Triumphant Failure At Sangatte: Challenging the English Channel in a Monoplane

By Stephen H. King | Aviation History  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

What went wrong? No one knows for sure. Wilbur Wright, who had toured the Antoinette factory earlier that year and inspected the engines, was sure the fuel injection system would prove unreliable in humid conditions and thought that Levavasseur should have relied on standard carburetors, at least when flying over open water. On the other hand, René Thomas—who soon thereafter began working for the Antoinette company as a mechanic and later became a pilot—was convinced that the engine had failed because Levavasseur had not filtered the fuel. Given the narrow jets of the engine’s fuel injection system, that could have been a critical problem.

Levavasseur himself, not one to admit mistakes, was certain the problem had arisen when the plane was transported down the bumpy road to its takeoff point. He assumed some critical piece of the engine must have shaken loose while the plane was on the ground and then become detached during the flight.

To Levavasseur’s dismay, the attempt to salvage the aircraft, which had been virtually undamaged when it went into the water, degenerated into a comedy of errors. The plane was a wreck by the time it arrived in Calais. Lashed to the side of Harpon awaiting transfer to a tug, it broke apart. The hoist operator was to blame, having failed to consider that the fuselage was full of seawater that shifted to both ends, putting an impossible strain on the framework. Adding insult to injury, souvenir hunters in Calais got to the airplane before Levavasseur and stripped it of anything not bolted or screwed down.

Though he was angry when he learned of the Antoinette’s fate, Levavasseur nevertheless retained the presence of mind to dispatch Latham to Paris to superintend the shipment of another airplane, this time his newest model, the Antoinette VII, for a second Channel attempt. At that point, however, the new plane had not even been test flown.

While Latham was en route to Paris, Levavasseur held a press briefing, hiding his dismay over Latham’s failure and the plane’s destruction. Looking the reporters straight in the eyes, he said: “Gentlemen, look just for a moment here. The Antoinette’s engine’s failure was just an accident. Just that. Why, even horse carts can fail too, you know? What is important is that I have developed a machine that can go on land, in the air, and in the water. It runs, it flies, it swims. C’est un triomphe!”

But the next day Levavasseur’s old nemesis, Louis Blériot, formally entered the competition. On July 25, with an amazing display of courage and determination laced with a generous helping of luck, Blériot took advantage of a brief period of early morning good weather to succeed in his Blériot XI monoplane where Latham had failed. Taking off from a spot near Calais at 4:41 a.m., Blériot landed near Dover Castle just 36 minutes later, at 5:17. Latham missed out on that fleeting opportunity because no one on the Antoinette team awakened him early enough to make a flight that day.

Latham did make a second attempt on July 27, but again met with disaster, this time going down only 11⁄2 heartbreaking miles from Dover. Once more he had been defeated by a malfunctioning engine.

Oddly enough, Latham’s spectacular failures enhanced rather than detracted from his public image. The picture of him perched in the cockpit of the stricken Antoinette, serenely smoking a cigarette while waiting to be picked up by a rescue boat, was carried in practically every newspaper around the world. He became an instant celebrity—an authentic hero not just for what he had tried to accomplish but also for how he had faced defeat. Latham’s grand effort was indeed a failure twice over, but that was not how the French saw it. The image of a manor-born French gentleman, filled with pluck and sang-froid, attempting the Channel crossing in a gorgeous French-built plane, transformed the whole episode into a national triumph.

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Tags: Aviation History, Flight Technology, Historical Figures

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