Alone over the immense sea

At 4.41 on the morning of 25 July 1909, Louis Blériot took off from a farm field at Les Baraques, near Calais, in his Type XI monoplane. He was still recovering from third-degree burns to his foot, suffered when exhaust insulation came loose during a flight at Douai three weeks earlier. Halfway across, he said later, he was lost in the midst of the immense sea. Thirty-six minutes and thirty seconds after take-off he landed in Northfall Meadow beside Dover Castle, won the Daily Mail’s 1,000-pound prize and became the first man to fly an aeroplane across the English Channel.

Headlamps paid for the wings

Blériot, born in Cambrai in 1872, had made his money from the first practical car headlamp, and spent it on aircraft. After a brief partnership with Gabriel Voisin he set up his own research business at Courbevoie in March 1909. His Type VIII of 1908 already had the stick and rudder-bar controls that pilots still use. The Type XI’s Channel flight then brought a flood of orders, and several hundred were built.

The Type XI and the schools

The fame filled flying schools too. From late 1909 Blériot opened schools at Étampes and Pau, then Hendon and Brooklands in England. Between 1910 and 1914 they trained about 1,000 pilots: by the outbreak of war nearly half the holders of the Aero Club de France’s licence had learned at a Blériot school. The Brooklands branch, opened in July 1914 with a small factory managed by Norbert Chéreau, built about 20 monoplane trainers. Blériot was selling not just aircraft but the very idea of the aviator.

SPAD: the fraudster’s factory

In 1913 Blériot bought the assets of the Deperdussin company, whose founder had been arrested for fraud, and renamed it the Société Pour L’Aviation et ses Dérivés, or SPAD. In the First World War it was SPAD, not Blériot, that mattered. Its S.VII and S.XIII fighters, the latter built 8,472 times, were flown by René Fonck, the top Allied ace, by Guynemer and Nungesser, by Italy’s Francesco Baracca and by the Americans.

Mammoths, flying boats and nationalisation

After the Armistice Blériot moved SPAD’s designers to his works at Suresnes and tried everything: the 28-seat Type 75 Mammoth airliner, motorcycles, a cyclecar and fishing boats. Only the Blériot 127 bomber, 42 built, sold in any number under his own name. His last aircraft, the 5190 Santos-Dumont flying boat, crossed the South Atlantic twelve times from 1933. In 1936 the government nationalised the industry and Blériot Aéronautique went into SNCASO. Louis Blériot died on 1 August that year.

Factories

• Courbevoie · Courbevoie, near Paris — Original 1909 base
• Suresnes works · Suresnes, near Paris
• Brooklands factory and school · Brooklands, Surrey — Opened July 1914

People

• Louis Blériot · founder and pilot — 1872–1936
• André Herbemont · chief designer of SPAD and later Blériot
• Alfred Leblanc · Blériot’s friend and pilot

Records and firsts

• First aeroplane crossing of the English Channel, 25 July 1909
• Blériot 5190 completed twelve South Atlantic crossings by May 1935