China Marks 100 Years of Flight
In aviation, China may well be the future, judging from global aircraft makers’ eagerness to sell here and simultaneous discomfort with Beijing’s plans to develop domestic planes. But for one group of enthusiasts, now is the moment to consider aviation history: China’s first powered flight, which happened 100 years ago this week in Shanghai. On Feb. 21, 1911, Frenchman René Vallon took off from a racecourse and flew a Sommer Biplane above Shanghai to mark the birth of flight — and aerospace marketing — in China.
Reporting on the show, the North China News, one of the city’s top English-language newspapers at the time, said the Sommer’s 50 horsepower engine “cackled like a maxim” gun and that the 12-meter-long craft’s 10-minute flight over north Shanghai’s Jiangwan Stadium included a figure-8 maneuver. Mr. Vallon negotiated it “with consummate skill” before he worked the two control levers and brought it down lightly “like a fastidious butterfly approaching a flower,” the account said.
The event was commemorated Monday evening by Aerospace Forum Asia and Odyssey Publications in the Peninsula Shanghai hotel’s Rosamonde Aviation Lounge with a plaque unveiling. The lounge, complete with the fuselage of a full-scale model of a green 1930 Loening Amphibian seaplane, is named for the English moniker of Sun Yat-sen’s second wife, and trained pilot, Soong Ching-ling.