Chasing Icarus (27 page)

But where were the Americans? In the grandstand and on the field enclosures spectators alternated their gaze between Grahame-White and hangar row. No movement came from the Wrights’ hangar; Orville seemed more concerned with timing each of Grahame-White’s laps, and now and again Walter Brookins emerged from the hangar to look over his boss’s shoulder and find out how the Englishman was faring. A similar lack of urgency marked the hangars of Armstrong Drexel and Charles Hamilton, the latter of whom appeared troubled by the state of his machine. Suddenly the crowd heard the starting crack of a Blériot engine outside hangar No. 8. Smoke billowed into the air, then the machine began to slowly taxi across the grass. At nine A.M. Peter Prunty shouted into his megaphone that Monsieur “Lee Blank” in his “Blearyrot” had started his first lap. Up in his box, August Belmont turned to two of his guests— Monsieur Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States, and Count Benoit D’Azy, the French naval attaché—and apologized for the butchering of their language.

Grahame-White was halfway through his sixth lap when Le Blanc set off in pursuit in his yellow monoplane. The Frenchman’s leather helmet was the only part of him visible to the crowd as they watched him negotiate the first corner with ease. Now the two machines were opposite one another, Le Blanc hurtling up the back straight and Grahame-White entering the home stretch. Spectators tried to gauge their respective speeds. It was hard to tell, but Le Blanc seemed to be fairly whizzing round the course. The scoreboard showed Grahame-White’s time for his sixth lap: 3 minutes 3.76 seconds. Another quick one. Now Le Blanc was coming into dead man’s turn. People jumped up from their seats, their eyes riveted on the machine as it deftly rounded the pylon at a height of one hundred feet, then shot forward, “its motor humming a fierce, defiant song of speed and power.”

The amateur timekeepers looked at their watches in astonishment. That couldn’t be right, could it? A deafening roar from the crowd confirmed it was. The official lap time had flashed up on the scoreboard—2 minutes 45.63 seconds. Half a minute quicker than Grahame-White’s first lap. People tried to take it in, that a flying machine could travel at such speed. It was too fantastic for words.

Le Blanc’s second lap was just as fast, and in the press box and around the grounds people’s excitement grew as they realized that they were witnessing the quickest-ever flight in an airplane. Those spectators who’d arrived early took plea sure in “explaining to the constant stream of newcomers the race that was then on in the air.”

As Le Blanc neared the end of his third lap, a second British competitor, Alec Ogilvie, took off in his Wright biplane. At least the crowd had something American to cheer now, even if it was a machine and not a man. It took just a lap from Ogilvie, however, for everyone to see “that his feeble 30-horsepower motor was outclassed by the great 100-horse power motors in the Blériot monoplanes.”

The thirty thousand people now on the grounds ignored the small biplane beetling around the course and watched transfixed as Le Blanc tore after Grahame-White “as a hound would chase a fox. It was an agile fox, a fast fox, but the hound was relentless.” The spectators in the seats high up on the grandstand ran down to the grass in front so they could get a better view of the hunt. The reporter from the
World
continued his analogy as the “fox disappeared behind the clump of trees on the northern side . . . but almost before it had done so the hound had plunged in after it. Then the sky-fox took to the air running high. But the hound was on him now in the full cry of the metal voice of the humming motor. For a breathless moment it really looked as if, hound-like, Le Blanc’s Blériot was about to plunge crashingly upon the fleeing monoplane of Grahame-White.”

Bored with the chase, Le Blanc left behind his rival and careered round the course while the “crowd was shouting mad with the excitement of the spectacle.” Straw boaters littered the infield where they had been thrown by men unable to control their emotions, and people stood on the backseats of their parked automobiles waving their arms aloft as the machines scorched overhead.

Le Blanc completed the first five laps in 13 minutes 50 seconds, nearly two minutes quicker than Grahame-White. The sixth lap he circled in 2 minutes 48 seconds, the seventh in 2 minutes 47 seconds, and the eighth also in 2 minutes 47 seconds. Le Blanc had found his rhythm and was averaging seventy miles an hour compared to Grahame-White’s sixty. Nonetheless, wrote the reporter from the
World
, one couldn’t but admire the Englishman “as he went persistently on, demanding from his machine all that it could give, drawing it out by skillful manipulation. Down on the scoreboard he could have seen as the laps rolled by that the Frenchman’s slowest record in any of them was faster than his . . . but if he realized it, he didn’t show it. He kept doggedly on his course—the conditions reversed, Le Blanc the fox, himself the dog.”

