Blériot's Channel Crossing

Louis Blériot was born in Cambrai in 1872, trained as an engineer at the École Centrale in Paris, and made his money with the first practical acetylene headlamp for motor cars. From the turn of the century he spent it on flight. His early machines: ornithopters with flapping wings, a floatplane glider built by Gabriel Voisin that nearly drowned him, a series of canard and tandem-wing designs, mostly broke. In November 1906, at Bagatelle, he saw his Blériot IV damaged in a taxiing accident on the same day Alberto Santos-Dumont flew 720 ft to win the Aéro-Club de France's prize. The partnership with Voisin ended, and Blériot set up on his own.

What he pursued from then on was the monoplane, a configuration most designers of the time distrusted. The Blériot VII of 1907 and the VIII of 1908 established the arrangement that would last: the engine and propeller at the front, the tail surfaces at the back, the layout of almost every aeroplane since. The VII, which first flew in November 1907, is recognised as the first successful monoplane, and on 31 October 1908 the Type VIII made a 15 nm round trip across country from Toury to Artenay. He was also the first to combine a hand-operated control stick with foot-operated rudder pedals, the layout pilots still use.

By 1909 the experiments had cost him, on one reckoning, at least 780,000 francs, at a time when one of his skilled mechanics earned 250 francs a month. Three new designs appeared at the first Paris aeronautical salon in December 1908. Two of them never flew. The third, the Type XI, first flew at Issy-les-Moulineaux in January 1909.

Through the early summer Blériot flew it with growing confidence, and with growing cost to himself. On 26 June he stayed up for more than 36 minutes. On 2 July, at a meeting at Douai, the asbestos lagging worked loose from the exhaust; one of his shoes burned through, and he carried on until the engine stopped, with third-degree burns that took more than two months to heal. On 4 July he flew for 50 minutes at Port-Aviation near Paris, and on 13 July he flew about 22 nm across country from Étampes to Orléans, winning the Aéro-Club de France's first Prix du Voyage. Between those flights, on 19 June, he had written to the Daily Mail to enter for its Channel prize.

The Type XI was a development of the Type VIII, drawn largely by the engineer Raymond Saulnier. It was a tractor monoplane with a box-girder fuselage of ash, braced with wire and only partly covered with fabric. The main difference from its predecessor was lateral control: instead of hinged surfaces at the wingtips, the XI twisted its thin, cambered wings by wires, wing warping, the method the Wright brothers had used. The wires ran to a small pyramid of struts above the fuselage and another below it. At the tail, a small all-moving rudder sat behind a tailplane whose outer sections served as elevators.

The undercarriage was one of its best features, and the part that took the punishment at Dover. The wheels were carried on castering trailing arms that slid up and down steel tubes, sprung by rubber cords, so that they could absorb a rough field and swivel when the aircraft touched down with any drift.

The engine was the problem. At the Paris salon the XI carried a seven-cylinder REP engine, and although the aeroplane handled well, the engine would not run for long. At the suggestion of his mechanic Ferdinand Collin, Blériot went to Alessandro Anzani, an Italian motorcycle racer who built his own engines and had just moved into aviation. On 27 May 1909 a three-cylinder Anzani was fitted: an air-cooled engine of about 25 horsepower with its cylinders splayed upward in a fan, a layout sometimes called a semi-radial. It was not powerful, but it was reliable enough.

With it came a new propeller. Lucien Chauvière's Intégrale, a two-bladed scimitar shape carved from laminated walnut, replaced the four-bladed paddle Blériot had been using. It was the first European propeller to rival the efficiency of the Wrights', and the combination of Anzani and Chauvière is credited with making the Type XI a practical aeroplane. Before the Channel attempt the wing area was increased from 130 ft² to 150 ft² and the small fin above the fuselage was removed. A flotation bag was fitted in case he came down in the sea.

The aircraft that crossed the Channel was, by the Musée des Arts et Métiers' own description, fragile, even rudimentary. It had no instruments to speak of. The span was about 26 ft. Its cruising speed was around 32 kt, and on the day it probably reached a little more.

Between 1906 and 1930 the Daily Mail, at the instigation of its proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, offered a long series of prizes for achievements in the air. The Channel prize was announced in October 1908: £500 for a crossing in a heavier-than-air machine made before the end of that year. Nobody tried. For 1909 the offer was renewed and doubled to £1,000. Many regarded it as cheap publicity for a prize no one could win; the Paris newspaper Le Matin said as much. Northcliffe, who had come to know Wilbur Wright during the Wright demonstrations in France in 1908, had hoped Wilbur would take it. Wilbur was tempted, but Orville, recovering from his crash at Fort Myer, cabled him not to try until he could come to help, and the brothers judged £1,000 too little for the risk.

