Deja Vu

June 22, 2009

29:31

Tags:

aviation,

Brazil,

commerce,

France,

inventions,

Paris

“Hard Pounding,” The Economist, June 18, 2009.

DISTANT indeed seem the days when the two great rivals of commercial aviation, Boeing and Airbus, would use big air shows to trumpet hundreds of new orders. This week’s biennial show in Paris was a much more sombre affair, even if the Boeing-Airbus feud still took centre stage.

There were one or two bright spots. Airbus was able to boast of a firm order for ten of its wide-body A350s from AirAsia X. John Leahy, its top salesman, expects deliveries in 2009 to match last year’s record 483. Boeing, which was hit by a prolonged strike in 2008, will probably deliver more aircraft this year than last. Both firms built up huge backlogs in the fat years: each has orders for about 3,500 planes.

But many of those may soon evaporate. Giovanni Bisignani, the boss of IATA, the trade body that speaks for most airlines, gave warning earlier this month that his members might defer as many as 30% of aircraft deliveries next year. He also almost doubled his forecast for the industry’s cumulative losses in 2009, to $9 billion.

My Airships: The Story of My Life, by Alberto Santos-Dumont, 1904.

Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont maintained that he, and not the Wright Brothers, had invented the airplane. In 1901, two years before Orville and Wilbur’s flight at Kitty Hawk, Santos-Dumont won the “Deutsch de la Meurthe” Prize, a 50,000-franc reward promised to the first person who designed, built, and conducted a machine capable of flying from Paris’s Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in less than 30 minutes. To win the prize, the aviator would need to complete the 6.8-mile trip while maintaining a ground speed of at least 14 mph.

And now, 19th October 1901, the air-ship “Santos-Dumont No. 6,” having been repaired with great celerity, I tried again for the Deutsch prize and won it….

The official start took place at 2.42 p.m. In spite of the wind striking me sidewise, with a tendency to take me to the left of the Eiffel Tower, I held my course straight to that goal. Gradually I drove the air-ship onward and upward to a height of about 10 metres above its summit. In doing this I lost some time, but secured myself against accidental contact with the Tower as much as possible.

As I passed the Tower I turned with a sudden movement of the rudder, bringing the air-ship round the Tower’s lightning conductor at a distance of about 50 meters from it. The Tower was thus turned at 2.51 p.m., the distance of 5 ½ kilometers, plus the turning, being done in nine minutes.

The return trip was longer, being in the teeth of this same wind. Also, during the trip to the Tower the motor had worked fairly well. Now, after I had left it some 500 meters behind me, the motor was actually on the point of stopping. I had a moment of great uncertainty. I must make a quick decision. It was to abandon the steering wheel for a moment, at the risk of drifting from my course, in order to devote my attention to the carbureting lever and the lever controlling the electric spark.

The motor, which had almost stopped, began to work again. I had now reached the Bois, where, by a phenomenon known to all aeronauts, the cool air from the trees began making my balloon heavier and heavier—or in true physics, smaller by condensation. By an unlucky coincidence the motor at this moment began slowing again. Thus the air-ship was descending, while its motive power was decreasing.

To correct the descent I had to throw back both guide rope and shifting weights. This caused the air-ship to point diagonally upward, so that what propeller-force remained caused it to remount continually in the air.

I was now over the crowd of the Auteuil racetrack, already with a sharp pointing upward. I heard the applause of the mighty throng when suddenly my capricious motor started working at full speed again. The suddenly-accelerated propeller being almost under the high-pointed air-ship exaggerated the inclination, so that the applause of the crowd changed to the cries of alarm. As for myself, I had no fear, being over the trees of the Bois, whose soft greenery, as I have already stated, always reassured me.

All this happened very quickly—before I had a chance to shift my weights and guide rope back to the normal horizontal positions. I was now at an altitude of 150 meters. Of course, I might have checked the diagonal mounting of the air-ship by the simple means of slowing down the motor that was driving it upward; but I was racing against a time limit, and so I just went on.

I soon righted myself by shifting the guide rope and the weights forward. I mention this in detail because at the time many of my friends imagined something terrible was happening. All the same, I did not have time to bring the air-ship to a lower altitude before reaching the timekeepers in the Aéro Club’s grounds—a thing I might easily have done by slowing the motor. This is why I passed so high over the judges’ heads.

On my way to the Tower I never looked down on the house-tops of Paris: I navigated a sea of white and azure, seeing nothing but the goal. On the return trip I had kept my eyes fixed on the verdure of the Bois de Boulogne and the silver streak of river where I had to cross it. Now, at my high altitude of 150 meters and with the propeller working at full power, I passed above Longchamps, crossed the Seine, and continued on at full speed over the heads of the Commission and the spectators gathered in the Aéro Club’s grounds. At that moment it was eleven minutes and thirty seconds past three o’clock, making the time exactly twenty-nine minutes and thirty-one seconds.

The air-ship, carried by the impetus of its great speed, passed on as a racehorse passes the winning-post, as a sailing yacht passes the winning-line, as a road racing automobile continues flying past the judges who have snapped its time. Like the jockey of the racehorse, I then turned and drove myself back to the aérodrome to have my guide rope caught and be drawn down at twelve minutes forty and four-fifths seconds past three, or thirty minutes and forty seconds from the start.

I did not yet know my exact time.

I cried: “Have I won?”

And the crowd of spectators cried back to me: “Yes!”

• Email /
• Print /
• Comment now