A beautiful book, written in Toulouse, you dive into legendary planes
Through Toulouse editorial staff
Published on
For a long time, the sky seemed inaccessible to men. This dream, already strongly anchored in the culture of ancient Egypt, inspires many legendary stories, like the character of Greek mythology Icarus, known to have died after flying too close to the Sun.
The pionneers
Later, the poet Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) (who inspired the character Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand) imagines himself “above the highest clouds” as he narrates in “Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon”.
Whether Leonardo DeVinci (1452-1519), the brilliant all-rounder of the Renaissanceby his innumerable sketches on the movement of birds and flight, is the first to imagine what will be the helicopter, the parachute or even the plane, it was not until the end of the 18th century that the aerial epic finally became tangible. On November 21, 1783, the Montgolfier balloon carried the first passengers into the air, while the British engineer George Cayley is the first to imagine fixed wings with one mode of propulsion.
On October 9, 1890, Clement Ader finally materializes this theory with the Eole, a vehicle propelled by a boiler with tubes equipped with an alcohol burner, used to supply two pairs of 20 horsepower cylinders which drive a double bamboo propeller.
In the wake of the Haut-Garonne engineer, the wright brothersWilbur and Orville, Santos-Dumont and Louis Blériot (who crossed the English Channel on July 25, 1909) became the first heroes in aviation history.
legendary planes
In his book “Legendary planes. The dream within reach of the sky »rich in beautiful photos, the Toulouse journalist Pascal Alquier comes back to all these figures and the many legendary planes.
“It is obviously difficult to talk about all these planes from Eole, but if I had to name a few: the Spirit of Saint Louis of Charles Lindbergh with whom he crossed the Atlantic in 1927, the Breguet including the Breguet 19, the first to make the transatlantic flight between Paris and New York in 1930, the fire eater, the iconic Royal Air Force aircraft that won the Battle of Britain in World War II, the lesser known but equally important Airspeed AS.51 Horsa, the gliders that dropped off American paratroopers in the first hours of the Landing of June 6, 44 in Normandy, the series of Lockhheed whose P38 Lightning on board authorized Saint-Exupéry died on July 31 of the same year. Without forgetting of course the Caravelthe Concordegusts…”.
The aircraft of the future
Far from confining himself to the past, the journalist also evokes the projects of the future, such as the range of zero-emission Airbuses and their engines powered by the combustion of hydrogen via modified gas engines and Overture, a supersonic device developed by the start-up. up American Boom Supersonic, supplied 100% by sustainable aviation fuel made from biomass, waste oils, purchased CO2 and green hydrogen.
Matthew Arnal
Editions Privat. Price: €34.90
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