Grove Koger
September 23 is remembered in France as the anniversary of an aviation milestone.
The pilot involved was Adrien Roland Georges Garros, born October 6, 1888, in the French colony of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Commonly known as Roland Garros, he was educated in Paris and took up bicycling in the Riviera city of Cannes as a means of recovering from pneumonia. Subsequently he became interested in several sports, including tennis and rugby, as well as in automobiles and, particularly, airplanes.
The first plane he flew was a Demoiselle (Dragonfly) monoplane. He mastered the basics quickly and received his aviator’s license in July 1910 before graduating to Blériot models. He entered several air races in the following years, and placed in several of the stages of the 1911 Circuit d’Europe (Circuit of Europe), which involved flying from Paris to London and back.
Garros set an altitude record in September 1911, reaching 12,960 feet, and broke his own record the following year when he reached 18,410 feet. But it was on September 23, 1913, that he achieved an even greater accomplishment. Piloting a Morane-Saulnier G, he flew from a naval airfield on the Riviera, Aérodrome de Fréjus-St. Raphael, to Bizerte in northern Tunisia (then a French protectorate), becoming the first person to fly non-stop across the Mediterranean. The flight had taken 7 hours 53 minutes, and had covered nearly 500 miles. The plane’s tank held more than 50 gallons of fuel, but sources differ over how much (meaning how little) fuel he had left at the end of the flight. Was it one gallon? Two and a half?
Garros flew as an escort pilot with Escadrille 26 in World War I, but was shot down and held captive for nearly three years before escaping and making his way to London and back to France. After rejoining his squadron, he was shot down again and killed on October 5, 1918.
If the name Roland Garros sounds familiar, it may be because you’ve watched or even attended the famous French tennis tournament known as Les Internationaux de France de Roland-Garros. Or it may be that you’ve admired the monument dedicated to the aviator as you strolled through Place Roland Garros in Bizerte, in which case I envy you. Or it may even be that you’ve flown into the Aéroport de la Réunion Roland Garros on another one of your trips, in which case I’m doubly envious.
The image at the top of today’s post is a French postage stamp issued in 2013. The photograph of Garros is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and shows the pilot standing in front of his Demoiselle plane in 1910. The third image is a poster designed by Lucien Cavé and published by the French Secrétariat Général à La Défense Aérienne in 1930, and the final image is the logo of the airport in Saint-Denis, Réunion.
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