Just gone; 40 years since the first moon landing. Just coming up, 100 years since the first foolhardy daredevil crossed the English Channel in a heavier-than-air flying machine.
I use the words "foolhardy daredevil" advisedly. Reading his biographical details, Louis Blériot sounds like a bit of an aeronautical duffer, albeit a brave and persistent one. According to the Century of Flight entry I've just been reading, he was a pretty terrible pilot, clumsy , accident prone and had little grasp of aerodynamics, (fortunately, another aircraft engineer, Gabriel Voisin, helped out with some of his designs). In 1907, Blériot produced the world's first successful monoplane - although the term "successful" is quite relative in this context, as the aircraft was quite unstable and soon crashed. Other than this, there were quite a lot of failures and lots of crashes (Blériot seems to have belonged to the "any landing you can walk away from is a good landing" school of flying).
Then, the Daily Mail offered a £1,000 prize for the first successful flight across the English Channel. By then, Blériot had developed the Blériot XI (pictured above), a monoplane which had set a European record by staying airborne for over half an hour. Even so, when he borrowed some money for his cross-Channel attempt, the accident-prone Blériot was definitely not the favourite to be first across the water. Also in the running was the gentleman adventurer Hubert Latham, wealthy, Anglo-French heir to a banking fortune. Latham had a larger, more powerful aeroplane called the Antoinette, a large ground crew, a hanger and a generally well-funded, well planned operation. Also in the running was another well-heeled competitor, Count Charles de Lambert, trained to fly by the Wright brothers themselves and equipped with two Wright aeroplanes, considered at the time to be the world's best design.
As Ecclesiastes pointed out, the race is not always to the swift, and nobody's immune to time and chance. De Lambert crashed one of his planes on a test run and decided to drop out rather than risk the second one in a cross-channel attempt. This left the field open for the favourite, Latham, and Blériot.
Latham had the first shot at the Channel on July 19th 1909. Seven and a half miles out, the fatal flaw in Latham's smooth, well-funded operation became apparent - the Antoinette's engine, although big and powerful, wasn't all that reliable and cut out with Latham out over the sea. With considerable skill, he managed to land the Antoinette on the water. It floated and he sat nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he waited to be rescued, which he duly was. Latham's spirits weren't dampened by his experience and arranged to race Blériot across the channel as soon as a new Antoinette was made ready and the weather was good enough. Good weather was forecast for the morning of July 25th, so the two men arranged to fly at dawn, Latham effortlessly confident of victory. Unfortunately for Latham, his engineer failed to wake him up at the arranged time of 3.30am.
Blériot, although suffering from burns from a racing accident was up in time. He took off just after half past four in the morning. He was hampered by being ill, having no navigational aids, and practically no instruments in his plane and probably by the aerodynamic drag of his unfeasibly bushy walrus moustache. For a while, after he lost sight of landmarks, was alone with the sea and the sky; "I am alone. I can see nothing at all. For ten minutes, I am lost", he said. The weather began to deteriorate with winds and gusts of rain. But the little Anzani rotary engine kept going and eventually Blériot spotted the English coast ahead. Shortly after that, he crash-landed into a field and the underdog became an international celebrity, (those were the days, when you became a celebrity by doing something remarkable, rather than just by appearing on some vacuous reality TV show).
Centenary celebrations are planned in France and Britain.
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