Yves Rossy is soaked in champagne by team members after landing at the South Foreland lighthouse at Dover. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
A tiny black cross no bigger than a gull appeared in the skies above Dover just before a quarter past one yesterday afternoon. Five minutes later a 49-year-old Swiss man, strapped to what looked like a streamlined ironing board, parachuted gently through the air and into the history books.
By the time he came to rest on the brow of a hill at 19 minutes past one, Yves Rossy had become the first person to cross the Channel on a jet-powered wing. He gathered up his canopy, and stood silhouetted against the blue sky as a stunt plane swooped low in acknowledgment and journalists and camera crews stampeded towards him. For a man who had just fulfilled a lifetime's ambition, Rossy was remarkably calm.
"It was perfect, just perfect," he said of the flight which had begun in the skies over Calais and ended 13 minutes later atop the white cliffs. "I'm still in a dream." He even went easy on the champagne that his crew drenched him in. After a modest swig, he looked down at his sodden flight suit and remarked: "It looks like I've been in the water."
The bubbly was the closest that the airline pilot came to the cold waves of the Channel. Yesterday's conditions could not have been better for the self-styled FusionMan and from the moment he flung himself out of a plane 2,500 metres (8,200ft) above Calais and fired up the four jet turbines on his carbon fibre wing, almost everything proceeded like Swiss clockwork. "It was as I wanted it and as the team wanted it," he said. "I was really living it in the present but it was like a dream."
On Thursday it looked as though the world would have to wait a little longer to see Rossy follow in the vapour trails of Frenchman Louis Blériot, who became the first man to fly a plane across the channel 99 years ago. Dark skies and a distinct sense of foreboding led FusionMan to postpone the flight that day. Or, as he idiosyncratically put it: "I have only one life and I don't want to lose it. I follow the little bees in my body, which are saying no."
Yesterday, though, the bees said yes and Rossy experienced something he found rather hard to define. Flying with nothing more than his body to steer with was, he said, "different, overwhelming. It was really like being in a second world, not really here, it was a mix of reality and dreams. I was flying with a wing just by turning my head. Over the channel, everything was new. I am from the mountains and it was almost mystic, like being in a parallel world."
But despite the months of planning, the hundreds of thousands of euros spent on the wing's development and the obedient weather yesterday, there was still no accounting for the human factor. Exactly how long had the flight taken him? Rossy could not be sure. Much, presumably, to the annoyance of his sponsors - a firm of Swiss watchmakers - FusionMan had got a little too caught up in the moment to hit the start button on his stopwatch. "I did realise after the first minute: 'Oh shit! I forgot!'" That brief moment of panic, he said, was the closest he had come to anxiety. There had not been any fear at all as he rocketed through the skies at 150mph.
"Not one minute. Tension, yes, but no fear. The day you feel fear, you won't go." Or, as he remarked again: "If you have bees in the body, don't go."
As befits a man who flies Airbuses for a living, though, he was adamant that the wing would never be used as a means of public transport. "We have very good airplanes with service and champagne. We don't have flight attendants on this flight," he pointed out.
Plan B
Stephane Rousson plans a rather more sedate crossing, in the other direction. On the Kent coast at Hythe the 39-year-old from Nice is waiting for the wind to drop so he can try for the first ever pedal-powered Channel crossing in a blimp.
With bicycle-powered propellers slung beneath a helium balloon, the Frenchman's craft, Mademoiselle Louise, looks like one of Hanna-Barbera's "Wacky Racers". If all goes to plan it will float 100ft (more than 30 metres) above the waves at an average speed of 8mph on the five-hour journey to northern France.
All that stops Rousson's "zeppy" from floating off is an anchor beneath. If that fails there's a dagger - for puncturing the balloon - on the pilot's seat.
Rousson calls his trip "both totally unnecessary and a very eloquent statement on human nature". He says he was inspired by Elliot's flying bike in the film ET, and Gossamer Albatross, the first pedal-powered plane to cross the Channel in 1977. He has exchanged cordial good luck letters with FusionMan.
The blimp is, at the moment, in a garage beside the Hotel Imperial where golfers and wedding parties come and go as Rousson bides his time. With luck, the launch could be tomorrow. But even a light wind will rule out a crossing.
The project has consumed the past five years of his life, costing him his relationship, he says, with his girlfriend, Louise, whose name adorns the airship. But he says "there is nothing like the pleasure of flying". And the next challenge? A crossing of the Atlantic in a tandem blimp.
