Blériot Crosses the Channel (1909): First Flight to England

On 25 July 1909 the French aviator Louis Blériot made the first flight across the English Channel in an aeroplane. Flying his small Blériot XI monoplane from near Calais, he landed at Dover about 37 minutes later and won a £1,000 prize from the Daily Mail newspaper. Coming less than six years after the first powered flights, the crossing showed that the sea no longer fully protected Britain from the air.

Background: the race to fly

After the Wright brothers’ first flight in December 1903, progress in Europe was at first slow. That changed in 1908, when Wilbur Wright gave dazzling demonstrations in France, and European aviators raced to improve their own machines.

In October 1908 Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel by aeroplane. Northcliffe was keenly interested in aviation and believed Britain was falling behind. The prize required a flight in either direction between Britain and France, in daylight, without touching the sea.

Louis Blériot

Louis Blériot (1872–1936) was a French engineer who had made a fortune manufacturing acetylene headlamps for cars. From about 1900 he spent much of that money on aircraft experiments, building a series of designs that crashed or failed to fly well.

His breakthrough was the Blériot XI, a light monoplane developed with the engineer Raymond Saulnier and first flown in January 1909. It had a wooden frame covered in fabric, a wingspan of about 7.8 metres, a tractor propeller at the front and a three-cylinder engine of about 25 horsepower built by the Italian-born engineer Alessandro Anzani. The pilot steered by warping the wings, a method similar to the Wrights’. In the weeks before the Channel flight Blériot set records for distance in it, though one accident left him with a badly burned foot, and he was still on crutches in July.

The aircraft was tiny by later standards. Its empty weight was only a few hundred kilograms, its engine often overheated, and the pilot sat in an open frame with almost no instruments. A flight of more than half an hour over cold water, far from any landing ground, was a real gamble: if the engine failed, as Latham’s had, the pilot would have to hope that a boat reached him quickly.

The rivals

Blériot was not the only contender. The favourite was Hubert Latham, a wealthy, popular Anglo-French aviator who flew the elegant Antoinette IV monoplane. Latham set up camp at Sangatte, near Calais, and on 19 July 1909 he set out for England. About 13 kilometres from France his engine failed and he came down on the water, where a French navy torpedo boat picked him up.

A third aviator, the Comte Charles de Lambert, who had been taught by Wilbur Wright, also brought Wright aircraft to the coast but did not make an attempt. Blériot arrived at Les Baraques, near Calais, and waited for the strong winds to drop. Bad weather kept all the contenders grounded for days, and crowds of journalists and spectators gathered on both sides of the Channel, waiting for news.

The flight on 25 July 1909

Early on Sunday 25 July the wind eased. Blériot made a short test flight and then took off at about 4:41 a.m., shortly after sunrise, as the rules required. The French destroyer Escopette set out to follow him, but he soon overtook it.

Blériot had no compass. For around ten minutes in the middle of the crossing he could see neither coast nor ship, and he kept a steady course until the white cliffs came into view. Finding that the wind had pushed him east of his target, he turned along the coast towards Dover.

A French journalist, Charles Fontaine of Le Matin, was waiting on the cliffs and waved a large French tricolour to mark a landing place in a sloping field called Northfall Meadow, near Dover Castle. At about 5:17 or 5:18 a.m. Blériot cut his engine and landed heavily, damaging the undercarriage and breaking the propeller. He had covered about 35 to 36 kilometres in roughly 36 to 37 minutes.

Reaction

The news spread quickly. Blériot was met by a police constable and a growing crowd, then celebrated at a lunch in London, where he received the Daily Mail prize. His aircraft went on display at Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, where large numbers of people came to see it. In France he became a national hero.

The flight was celebrated as a triumph of French engineering at a time when French and British relations were improving under the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Some British newspapers, however, used it to ask why no British aviator or aircraft had been ready to compete for a British prize, and why the country had invested so little in flying machines.

Latham tried again on 27 July and came down in the sea about 1.5 kilometres from Dover. The Antoinette was the more graceful machine, but the race belonged to Blériot.

Commercially, the flight was a triumph. Blériot received orders for around 100 Type XI monoplanes within weeks, and his company became one of the most important early aircraft makers. Blériot XIs were later among the first aircraft used by armies, including in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and in the opening months of the First World War.

What it meant for Britain

For centuries the Channel and the Royal Navy had protected Britain from invasion. Blériot’s flight suggested that this was changing. Newspapers and writers, including the novelist H. G. Wells, argued that Britain was no longer an island in the military sense, and the government came under pressure to invest in aviation.

The fear was premature in 1909, since the Blériot XI could carry only its pilot. But within a few years aircraft were crossing the Channel regularly, and during the First World War German aircraft and airships bombed English towns, as in the Zeppelin raids on Britain.

Myths and facts

• “Blériot navigated across the Channel.” He flew without a compass and, for part of the crossing, could see no landmarks at all. He held his heading and relied on the English coast coming into view.
• “His was the first crossing of the Channel by air.” It was the first by aeroplane. Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries had crossed in a gas balloon in January 1785.
• “The flight was smooth.” It ended with a hard landing that damaged the aircraft, although Blériot was unhurt.

Timeline

• 1785, 7 January: Blanchard and Jeffries cross the Channel by balloon.
• 1908, October: The Daily Mail offers £1,000 for the first aeroplane crossing of the Channel.
• 1909, January: The Blériot XI makes its first flights.
• 1909, 19 July: Hubert Latham’s attempt ends with his Antoinette in the sea.
• 1909, 25 July: Blériot flies from Les Baraques to Dover in about 37 minutes.
• 1909, 27 July: Latham’s second attempt ends in the sea near Dover.
• 1910, 2 June: Charles Rolls makes the first non-stop return flight across the Channel.

Legacy

Blériot’s aeroplane is preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, and a granite outline of the aircraft, the Blériot Memorial, marks the landing site at Dover. The anniversary has been marked many times, including in 2009, when a replica Blériot XI repeated the flight on its centenary. The crossing is remembered as one of the moments when aviation passed from experiment to practical transport. Less than a century later, the Channel Tunnel offered a very different way of linking Britain and France.

Why it matters

Blériot’s 37-minute flight proved that aeroplanes could cross open water between countries. It boosted European aviation, launched a successful aircraft business and forced Britain to rethink its security in an age when the sea was no longer an absolute barrier.