Gustav GoneBritain's famous flyer, Gustav Hamel, is missing. Just last week Hamel was reported looping the loop with Winston Churchill (noted here May 19:
https://forum.ww1aircraftmodels.com/index.php?topic=13750.msg255224#msg255224). Today's news relates the Royal Navy's fruitless search for the recent applicant to their nascent Air Service, who disappeared over English Channel returning from Paris piloting a new Morane-Saulnier monoplane that he was intending to compete with that same day.
(from The Sun, 25 May 1914):
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Louis Blériot commented that he had never seen a pilot with such natural ability. The German-born Hamel, who was a pupil at Bleriot's aviation school, obtained
Aéro-Club de France's certificate no. 358, and the Royal Aero Club's Aviator's certificate no. 64 in February 1912. Over the next two years Hamel would accomplish several flying firsts and participate in numerous aviation competitions - his last, which he was en route to, being the
Daily Mail's Aerial Derby of 1914:
"
Hendon was fog-bound and rainy, with visibility limited to 100 yards... there was mounting concern as to Hamel's whereabouts when he failed to arrive.... (Claude) Grahame-White had no alternative but to postpone the race for a fortnight, to the disappointment of the crowds, who were slightly appeased by some displays of looping the loop in between the showers. By three that afternoon, three and a half hours after Hamel had begun his Channel crossing, there was still no news of him and the worst began to be feared. Grahame-White telephoned all the possible airfields where Hamel might have made an emergency landing, but with no success. He then alerted the Admiralty, and, under instructions from the First Lord (Churchill), the cruiser Mallard and four destroyers put out from Dover to sweep the Channel. A flotilla of gunboats from Sheerness also joined the search, accompanied by several seaplanes. No trace of Hamel or of his aircraft was found.
Grahame-White, accompanied by Hamel's faithful mechanic Gonne, had meanwhile taken the evening boat to Boulogne, where there was still a thick haze over the Channel. At Hardelot he questioned the mechanics who had refuelled Hamel's Morane-Saulnier racer earlier that day. They assured him that the machine had been in perfect order when Hamel took off for England. Five days later hopes of Hamel's survival were raised, only to be cruelly dashed when a report that he had been picked up by a trawler in South Shields turned out to be false. In their excitement at the news, crowds in the streets had formed around the newspaper boys in their haste to get the special editions. It was now assumed that, flying without a compass, Hamel had been carried off-course over the North Sea, where his reserves of fuel would quickly have been exhausted, causing his machine with its heavy engine to fall into the sea. The Admiralty issued a statement. Hamel was without question the foremost exponent in these islands of an art whose military consequence is continually increasing. His qualities of daring, skill, resource and modesty merited the respect of all those who pursue the profession of arms.' Shortly before his disappearance, Hamel had announced his next challenge: to fly the Atlantic that August. Just over a month later... a body was seen bobbing about in the sea off Boulogne. According to French reports, there could be 'no room for doubt that it was that of Gustav Hamel'". (Image and citation: Bostridge, Mark,
The Fateful Year: England 1914, London, Penguin Books, 2014)
Check out forum member RLWP's scratch-built, mixed-media, 1/32nd-scale Morane-Saulnier monoplane (Type L):
https://forum.ww1aircraftmodels.com/index.php?topic=8340.0
