What a Shambles!

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Wow. What a shambles. I even forgot to do the Nova article, 'A Daring Flight,' about Louis Bleriot. By way of making up, it was the history of the person who invented the modern form of the airplane. Bleriot apparently was the first person to put the engine in front and the tail in back. This arrangement resulted is a craft which was inherently stable. A sort of side show to the Nova history of Bleriot's adventures was the story of his grandson, now an old man, who at his ripe old age determined to learn how to fly for the sole purpose of piloting a replica of the Bleriot 11 across the English Channel, replicating the first crossing by his grandfather.

One suspects the old boy's motivation involved more ego than love of flying, and sure enough, after a minute or two of flight he found himself in a right turning spiral. Apparently, the procedure for correcting to level flight escaped him at the critical moment and he crashed ignomineously in full view of the camera, including his own video camera which was trained on his face and the tail assembly at impact.