On July 25, 1909, the Frenchman Louis Bleriot, in an aircraft he designed and built, became the first to fly across the English Channel. For this great feat he was awarded a prize of 1,000 pounds by the London Daily Mail.

Even though Louis had been deathly sick with an infected foot (the result of a gasoline explosion), he was forced into making the flight when he did. He had been on crutches for a week, but a few days earlier another Frenchman, Hubert Latham, had attempted the flight but had been forced into the channel after seven miles due to a faulty motor. He was rescued by a French naval vessel ordered to follow his course as a safety measure.

Louis knew that Hubert would try again, and soon. Therefore at four o'clock in the morning, Louis Bleriot stepped into his monoplane and flew from Les Barrages, France, to Dover, England.

The Bleriot XI, Louis's plane, proved to be a superior flying machine and distinguished itself in many events preceding the war. Conquering the Alps was among many of its numerous accomplishments.

The Farman Biplane, another pre-war design used in the WWI.
Wingspan: 34 ft.10 in. Length: 38 ft. Weight Loaded: 816 lbs.
Engine: 1aircooled Gnome 7-cylinder radial engine 50 hp

Once the aeroplane made its debut with the Morane-Saulnier and the Bleriot XI, flying schools began popping up all over Western Europe where young pilots-to-be could learn to fly these new machines. One of the most popular shools was the French School.

At the French School, the pilot-in-training would sit down in his plane and start the engine while the instructor quickly pointed out all of the instuments and some hints and tips, yelling over the roar of the engine. The instuctor would leap off the plane and the student would open up the throttle a little and taxi around the field trying to get a feel for the controls. At a signal from his intructor, the student would open the throttle a little more and go bounding through the grass, and some of the more daring students would even leave the ground for a few seconds, though this was supposed to be saved for the second day.

Gradually the student would progress, staying airborn for longer and longer amounts of time and going higher and higher into the atmoshpere. As the pilot flew higher into the sky above the clouds, strange happenings occured. The early flyers had no comprehension of air currents. Air pockets caused by changes in temperature in the atmoshpere (strong winds) could sieze the plane suddenly and carry it, and the pilot could do nothing with the ailerons or the engine.

In the middle of the Salisbury Plain training area there was a narrow, wooded cleft several miles from the Upavon Aerodrome known as the valley of death. Between 1909 and 1913 seven planes plummeted to their deaths their, seized on fine summer evenings by the wood's strange spiralling air currents and smashed to pices in the treetops. The place can still be visited today, unchanged since those times and curiously redolent of its victims' aura. The following passage was written by an American student of the French School regarding the first day's training:

When a student was first learning to crow-hop up and down a field, he'd take off, rise about ten or twenty feet and then bring the ship down almost flat, hardly peaking at all, by blipping the motor on and off. About four or five feet off the ground, the amateur eagle just let her drop ker-wham.
The sound was the general effect of an earthquake in a hardware store, but the miracle was that the ship seemed to suffer no particular ill effects. A tire here or a couple of wires there would go, or perhaps a shock-absorber cord, but nothing happened to render the ship unfit for further use.

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