it started up again after a 100 foot glide, it did not give enough
power to give him safety in the gale he was facing. The rising wind
kept him on the ground throughout the day, and, though he hoped for
better weather, the gale kept up until the Sunday evening. The men in
charge of the machine during its halt had attempted to hold the machine
down instead of anchoring it with stakes and ropes, and, in consequence
of this, the wind blew the machine over on its back, breaking the upper
planes and the tail. Grahame White had to return to London, while the
damaged machine was prepared for a second flight. The conditions of the
competition enacted that the full journey should be completed within 24
hours, which made return to the starting ground inevitable.
Louis Paulhan, who had just arrived with his Farman machine,
immediately got it unpacked and put together in order to be ready to
make his attempt for the prize as soon as the weather conditions should
admit. At 5.31 p.m., on April 27th, he went up from Hendon and had
travelled 50 miles when Grahame White, informed of his rival’s start,
set out to overtake him. Before nightfall Paulhan landed at Lichfield,
117 miles from London, while Grahame White had to come down at Roden,
only 60 miles out. The English aviator’s chance was not so small as it
seemed, for, as Latham had found in his cross-Channel attempts, engine
failure was more the rule than the exception, and a very little thing
might reverse the relative positions.
A special train accompanied Paulhan along the North-Western route,
conveying Madame Paulhan, Henry Farman, and the mechanics who fitted
the Farman biplane together. Paulhan himself, who had flown at a height
of 1,000 feet, spent the night at Lichfield, starting again at 4.9 a.m.
on the 28th, passing Stafford at 4.45, Crewe at 5.20, and landing at
Burnage, near Didsbury, at 5.32, having had a clean run.
Meanwhile, Grahame White had made a most heroic attempt to beat his
rival. An hour before dawn on the 28th, he went to the small field in
which his machine had landed, and in the darkness managed to make an
ascent from ground which made starting difficult even in daylight.
Purely by instinct and his recollection of the aspect of things the
night before, he had to clear telegraph wires and a railway bridge,
neither of which he could possibly see at that hour. His engine, too,
was faltering, and it was obvious to those who witnessed his start that
its note was far from perfect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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