his intention to compete and set up his plane near the beach at Les Barraques. At 3:00 a.m. on July 25, Mr. Blériot was awakened and told the weather conditions were ideal for a crossing, with a gentle breeze and clear skies.. Preparations were made for an attempt at dawn. The French destroyer Escopette put out for Dover, just in case the pilot and his plane needed to be plucked from the sea. At 4:41 a.m. on July 25, in near-perfect weather conditions, Mr. Blériot took to the air, the planeâs engine belching clouds of black smoke and dribbling castor oil. The white cliffs of the English coast were not visible, but the air was so clear that Mr. Blériot expected to be able to see them within minutes. He skirted the French coastline, then veered north, maintaining an altitude of no more than 30 meters above the water. âFor more than 10 minutes I was alone, isolated, lost in the midst of the immense sea, and I did not see anything on the horizon or a single ship,â Mr. Blériot told The Daily Mail upon landing. âThe calm, disturbed only by the droning of the motor, attracted me by its dangerous charms, and I was well aware of it.â As Mr. Blériot approached the English coast, the winds picked up considerably, and he was blown temporarily off course. Clouds rolled off the shore and soon enveloped him and his plane in a light drizzle. When the sky eventually broke, Mr. Blériot saw green fields below him, though he was now well east of his target. He hugged the cliffs until he spied Dover Castle and the cricket field that was his designated landing spot. Charles Fontaine, a journalist with the French daily newspaper Le Matin, was waiting with an enormous French tricolor flag. The rain had stopped, and the planeâs hot engine began to sputter. He descended, struggling against winds that gusted as high as 40 kilometers an hour. When he reached a height of around 20 meters, he cut the ignition.. The nose of the plane struck the ground first, smashing its undercarriage and reducing the wooden propeller to match sticks. âTant pis!â â or âToo bad!â â a triumphant Mr. Blériot said as he emerged from the wreckage to Mr. Fontaineâs embrace. âI crossed La Manche!â The trip took 37 minutes. Newspapers across Europe devoted their front pages to Mr. Blériotâs exploit in his âartificial bird.â Orville Wright, interviewed by The New York Times, was stunned: âI canât for the life of me understand how he ever managed to do it with the flier he has.â With his success, Mr. Blériot suddenly faced a deluge of orders for the plane and was soon obliged to set up a factory to keep up with demand. The Blériot XI became the first mass-produced airplane, with roughly 800 built from 1909 to 1914. The pilots hoping to make the crossing Saturday say their planes will be equipped much as Mr. Blériotâs was, though most have engines that are slightly more powerful than his original 20-horsepower Ansani motor, meaning that they should be able to make better time. Mr. Blériot mounted a float inside his planeâs chassis in the event of a water landing, but otherwise took no further safety precautions. âIt would not be right to make modifications,â said Mr. Carlson, who said he would eschew a crash helmet and would rely on a narrow leather lapbelt as his only safety restraint. Past attempts to re-enact Mr. Blériotâs flight have not always succeeded. In 1989, a British pilot, Gloria Pullen, landed in the water, just a few kilometers from Dover, after her engine failed. A decade later, Mr. Blériotâs own grandson crashed into a duck pond after just two minutes in the air. The cause was attributed to âpilot error.â If the pilots preparing for the crossing Saturday are at all concerned about failure, they arenât showing it. âIf you are nervous, it means that you donât trust the plane and so you shouldnât be flying it,â Mr. Salis said. Mr. Blériotâs original plane, part of the permanent collection at the Arts et Métiers, is currently the centerpiece of a special exhibition â complete with a Channel flight simulator â on the crossing and its place in aviation history, which runs through Oct. 18. But for some observers, seeing the Blériot trussed inside a museum is something akin to pinning a rare insect in a glass case. âAs soon as an aircraft ends up in a museum it is dead â there is no smell, no sound, no sensation,â Mr. Carlson said. âSo it is very important to fly them. It is our only chance to try to recall, to bring back for a moment what it was like to experience this for the first time.â ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:300902 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
