Early on the morning of July 25, 1909, French aviator Louis
Blériot woke up in a bad temper due to a recent injury. He
refused breakfast and drove to the field where his Type XI plane
waited. Seeing that the weather was good, he warmed up the engine
and took off—into history. "A Daring Flight" recounts one of
the most spectacular feats of early aviation. The program captures
the thrilling formative years of flight, when the French in
particular were mad about airplanes and tried everything to fly.
"I think there was something in the water or the air in Paris at the
turn of the century that just produced these wonderful characters,"
says Tom Crouch, Senior Curator of the Aeronautics Department at the
National Air and Space Museum. The same crazy spirit lived in
Blériot's grandson, also named Louis Blériot, whom
NOVA follows in his project to repeat his forebear's exploit in a
nearly identical though now antique aircraft (see
A Soaring Obsession).
Among the risk-all aviators at the turn of the century was Albert
Santos-Dumont, who puttered around Paris in his dirigible and was
the first in France to get off the ground in a powered winged
vehicle—a giant box kite that careened across a field,
seemingly tail-first, as the pilot stood bravely at the controls.
Santos-Dumont's feat was in 1906, when the Wright brothers'
secretive flights in the United States were still only a rumor.
Blériot, too, was part of the action. He had made a modest
fortune by inventing an acetylene-fueled headlight for the newly
popular automobile, and then threw his money and energy into
aviation. He tried a number of absurd-looking contraptions before
hitting on a design that could actually fly, or rather hop: the
Blériot V.
NOVA focuses on the features of these early airplanes, which had
wings for lift and a motor and propeller for propulsion, but very
little else in common with one another (see
Too Much Imagination). For example, investigators were still experimenting with the
number of wings. Most craft used two—a biplane
design—because of the inherent structural strength of that
configuration. Blériot, however, preferred a single-wing
monoplane because it could achieve greater speed.
The position of the control surfaces was also evolving, from front-
to rear-mounted. The biggest evolutionary change, though, came when
the Wright brothers finally began publicly displaying their flying
machine in 1908. The French were stunned at how effortlessly the
Wright Flyer could maneuver through the sky.
The secret turned out to be wing-warping, a method of balancing the
wings to allow the plane to roll and initiate a turn, much as a
bicyclist leans when going around a corner. Combined with
simultaneous use of a rudder, the system permitted the Wrights to
make perfect circles in the air.
Blériot adopted the technique. By 1909 he had an airplane
that could compete for the cash prize offered to the first pilot to
cross the English Channel, which has for centuries been considered a
formidable barrier protecting Great Britain. The feat would make
Blériot famous, and his Type XI would become the world's most
popular airplane in the period leading up to the First World War.
(To have a closer look at the plane, see
Tour a Blériot XI).
Indeed, it is a vintage Type XI that the great aviator's grandson
intends to fly across the English Channel on NOVA. Given the age of
the aircraft, the first Louis's mother's comment, almost 100 years
ago, might still apply: "Louis has gone completely mad. He wants to
cross the Channel in a kite!"
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Louis Blériot makes history over the English
Channel on July 25, 1909.
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