Four men entered. The favourite, in both Britain and France, was Hubert Latham, a 26-year-old Frenchman of English descent, educated partly at Oxford, who had become the chief pilot of the Antoinette company. His Antoinette IV was an elegant, long-bodied monoplane with a V8 engine designed by Léon Levavasseur, and by the end of May 1909 Latham had flown it for more than an hour at a stretch. The second was Comte Charles de Lambert, a Russian aristocrat of French descent and the first man Wilbur Wright had taught to fly in France, who owned two French-built Wright biplanes. The third, Arthur Seymour, an Englishman said to own a Voisin, never went further than sending in his entry. Blériot was the fourth.

Latham notified the Daily Mail on 9 July and set up camp at Sangatte, west of Calais, in the half-derelict buildings left from an 1881 attempt to dig a Channel tunnel. Within four days de Lambert had established his own base at Wissant, further west along the coast. The contest became a spectacle: some 10,000 visitors were reported at Calais and as many at Dover, and the Marconi Company set up a wireless link between Cap Blanc-Nez and the roof of the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover so that news could cross faster than the aeroplanes.

The wind blew for a week. Latham finally went on 19 July, taking off from Cap Blanc-Nez near Sangatte with the destroyer Harpon following below. Some eight miles out the engine failed, and he put the Antoinette down on the sea: the first time an aeroplane had landed on water. The fuselage floated; he is said to have lit a cigarette and waited for the boat. A stray piece of wire was later found inside the engine. He returned to Calais to learn that Blériot had arrived to compete.

Blériot reached Calais on Wednesday 21 July with two mechanics and his friend Alfred Leblanc, who handled the organisation, and set up at a farm near the beach at Les Baraques, between Calais and Sangatte. Next day a replacement aircraft for Latham arrived from the Antoinette works. On Friday and Saturday the wind was too strong for anyone to fly, but on Saturday evening it began to drop, and both camps went to bed hoping for the morning.

Alfred Leblanc went to bed around midnight and slept badly. At two in the morning he looked out, judged the weather ideal and woke Blériot, who for once was pessimistic and had to be talked into eating breakfast. His mood lifted. By half past three his wife Alice was aboard the French destroyer Escopette, which was to steam towards Dover as his escort and, if needed, his rescue. In Latham's camp at Sangatte, nobody noticed the change in the weather; Levavasseur and his team slept through, a lapse Latham's supporters never forgave.

At 4:15, watched by a crowd that had come out in the dark, Blériot made a short trial flight around the field. The rules required the crossing to be made between sunrise and sunset, so he waited for the signal that the sun was up, and at 4:41 he took off and turned out over the sea. He flew at about 39 kt and at a height of about 250 ft. Having no compass, he took his course from the Escopette, heading for Dover below him: and within minutes he had overtaken her.

Then the visibility closed in. "For more than ten minutes," he said afterwards, "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." He held his heading and kept going. When a grey line of coast appeared, it was on his left: the wind, freshening, had carried him east of his line, and he first crossed the English coast near St Margaret's Bay, north-east of Dover. He turned and followed the shore south-westward about a mile out to sea, looking for his landing place.

Blériot, unlike Latham, had never visited Dover to choose a field. The choice had been made for him by Charles Fontaine, the correspondent of Le Matin, on the advice of Frederick Duckham, the engineer in charge of the harbour works: Northfall Meadow, a patch of gently sloping grass on the clifftop close to Dover Castle. Fontaine stood in it waving a large French tricolour. Blériot saw the flag, crossed the cliff edge and circled twice to lose height, in gusty wind.

At about twenty metres he cut the engine, and the Type XI dropped onto the meadow in a heavy "pancake" landing. The undercarriage buckled and one blade of the propeller shattered. Blériot climbed out unhurt. It was a little after 5:10 in the morning. The flight had lasted something over half an hour, exactly how much over, the sources still do not agree.

News of the departure had gone across by wireless, but Dover expected him on the beach west of the town. The Daily Mail's correspondent, realising where he had come down, drove up at speed and took Blériot to the harbour, where he was reunited with Alice, landed from the Escopette. Surrounded by a cheering crowd and photographers, the couple were taken to the Lord Warden Hotel at the foot of the Admiralty Pier. According to Dover Museum, the customs officer, having no category for an aeroplane, entered the machine in his records as a yacht and its pilot as her master.

Photographs taken on the meadow show the broken monoplane guarded by police beside a French tricolour, with visitors crowding round. Blériot had become a celebrity between breakfast and lunch. In London, thousands cheered him at Victoria Station in the company of Lord Northcliffe. Back in France, a crowd put by the RAF Museum at 100,000 greeted him in Paris.

Latham, meanwhile, had not given up. On 27 July, two days after Blériot's crossing, he took off again in the replacement Antoinette. This time he came within sight of Dover, within minutes of the English coast, before the engine failed once more. He could not control the descent as well as on 19 July; the aircraft was badly damaged when it struck the water and he cut his face. The cause was never settled: perhaps fuel clogging the injection system, perhaps, as Gabriel Voisin argued, the Antoinette V8's habit of losing power after a quarter of an hour. The company, having lost two aircraft, declined to fund a third attempt with the great Reims meeting weeks away. De Lambert, who had damaged his Wright biplanes practising at Wissant, never made one.

