1909 Louis Blériot in Istanbul

Mavi Boncuk |

After the successful crossing of the English Channel, there was a great demand for Blériot XIs. By the end of September 1909, orders had been received for 103 aircraft.

In 1909, the famous French pilot Louis Blériot [1] came to Istanbul and performed a flying display in Taksim Square. A sizable crowd gathered to watch. 

In the fall of 1909, Blériot was “on tour” in Europe making various exhibition flights. In September, he was in Brescia in northern Italy. In October he was in Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania and made the first flights ever in those countries. Promoters paid him handsomely. He supposedly received 250,000 francs in Bucharest alone. From Romania he continued to Istanbul where he was promised 50,000 francs for a similar exhibition. His aircraft was shipped in advance of his arrival and was put on exhibit in the Ice Skating Palace on the Grand Rue de Pera, now İstiklal Caddesi, from 8 through 11 December. Tickets for this exhibit were on sale at the site.

Blériot successfully took off, but unforeseen strong winds from the Dolapdere Valley prevented him from returning to Taksim Square, instead driving him toward Tatavla (Kurtuluş), and he ultimately crashed his plane into the garden of a house in Tatavla (one of the streets between Sefa Square and the Evangelist Church in Dolapdere). 

They were carried out by the Belgian Baron Pierre de Caters [2] and then by the Frenchman Louis Bleriot. De Caters flew from Şişli and Bleriot flew from the Taksim Parade Ground. Their flights were short and of very limited success, but they were a sensation and sparked the interest of the Ottoman Army. Indeed, shortly thereafter the Ottoman Army acquired its first aircraft. This article is based on descriptions of these flights in the leading newspapers of İstanbul and includes full translations of these events from Yeni Tesvir-i Efkâr (Turkish) and The Levant Herald (French).[3]

The incident was widely reported in the press of the time. After the accident Blériot did very little flying but he made a couple of short flights at the 1910 Biarritz and Barcelona meetings. He then focussed on production of airplanes. Blériot took over the remains of the Deperdussin company in 1913 and during WW1 he was the president of SPAD, which produced thousands of planes during the war, the most famous being the "VII" and "XIII" biplane fighters.t at an aviation meeting in Istanbul in December 1909, Blériot gave up competition flying, and the company's entries for competitions were flown by other pilots, including Alfred Leblanc, who had managed the logistics of the cross-channel flight, and subsequently bought the first production Type XI, going on to become one of the chief instructors at the flying schools established to aviation and the flights of de Caters and Bleriot. 

de Caters Flight

“Despite the good weather in the morning, the Baron was not able to get his flying machine ready for takeoff as early as planned. Around eight o'clock, a white flag was raised over the shed, which seemed to indicate that he was ready," but the hours dragged on and the crowd became increasingly impatient. Finally around noon, the Baron had his aircraft brought from its shed and had it pointed toward the field that stretched beyond for 200 meters. Wearing a yellow beret and a "jumpsuit" of the same color, he leapt into the machine and started the engine. It made such a loud booming and tapping sound and so shook the ground that it terrified the horses hitched to various conveyances and threatened to cause a stampede. Some people feared that they would be trampled to death. Alus recalled how the horses reared up and spread confusion among the crowd25. At the same time, the propellers caused awesome whirlwinds that blew dust and smoke high into the air in all directions.” [*]

[*] LINK  LINK 2

The Dawn of Aviation in the Middle East: The First Flying Machines Over Istanbul By Gary Leiser

Gary Leiser is the director of the Travis Air Museum at Travis-Air Force Base, California. He received a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the Universi-ty of Pennsylvania in 1976. Dr. Leiser has published eight books and more than twenty. -five scholarly articles on various aspects of Middle Eastern history. Ris most recent book is the edition and translation of a twelfth-century Arab medical text, Questions and Answers for Physicians (Leiden, 2004). 

[1] As the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft across the English Channel, Louis Blériot is among the greats of aviation. He was also a brilliant inventor, engineer and entrepreneur.

While there was nothing new in flying across the English Channel – Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries had completed the journey in a balloon in 1785 – the Daily Mail was prepared to award a £1000 in 1909 for the first aeroplane flight to complete the challenge. This prize was offered in the hope of inducing Wilbur Wright (of Wright Brothers renown) to enter. Wilbur was in Europe at the time (while Orville was recuperating from a crash in the US), but could not be tempted, objecting that the prize was not on a scale that would justify the risks involved. This left the field open to Blériot and three rivals who, along with the 10,000 spectators at both Calais and Dover, were forced to wait until 25th July for conditions to clear.

[2] Pierre Henri Marie Amédée Baron de Caters de Bosschaert was born on December 25th, 1875 in Berchem outside Antwerp. He was the son of an Antwerp businessman, from which he inherited his noble title in 1884. In his youth he practiced tennis, fencing, cycling and other sports, and after a brief effort at a military career he started an electrical engineering education.

In 1897 he unexpectedly inherited an enormous fortune, reportedly worth the then fabulous sum of six million francs, after a distant aunt. After winning a three-year court fight with his relatives over the validity of her will he started spending the money on cars, motorboats and aeroplanes. He participated in many automobile races in several types of cars and eventually became a factory driver for Mercedes. His biggest win was the 1905 "Tour des Ardennes". In 1904 he briefly held the absolute speed record of 156 km/h, set at Ostend in Belgium with a 90 hp Mercedes. His boat "Sea Sick", powered by a Mercedes-Sunbeam engine, reached a record 50.4 km/h over a kilometre in 1904.

His interest then turned to aviation and he became Belgium's first pilot. In 1908 he ordered two planes from the Voisin brothers, one triplane and one biplane, and built a private airfield at the family palace in 's-Gravenwezel near Antwerp. He made his first flights, in the triplane which he soon abandoned, during the second half of October 1908. From the autumn of 1909 to late 1910 he participated in several meetings and bought four more Voisins. He also performed in several towns in Eastern Europe and in Turkey and Egypt.

[3] Among these newspapers, Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr devoted the most attention Ebüzziya Tevfik's youngest son Velid Ebüzziya, who eventually took over the newspaper in 1912, was especially interested in flight. Many of the articles in Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr on this subject are signed with the initials V.E. (i.e., the letters waw and alif in the Arabic alphabet), which must stand for Velid Ebüzziya. No articles on aviation in any of the other Turkish papers cited in this study are signed. It is worth noting that Velid Ebüzziya and his older brother Talha set up a darkroom for photography, effectively the first for an Istanbul newspaper, in 1912 and in the same year Velid apparently took the first aerial photographs 

As for newspapers published by foreigners or European interests, the most important was The Levant Herald. It was established by a British subject, with the help of the British Embassy, in 1856 and ran until 1914. It concentrated on trade and diplomatic issues between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire. In 1909, the language of The Levant Herald was French with two columns of summaries in English. At that time, French was the language of trade and diplomacy for the European colony. Indeed, even the Ottoman high society in Beyoglu spoke French and imitated Parisian social graces. The Levant Herald took a great, but rather different, interest in the flights of de Caters and, above al!, Bleriot. Apart from this different emphasis, its accounts of these flights add further details to those of the Turkish press and help complete the picture of those events.