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A book and DVD set telling how crashes changed aviation, and made
flying the safest form of modern travel This slice of aviation
history discusses the fearless test pilots and the very first
commercial jet airliners of the post war years, the Constellation
and the Comet. It also offersin depth analysis of some of the most
well known plane crashes and the investigations by the worlds
leading experts in a race to discover the causes of each crash. It
includes DVDs of the television series Mayday, Air Crash
Investigation investigating air crashes, near-crashes, hijackings,
bombings, and other disasters. Mayday uses reenactments and
computer-generated imagery to reconstruct the sequence of events
leading up to each disaster. In addition, aviation experts, retired
pilots, and crash investigators are interviewed explaining how
these emergencies came about, how they were investigated, and how
they could have been prevented.
From as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain
was at the forefront of powered flight. Across the country many
places became centres of innovation and experimentation, as
increasing numbers of daring men took to the skies. It was in 1799,
at Brompton Hall, that Sir George Cayley Bart put forward ideas
which formed the basis of powered flight. Cayley is widely regarded
as the father of aviation and his ancestral home the cradle' of
British aviation. There were balloon flights at Hendon from 1862,
although attempts at powered flights from the area later used as
the famous airfield, do not seem to have been particularly
successful. Despite this, Louis Bleriot established a flying school
there in 1910. It was gliders that Percy Pilcher flew from the
grounds of Stamford Hall, Leicestershire during the 1890s. He was
killed in a crash there in 1899, but Pilcher had plans for a
powered aircraft which experts believe may well have enabled him to
beat the Wright Brothers in becoming the first to make a fixed-wing
powered flight. At Brooklands attempts were made to build and fly a
powered aircraft in 1906 even before the banked racetrack was
completed but these were unsuccessful. But on 8 June 1908, A.V. Roe
made what is considered to be the first powered flight in Britain
from there - in reality a short hop - in a machine of his own
design and construction, enabling Brooklands to claim to be the
birthplace of British aviation. These are just a few of the many
places investigated by Bruce Hales-Dutton in this intriguing look
at the early days of British aviation, which includes the first
ever aircraft factory in Britain in the railway arches at
Battersea; Larkhill on Salisbury Plain which became the British
Army's first airfield, and Barking Creek where Frederick Handley
Page established his first factory.
On 25 July 1909, a dapper, moustachioed Frenchman flying a flimsy,
diaphanous aeroplane 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 GBP1,000 prize for the
first flight of the English Channel by the pilot of an aeroplane.
In securing the prize for one of aviation's most celebrated firsts,
Louis Bleriot 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 was attempted the crossing. In this book
the author explores the many and varied 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 Bleriot 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. The book
will chart other significant events in cross-Channel aviation such
as the first mid-air collision between airliners flying between the
UK and France, which led to a rudimentary system of air traffic
control, the popularity of car ferry services in the 1950s and
1960s, and the coming of the jets. Other big changes were on the
way. In 1994 Eurostar rail passenger services from London using the
Channel Tunnel were launched. In October 2001, following chronic
air traffic delays during the late 1980s, the European Commission
adopted proposals for a Single European Sky but it comes as no
surprise to learn that during the second decade of the 21st century
this has become bogged down in intra-European politics.
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