A tiny black cross no bigger than a gull appeared in the skies above Dover just before a quarter past one yesterday afternoon. Five minutes later a 49-year-old Swiss man, strapped to what looked like a streamlined ironing board, parachuted gently through the air and into the history books.
By the time he came to rest on the brow of a hill at 19 minutes past one, Yves Rossy had become the first person to cross the Channel on a jet-powered wing. He gathered up his canopy, and stood silhouetted against the blue sky as a stunt plane swooped low in acknowledgment and journalists and camera crews stampeded towards him. For a man who had just fulfilled a lifetime's ambition, Rossy was remarkably calm.
"It was perfect, just perfect," he said of the flight which had begun in the skies over Calais and ended 13 minutes later atop the white cliffs. "I'm still in a dream." He even went easy on the champagne that his crew drenched him in. After a modest swig, he looked down at his sodden flight suit and remarked: "It looks like I've been in the water."
The bubbly was the closest that the airline pilot came to the cold waves of the Channel. Yesterday's conditions could not have been better for the self-styled FusionMan and from the moment he flung himself out of a plane 2,500 metres (8,200ft) above Calais and fired up the four jet turbines on his carbon fibre wing, almost everything proceeded like Swiss clockwork. "It was as I wanted it and as the team wanted it," he said. "I was really living it in the present but it was like a dream."
On Thursday it looked as though the world would have to wait a little longer to see Rossy follow in the vapour trails of Frenchman Louis Blériot, who became the first man to fly a plane across the channel 99 years ago. Dark skies and a distinct sense of foreboding led FusionMan to postpone the flight that day. Or, as he idiosyncratically put it: "I have only one life and I don't want to lose it. I follow the little bees in my body, which are saying no."
Yesterday, though, the bees said yes and Rossy experienced something he found rather hard to define. Flying with nothing more than his body to steer with was, he said, "different, overwhelming. It was really like being in a second world, not really here, it was a mix of reality and dreams. I was flying with a wing just by turning my head. Over the channel, everything was new. I am from the mountains and it was almost mystic, like being in a parallel world."
But despite the months of planning, the hundreds of thousands of euros spent on the wing's development and the obedient weather yesterday, there was still no accounting for the human factor. Exactly how long had the flight taken him? Rossy could not be sure. Much, presumably, to the annoyance of his sponsors - a firm of Swiss watchmakers - FusionMan had got a little too caught up in the moment to hit the start button on his stopwatch. "I did realise after the first minute: 'Oh shit! I forgot!'" That brief moment of panic, he said, was the closest he had come to anxiety. There had not been any fear at all as he rocketed through the skies at 150mph.
"Not one minute. Tension, yes, but no fear. The day you feel fear, you won't go." Or, as he remarked again: "If you have bees in the body, don't go."
As befits a man who flies Airbuses for a living, though, he was adamant that the wing would never be used as a means of public transport. "We have very good airplanes with service and champagne. We don't have flight attendants on this flight," he pointed out.
Plan B
Stephane Rousson plans a rather more sedate crossing, in the other direction. On the Kent coast at Hythe the 39-year-old from Nice is waiting for the wind to drop so he can try for the first ever pedal-powered Channel crossing in a blimp.
With bicycle-powered propellers slung beneath a helium balloon, the Frenchman's craft, Mademoiselle Louise, looks like one of Hanna-Barbera's "Wacky Racers". If all goes to plan it will float 100ft (more than 30 metres) above the waves at an average speed of 8mph on the five-hour journey to northern France.
All that stops Rousson's "zeppy" from floating off is an anchor beneath. If that fails there's a dagger - for puncturing the balloon - on the pilot's seat.
Rousson calls his trip "both totally unnecessary and a very eloquent statement on human nature". He says he was inspired by Elliot's flying bike in the film ET, and Gossamer Albatross, the first pedal-powered plane to cross the Channel in 1977. He has exchanged cordial good luck letters with FusionMan.
The blimp is, at the moment, in a garage beside the Hotel Imperial where golfers and wedding parties come and go as Rousson bides his time. With luck, the launch could be tomorrow. But even a light wind will rule out a crossing.
The project has consumed the past five years of his life, costing him his relationship, he says, with his girlfriend, Louise, whose name adorns the airship. But he says "there is nothing like the pleasure of flying". And the next challenge? A crossing of the Atlantic in a tandem blimp.
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