MAN WHO MADE HISTORY ..delays Channel flight by Swiss birdman

 

Regulars here may remember Yves Rossy, the Swiss airline pilot who has turned himself into the world's first human jet. I spent the day with him today at Calais as he prepared to strap on his wings and become the first jetman cross the English Channel.

At the last minute, with TV networks broadcasting live, fog rolled in over the landing area at Dover so he had to call off the flight, which starts with a free-fall from a plane. (That's him in the picture getting the bad news from Dover.) He is going to try again tomorrow (Friday) lunchtime.

Rossy, a lanky, boyish 49-year-old was disappointed after preparing himself mentally all morning for what remains a dangerous mission. His flight of about 23 miles will take only about 13 minutes at 115 MPH, but if he runs out of fuel too soon or his four little jet engines cut, he must splash down under parachute in the cold grey water of the Channel.

We flew up from Paris in a Cessna to tag along behind the little escort fleet of two helicopters and two planes. The visibility on the French side of the Channel was already so poor that I found it hard to make out the Calais airport in the murk below us. That's when we small-time pilots bless GPS, the satellite positioning system. I cannot imagine what it would be like to fly in the same conditions with no instruments and no flight controls apart from your body. That's what Rossy does when he is being Fusionman, the name he uses for his human flying machine. Rossy, who is constantly cheerful, said the descending fog was just one variable too much.

"There are so many unknown factors. We don't want to add another layer," he said after being told by phone of the closing cloud. His senses told him not to push it, despite the pressure of heavy media attention and commitments to sponsors. "I have butterflies in my stomach and that's a bad sign," he said as he rolled his wings back from the Pilatus jump plane. "I only have one life and I would rather keep it."

I hope that he makes it tomorrow. He has to be back in the captain's seat of his A320 Airbus flying out of Zurich early next week. The forecast is better but we're expecting a headwind wind that could force another cancellation. With only just enough jet fuel to get across the Straits, Fusionman has no margin for error.

The pressure to perform on schedule is a strain that the early aviators did not suffer so much. Only a few reporters were in attendance at Calais and Dover in July 1909 when Louis Blériot, a French pioneer, became the first man to fly the Channel in an aircraft.