The aeroplane itself never flew again. It was hurriedly repaired and exhibited at Selfridges department store in London, then outside the offices of Le Matin in Paris. On 13 October 1909 it entered the collection of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, where it still hangs in the former church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs.

Nobody disputes that Blériot crossed the Channel on 25 July 1909, or that he was the first to do it by aeroplane. The details are another matter, and several of the most repeated ones rest on less than they seem.

The first is the time. The figure most often printed is 36 minutes 30 seconds. Dover Museum says 37 minutes, with a take-off at 4:35. The Musée des Arts et Métiers, which holds the aircraft, gives a take-off at 4:41 and a landing at 5:13, 32 minutes, and the RAF Museum says 4:41 to 5:12, "just over 30 minutes". No official timekeeper stood at both ends; the times were taken by different observers, on different watches, on two sides of the sea. This entry gives the range rather than choose among them.

The distance varies too. Arts et Métiers speaks of 38 kilometres between England and the continent; the RAF Museum gives 24 miles, about 39 kilometres. Both describe the width of the strait rather than the path actually flown, which bent east with the wind before turning back along the coast, and was therefore somewhat longer.

The most famous words attached to the flight are the least secure. "England is no longer an island" is widely attributed to Lord Northcliffe on hearing the news. The historian Brett Holman, tracing the phrase, found it already a stock expression in 1846, when steamships raised the same fear, and could find no primary source for Northcliffe saying it; the earliest attribution he traced came decades later. What is documented is the chorus of 27 July 1909: in the Daily Mail, H. G. Wells wrote that "in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the military point of view, an inaccessible island", and the same issue reprinted a Daily Express piece headed "No Longer an Island". Latham's supporters, finally, blamed his team for sleeping through the calm; whether an Antoinette that failed twice in eight days would have got across that morning is unknowable.

Blériot's fame outlived the aeroplane that made it. France marked the crossing on its round anniversaries: in July 1929 Blériot returned to Calais for the twentieth, photographed in the cockpit of a monoplane, and in November 1934 the French post issued a 2 franc 25 airmail stamp for the twenty-fifth, engraved by Achille Ouvré with the Type XI over a map of the strait between Calais and Dover.

He was honoured as a founder of the industry as much as a pilot. In 1930 he instituted the Blériot Trophy for the first crew to sustain 1,100 kt for half an hour, a target so far ahead of its time that his widow Alice presented it only in 1961, to the crew of a US Air Force B-58. In 1936 the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale created the Louis Blériot Medal, still awarded for speed, altitude and distance records in light aircraft. After his death he received a funeral with full military honours at Les Invalides.

The centenary in 2009 brought the flight back to both shores. The Musée des Arts et Métiers mounted an exhibition around the original aircraft, and on 25 July 2009 Edmond Salis flew a replica Blériot from Blériot-Plage to Kent.

For Blériot the crossing was the return on a decade of losses. Orders for copies of the Type XI came at once: 103 by the end of September 1909, according to one account, more than a hundred by the end of the year, each selling for 10,000 francs. In August he flew at the Grande Semaine d'Aviation at Reims, where Glenn Curtiss narrowly beat him for the first Gordon Bennett Trophy but Blériot set a world speed record for the fastest lap. After a crash at Istanbul in December 1909 that broke several ribs, he gave up competition flying and left it to others, Alfred Leblanc among them.

The firm grew into one of the great manufacturers of pre-war aviation. Between 1909 and 1914 Blériot built about 900 aircraft, most of them variants of the Type XI, with Gnome rotary engines and one or two seats, sold as trainers, sporting machines, racers and military scouts. Blériot schools opened in France and in England, at Brooklands and Hendon. Type XIs won the Circuit de l'Est in 1910 and the Circuit of Europe in 1911; Claude Grahame-White won the 1910 Gordon Bennett race in one, and Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the Channel in one in 1912. Two early survivors still fly: the Shuttleworth Collection's G-AANG in England, the world's oldest airworthy aeroplane, and a Type XI at Old Rhinebeck in New York.

For Britain the flight was a shock of another kind. The country's security had rested for centuries on the Royal Navy and the width of the sea, and a Frenchman had now crossed that sea in the time it took to eat breakfast, over the heads of the fleet. The fear was not new: steamships had prompted the same phrase in the 1840s, and Britain had had its first air panic in 1908: but Blériot gave it a date and a photograph. Wells's warning in the Daily Mail was echoed across the press, and others later drew the lesson that Britain must seek another form of defence besides ships.

The places of the flight are marked on both shores. On the meadow behind Dover Castle, the outline of the monoplane was laid out in granite setts in the turf, paid for by Alexander Duckham, who had witnessed the landing, and presented to the Aero Club. At Les Baraques a monument was inaugurated in 1911, and in 1936 the hamlet took the aviator's name, as Blériot-Plage. A statue of Hubert Latham stands on the clifftop near Sangatte, looking at the sea that beat him twice. Blériot died in Paris on 1 August 1936, a week after the anniversary of his flight.