Eleven months after the Rheims meeting came what may be reckoned the
only really notable aviation meeting on English soil, in the form of
the Bournemouth week, July 10th to 16th, 1910. This gathering is
noteworthy mainly in view of the amazing advance which it registered
on the Rheims performances. Thus, in the matter of altitude, Morane
reached 4,107 feet and Drexel came second with 2,490 feet. Audemars
on a Demoiselle monoplane made a flight of 17 miles 1,480 yards in 27
minutes 17.2 seconds, a great flight for the little Demoiselle. Morane
achieved a speed of 56.64 miles per hour, and Grahame White climbed
to 1,000 feet altitude in 6 minutes 36.8 seconds. Machines carrying
the Gnome engine as power unit took the great bulk of the prizes, and
British-built engines were far behind.
[Illustration: Rolls executing a turn (note tilt).]
[Illustration: Fatal accident to Rolls. Bournemouth Aviation Week.]
The Bournemouth Meeting will always be remembered with regret for the
tragedy of C. S. Rolls’s death, which took place on the Tuesday, the
second day of the meeting. The first competition of the day was that
for the landing prize; Grahame White, Audemars, and Captain Dickson
had landed with varying luck, and Rolls, following on a Wright machine
with a tail-plane which ought never to have been fitted and was not
part of the Wright design, came down wind after a left-hand turn and
turned left again over the top of the stands in order to land up wind.
He began to dive when just clear of the stands, and had dropped to a
height of 40 feet when he came over the heads of the people against the
barriers. Finding his descent too steep, he pulled back his elevator
lever to bring the nose of the machine up, tipping down the front end
of the tail to present an almost flat surface to the wind. Had all
gone well, the nose of the machine would have been forced up, but the
strain on the tail and its four light supports was too great; the tail
collapsed, the wind pressed down the biplane elevator, and the
machine dived vertically for the remaining 20 feet of the descent,
hitting the ground vertically and crumpling up. Major Kennedy, first
to reach the debris, found Rolls lying with his head doubled under him
on the overturned upper main plane; the lower plane had been flung
some few feet away with the engine and tanks under it. Rolls was
instantaneously killed by concussion of the brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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