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Aviation History
1951
1951 - 0593.PDF
FLIGHT, 30 March 1951 363 PORTRAIT OF A PIONEER One Year of Fame: the Meteoric Flying Career of Hubert Latham By COLIN BOYLE In spite of his achievements, fewportraits of Hubert Latham exist. \\ WHILE the name of Louis Bleriot is known even to the youngergeneration, that of his rival on the Channel flight, Hubert Latham, it familiar only to those who have studied aviation history or areold enough to remember the early days of flying. Readers will recall an article in Flight of July 1st, 1949, in which Harry Harper,veteran aviation journalist, re-told the story of Bleriot*s Channel crossing. Here another contributor, who has delved into thechronicles of the period, writes of the brilliant flying and con- sistent ill-luck of Latham, IF you leave Calais by the Boulogne road, and bear right atCoquelles, you will come to the little seaside village of San-gatte. This village has a certain claim to fame, in that work was started here on the French end of the Channel tunnel, but there was once another occasion when it was a centre of interest for both England and France. Go through the village, and climb up the coast road, past the little war memorial, and presently you will see before you the bronze figure of a man, dressed in the cap, Norfolk jacket, and knickerbockers of the Edwardian sportsman. It stands by the roadside, with the high ground of Cap Blanc Nez behind it; and if you examine it you will find that it is of Hubert Latham, and erected by the Aero Club de France. When I was there two years ago, the great cross-channel guns were still emplaced in the low inland hills, and all the ground before them, right to the foot of the statue itself, was riddled and honey- combed with crater on crater, crater beside crater, until the whole seemed like some fantastic valley of the moon. Behind, on the slopes of Cap Blanc Nez, lay the German look-out posts and anti- aircraft stations, whose paths wound round the foot of the statue itself. But in this valley of desolation the statue still stood un- touched and impassive. The name of Latham meant little to me then, but the discovery of the lonely statue amid so much ruin and destruction piqued my curiosity, and I set about finding out more about him. Hubert Latham, the son of an Englishman, was born in Paris in 1883. He was educated in Paris and at Oxford, so that, in spite of the French nationality which he retained, he could with justice be called an Anglo-Frenchman. He acquired, while still a young man, a reputation as a sportsman, but it was as an airman that he became famous. It is difficult to obtain much information about him, apart from stories of his air exploits, but I have been told that he first took up the then hazardous pastime of flying on being told by his doctor that he had only one more year to live; and he was determined to live that year as fully as possible. However this may be, it is a fact that he lived for several years longer, and at last died a violent death. A footnote to a paper on flying published in 1909 says that he was learning to fly in order to explore Africa from the air—surely a courageous ambition ! In the spring of 1909 the Antoinette Engineering Company of Paris, which had for some years been experimenting with aircraft, produced a machine to the design of M. Levavasseur. It was a monoplane, and was for those days very large and graceful. It was called the Antoinette after the company, and the famous motor which powered it. The services of Hubert Latham were retained as a pilot. He spent a few weeks practising with the aircraft, and then, early in June, burst into the limelight by setting up a European endurance record of 1 hour, 7J minutes. During this flight he was seen to remove his hands from the controls, and calmly to roll and smoke a cigarette. He was certainly the first airman to treat his craft with such scant respect; and when the position of the pilot on an Antoinette is considered—he was perched up on, rather than in, a narrow fuselage, in the full blast of the slipstream—it was a most remarkable feat. In its issue of June 19th of that year, Flight commented on the advent of Latham, which it called ''Byronic", and went on to say that, now the preliminary technical work had been done, the new science of aeronautics needed men like him, who were prepared to take great risks to prove their machines. Soon afterwards came an event which more than any other took men's fancy, and established aviation as an accomplished fact. The Daily Mail had offered a prize of £1,000 to the first man to fly the English Channel, and a number of aviators were determined to carry off the award. Early in July the great Anglo-French pioneer Farman came to Calais to examine the lie of the land, and soon afterwards Latham set up his camp at Sangatte, while the Comte de Lambert established one farther down the coast at Wissant. Latham, in particular, had set his heart upon this prize and this honour. He had already crossed the Straits in a balloon, and felt quite confident of crossing it in his Antoinette. The Comte de Lambert, who was flying a Wright biplane, soon eliminated himself as a competitor by crashing his aircraft, and for a while, Latham had the field to himself. He made several practice flights, and once had a crash himself, coming down heavily in a cornfield; but fortunately his machine was little damaged, and soon he was waiting only for favourable weather. The French destroyer Tarpon had been told off as an escort for Latham, and M. Levavasseur, who was managing the attempt, installed himself on board. The morning of July 19th dawned calm and clear, the Channel was oily and smooth, and wireless reports from Dover (the first wireless weather reports) said that there, too, the weather was fine. Accordingly, at 6.15 a.m., M. Levavasseur ordered the firing of the three guns which were the signal to Latham to start. In less than half an hour the pilot was in the air and, climbing to a thousand feet, set out for England. He soon overtook the destroyer and, as he passed over it, tried to take a photograph. But even as he was focusing bis camera the engine of his aircraft began to miss and slow down. He tried all the elec- trical connections in his reach, he tried adjusting the fuel and air supply; but it was all in vain, and at last he had to be content with bringing the Antoinette smoothly down on the water, and as near to his escort ship as possible. It was characteristic of Latham that he had made no effort to see if the monoplane would float or not; he had merely assumed that it would. Fortunately, the event proved him correct; in the calm sea it floated easily and, while he waited to be rescued, he again casually Latham's graceful Antoinette monoplane during its sensational flight in a high wind at the Blackpool aviation meeting held i»~October, "Flight" photograph
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