From our press release.... THE TRUE ‘FIRST AIRCRAFT IN FRANCE’ REVEALED REPLICA WW1 OBSERVATION BIPLANE PREPARES TO RECREATE HISTORY On 13th August 1914, twelve BE-2 observation aircraft of No.2 Squadron Royal Flying Corps flew from Swingate Down near Dover to Amiens in France in support of the British Expeditionary Force. It was the first-ever aerial deployment of an air force to a theatre of action. The feat, in terms of airmanship, was unprecedented. In the years after Louis Bleriot’s faltering first crossing, only around 50 pilots had flown the Channel, yet all twelve of the No.2 Squadron aircraft made the crossing and in the opening weeks of the Great War, more than 60 of the frail aircraft successfully made landfall in France. However there has always been mystery about which of the Royal Flying Corps aeroplane was the ‘First in France’. It is well recorded that Lieutenant Hubert Harvey-Kelly was the first to land, in breach of an order from his Commanding Officer, Major Charles Burke, that “all aeroplanes were to take off and land in Squadron order.” For most of the past century, it was assumed that Harvey-Kelly’s mount had been a BE-2 with the tail code ‘347’. The assumption was based on a photograph, still held by the Imperial War Museum, which shows Harvey-Kelly reclining against a haystack next to his aircraft. In a piece of early twentieth century ‘spin’, the picture was used by contemporary newpapers to illustrate “The First in France”, but it turns out that the aircraft never made it as far as the English Channel. The photograph was in fact taken 100 years ago this week, on the moors above Whitby in North Yorkshire when the squadron, upon the outbreak of war, was heading south from its previous base at Montrose in Scotland. A day or so later Harvey-Kelly damaged its undercarriage, landing in a field in Northamptonshire. Determined not to miss out on the crossing, Harvey-Kelly it seems made his way to the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough and took over another, newly-built aircraft. However the identity of this machine has frustrated historians until Stephen Slater and Matthew Boddington, owners of the ‘Biggles Biplane’ replica of the 1914 aircraft, uncovered some exciting new information. “As we have been preparing our aircraft to cross the channel in commemoration of that first flight, we have been liaising closely with the Western Front Association and its vice-President Graham Parker” said Stephen Slater. “One day he said he had an interesting document for us to see”. It turned out to be a faded, typewritten copy of Major Burke’s diary for the day of the crossing. In addition to giving a first-hand account of the crossing, the diary page contained a list of each aircraft and the pilot flying it. “It was a bitter-sweet moment for us” said Slater. “On one hand we had uncovered a piece of history and now knew definitively the correct number. The bad news was, that having flown as ‘347’ for the past three years since we restored our aircraft, we now had to completely remake the rudder with a new fabric covering painted with the correct code.” A week ahead of its flying from Dover to France to recreate the first channel crossing, ‘Biggles Biplane, an authentic replica of a 1914 BE-2 originally built in the 1960s for a Biggles film, unveiled its new tail code. Royal Flying Corps “Number 471”, as recorded in Major Burke’s diary, will once again fly into history in commemoration of the brave aviators of a century ago.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 14:00:01 +0000
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