Cross-Channel Aviation Pioneers: Blanchard and Bl�riot, Vikings and Viscounts

The stories of the daredevils who attempted to fly over the English Channel--a history filled with triumphs, tragedies, and colorful characters.On July 25, 1909, a dapper, mustachioed Frenchman flying a flimsy, diaphanous airplane changed the status of a great nation. "England is no longer an island," declared the Daily Mail. Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper's proprietor, had put up the �1,000 prize for the first flight of the English Channel by the pilot of an airplane.In securing the prize for one of aviation's most celebrated firsts, Louis Bl�riot had beaten his Anglo-French rival Hubert Latham. Six days earlier, Latham had become the first airman to make a forced landing on water when the engine of his elegant Antoinette monoplane failed while he attempted the crossing.This book explores the triumphs, tragedies, and many milestones in cross-channel flight, beginning back in July 1785 when John-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries made the first crossing, by balloon. Other flyers quickly followed Bl�riot so that Pierre Prier made the first non-stop London-Paris flight in April 1911 and Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the Channel a year later--though her historic accomplishment was overshadowed by the Titanic catastrophe.The book also charts other events in cross-Channel aviation such as the midair collision between the UK and France that led to a rudimentary system of air traffic control; the first cat to make the flight; the popular car ferry services of the 1950s and 1960s; and the coming of the jets--providing a colorful history of the era before the debut of the famed Channel Tunnel.