Electric aircraft to cross the channel

You wait over a century for an electric aircraft to cross the channel and then two do it in less than a week.

In 1909 Louis Bleriot, Hubert Latham, Charles de Lambert and Arthur Seymour raced to be the first person to cross the English Channel in a powered aircraft. As any school child will tell you, Bleriot went on to win the battle in an aircraft of his own design. What future generations will remember of the race to cross the channel by electric aircraft is harder to tell.

Aviation giant Airbus spent millions developing the E-fan before A private owner has beaten Airbus in the race to fly the first electric aircraft across the English Channel. He undertook the Channel crossing on 25 July 1909 in his Blériot XI, an aircraft that was the first to be put into into mass production at a site near Paris where part of the E-Fan team is now located.

The E-Fan's provenance is impeccable and the aircraft performed beautifully, marking a step towards Airbus’s aim to produce 100-seater commercial aircraft that use gas-turbine / electric hybrid engines. The only fly in the ointment was that earlier the same week, Hugues Duwal flew his electric Colomban Cri Cri E-Cristaline across the channel, beating the Airbus E-Fan by one day.

https://youtu.be/rkEHIv1o7u8

The E-Fan is powered by lithium-ion batteries, which enabled the plane to cover the 74 kilometres [46 miles] between Lydd, England, and Calais in France in 36 minutes.. Flown by test pilot Didier Esteyne, the sleek electric aitrcraft weighs around 600 kilogrammes and travelled at a maximum altitude of 1,000 metres.

By contrast, when Bleriot first crossed the channel he flew at approximately 72 km/h and an altitude of only 76 m. Without a compass, let alone the modern avionics fitted to the E-Fan, Blériot took his course from the ship Escopette, which was heading for Dover. At one point visibility deteriorated to such an extent that he later said, “for more than 10 minutes I was alone, isolated, lost in the midst of the immense sea, and I did not see anything on the horizon or a single ship”.

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