By the time he had completed lap fifteen Grahame-White was in trouble. For the last few minutes his motor had been spraying oil over the fuselage, and now smoke wafted around his feet and he could “feel the woodwork of the monoplane heating and my coat . . . beginning to be uncomfortably warm. I could feel it almost parching on my back and I was stricken with the horrible feeling that I might have to make a quick dash to the ground with the wings and framework of my machine blazing about me.” Having never before flown such a powerful machine, Grahame-White had no idea the smoke and heat were normal by-products of the Gnome engine; instead, he presumed he was on fire and “for a few moments I could not help [but] picture myself projected like a cannon ball at a speed of sixty miles an hour . . . the prospect was not very agreeable.” But there were no flames and Grahame-White managed to quell the rising panic. Only five more laps, he told himself, stick it out. He reduced his height, flying as close to the ground as possible, “expecting to make a drop at any moment.”

Flying in fear for his life, Grahame-White dipped under three minutes each for his final five laps, and at nine forty-three A.M. he finished his twentieth lap to an extravagant wave from the starter’s black-and-white-checkered flag and a rapturous ovation from the crowd. The scoreboard displayed his overall time: 1 hour, 1 minute, 4.75 seconds. A plucky performance, wrote the reporter from the
New York Herald
, “but it was taken for granted that he was hopelessly beaten.”

Attention turned to Le Blanc, who was still “distance-devouring,” in the words of the pressmen. With Grahame-White finished, and Ogilvie down with engine trouble, the Frenchman had the crowd to himself. They kept their eyes trained on him “with an interest that kept the breath stilled while he was passing, and was marked by a quick relieved breath as he shot off.” The mathematicians in the grandstand tediously pointed out that he was traveling at a greater speed than Harry Grant, who, three weeks earlier, had driven his automobile for 278 miles at an average speed of 65 mph to win the Vanderbilt Cup. Imagine, they said, an airplane going quicker than an automobile.

As Le Blanc started his penultimate lap, the
Herald
reporter had already left his seat in the press stand and was down at the judges’ box taking advantage of his newspaper’s status as the meet’s official organ. Waiting for the Frenchman to finish the race, the journalist tried to convey the magnitude of Le Blanc’s flight. He described the Blériot’s “beautiful steadiness . . . perfect pitch,” and the way the Gnome engine “thrashed ceaselessly,” but he needed something more, he needed a comparison. He checked the tournament program for the world record for one hundred kilometers—1 hour and 6 minutes, set by Léon Morane of France a year earlier. Yet here was Le Blanc, flying down the home straight to complete his ninety-fifth kilometer in a shade under 53 minutes, having reached a top speed of 72.5 mph—another world’s record—and having “set a pace that it was known only a phenomenon in aircraft construction could equal.”

The two corpsmen at pylon No. 5 watched as Le Blanc raced toward them on his final lap. The sun glinted off the windshields of the auto-mobiles parked to their left and the roar of the crowd thundered down the track like the hooves of a hundred Thoroughbreds. Le Blanc was a hundred feet above the ground, but as he did in the approach to every pylon, he now began to drop to a height of about fifty feet. Suddenly the airplane swerved toward the infield, almost as if it were cutting the corner, but the corpsmen saw from the way the machine swiveled in the air that Le Blanc had lost control. He was headed toward the stables. No, he seemed to have righted it. The craft jerked, once, twice, and for a moment hovered like an ea gle over a lake. Then without a sound the machine fell from the sky, crashing into a fourteen-inch-thick telegraph pole with such force that the pole snapped like a toothpick. The reporter from the
Sun
stifled a cry as “Le Blanc was shot forward on his hands and knees and rolled over and over until he lay limp.”

