BLERIOT XI

The Bleriot in flight at WOW 2003

Photo (c) David Cornick 2003

In the early 1900s Louis Bleriot began to build and fly a variety of aircraft of his own design. Bleriot decided that the future of flight lay with the monoplane and built a series of promising aircraft that he numbered V to X. However, it was the Bleriot XI that was to guarantee him an important place in aviation history.

The first Bleriot XI was built at the end of 1908 and on 25 July 1909 Bleriot took off from a field near Calais and, maintaining an altitude of 300 feet, landed about one and a half hours later on the cliffs near Dover castle, for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel.

Between 1909 and 1912 nearly every European competition saw a Bleriot XI among the winners. By the end of 1913 M. Bleriot had delivered 800 aircraft of the total of 1294 aircraft of all types built in France that year.

One of these aircraft appeared in New Zealand that same year. An American, Arthur ‘Wizard’ Stone arrived in Auckland with his Bleriot XI in April 1913. On 19 April, a large crowd at the Auckland domain witnessed his first flight (albeit brief) when he flew a short distance before having to carry out a hasty forced landing. Not discouraged, he made further flights the same month from Epsom’s Alexander Park (one covering 19 kilometres). On 3 June the aircraft was written off on a fence on the boundary of Napier’s racecourse. Stone and his Bleriot had made the first long, sustained and truly practical flights in New Zealand.

Mikael Carlson returned a Bleriot to New Zealand skies for the first time in 90 years when he brought his beautifully restored aircraft to Warbirds over Wanaka in 2000. Originally built in 1918 Mikael painstakingly rebuilt his aircraft in the early 1990s. The aircraft is one of only three genuine airworthy Bleriot Xs in the world. In 1999, Mikael recreated history when he flew the aircraft across the English Channel, 90 years after his famous predecessor.

The aircraft is powered by a 50hp Gnome Omega rotary, an amazing early type of aero engine where the crankshaft remains fixed within the engine and the cylinders (directly connected to the propellor) whirl around the crankshaft. The Bleriot cruises at a sedate 40 knots, at altitudes not exceeding a few hundred feet. The aircraft is primitive by any standards and yet Mikael has delighted crowds all over Europe by his figures-of-eight, slow flying and even ‘hands off’ recreations of those early ‘magnificent men in their flying machines’.

Mikael Carlson's Bleriot XI proved to be a stunning and crowd pleasing performer at Whittaker’s Wings over Wairarapa 2003, in the centennial year of aviation.