The first man to reach the wreckage was one of the Pinkerton security guards, John Ellis, who’d been patrolling the eastern end of the grounds. Le Blanc was lying on the grass, a few feet clear of the broken pole, in among the yellow rags of what had once been the covering of his machine’s wings. He was still alive, but he had a cut down to the bone above his right eye and three or four other gashes to his face caused by shards of wood from his propeller. Ellis took a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to stanch the blood flowing down the aviator’s face. Le Blanc pushed him away, got to his feet, threw off his shattered goggles, and tried to find a way into the mangled corpse of his machine, “apparently thinking of climbing again into the seat of his craft.” But no craft was left, explained the
New York Herald
reporter, who was in one of the automobiles now racing to the scene of the crash. The nose of the Blériot had hit the center of the pole twelve feet from the ground, ripping the wings from the fuselage and leaving the chassis “crumpled up into a smashed bundle of wreckage.”

One of the tournament doctors, Charles Ross, put an arm around Le Blanc and noticed the faraway look in his eyes. The Frenchman was helped into an automobile and driven round to the back of the grandstand to the hospital tent, where a tall policeman opened the door of the vehicle. The sight of the uniform snapped the Frenchman out of his stupor, and he “threw his arms around the policeman and, coursing down across the bloodstains on his face, came Le Blanc’s first tears . . . and as he sobbed Le Blanc rattled along in French to the Irish policeman whom he was embracing.”

Dr. Ross eased the aviator out of the policeman’s arms and into the tent underneath the grandstand, where he laid him down on a bed and began to clean and dress his wounds. Le Blanc was still gibbering when from above came a fearful cry.

Grahame-White had arrived back at his hangar just as Le Blanc started his last lap. He knew he’d lost, but he had no complaints. He’d given it his best shot, and he had beaten the existing record for a hundred-kilometer flight, and in a machine he had never before flown. He removed his flying goggles, revealing two white-saucer eyes in a face blackened by oil, and whipped off his gloves so he could shake hands with his mechanics. Eleonora Sears ran over to take a snapshot, and as she did so, the Frenchman dropped out of the sky, and the race.

In the commotion that followed, only a handful of spectators saw that the flaps of the Wrights’ tent were being folded back. Suddenly the Baby Grand emerged into the cold sunshine. The
World
’s reporter swept the field with his field glasses, leaving behind Le Blanc and focusing instead on the “tall, lithe, boyish-face of Walter Brookins [who] appeared to have no anxiety other than to begin the race.” Now the biplane was on the grass, and the mechanics were helping the aviator into his seat on the leading edge of the lower plane. Wilbur and Orville Wright said a few words to Brookins, who then signaled he was ready to start. A couple of minutes later—as a bleeding Le Blanc was being driven to the hospital tent—Brookins climbed into the air, working the two levers either side of his seat.

The
New York Times
reporter knew something was wrong the moment Brookins left the ground. It wasn’t that the wind had picked up and was now blowing in fitful gusts at twenty miles an hour, but more that the motor didn’t sound right. The reporter knew an eight-cylinder engine when he heard one, and that wasn’t the sound coming from the Baby Grand. At most, he reckoned that four of the cylinders were firing. The machine came round dead man’s turn toward the start line at a height of no more than eighty feet. It began to head toward the infield, then back out, then it started to lose height. “He’s going to come about into the wind and land,” someone shouted from a seat close to the press stand, but through his glasses the
Times
reporter saw Brookins pulling frantically at the levers, then the propeller stopped. What happened next took no more than thirty seconds, he wrote, “although to the spectators it seemed like minutes.” The Baby Grand was only fifty yards from the lawn on which promenaded the ladies and gentlemen in their finest furs and stiffest collars. They stopped and looked up at the drama unfolding before their eyes. The machine’s nose rose for a moment, then fell, and Brookins nearly went with it. He grabbed a wire and steadied himself, then pulled again at the levers. It looked as if the nose was leveling up . . . was he winning his battle? And then, just as suddenly as the propeller had stopped, it started, and the Wright Baby Grand machine arrowed toward the ground. “Women in the stands cried aloud and more than one man turned away,” wrote the reporter from the
New York Sun
as Brookins, wearing his favorite two-piece green suit, made “a quick move backward from his seat as if to get as far from the first smashing point as possible.” The airplane slammed nose-first into the earth, “and in a dense dust cloud it turned tail upwards and crumpled into a roll of muslin, broken wood and steel, and settled into wreckage like a crushed paper bag.” Each reporter differed on the fine details of the crash, but they all agreed on the deafening silence in the seconds that followed. It was as if, said the
New York Times
, spectators and officials alike had been “dazed into a trance.” Young Brookins was finished, and with him America’s best hope of retaining the International Aviation Cup. It was hard to believe.