On 23 September 1913 Frenchman Roland Garros made the first solo
flight across the Mediterranean Sea and from one continent to
another. Averaging 100km/h over the 730 kilometres-500 of them
over-water-between Fréjus and Bizerte, Garros's Morane-Saulnier
H monoplane took seven hours 53 minutes to complete the pioneering
trip.
On the 90th anniversary of this epic voyage, French manufacturer
EADS Socata-descendant of the Morane Saulnier company-recreated
Garros's achievement by flying a new TBM 700C turboprop single
over the same route. Jean-Pierre Lefèvre-Garros, nephew
and biographer of the famous pioneer aviator and sportsman, christened
the TBM Spirit of Roland Garros before its departure from Paris-Le
Bourget in the hands of Socata chief test pilot Christian Briand.
He set off from Cannes-Mandelieu and crossed the Mediterranean
to Bizerte after a symbolic overflight of the former air and sea
base at Fréjus-Saint-Raphaël, from where Roland Garros
had taken off 90 years earlier.
Born in 1888, Roland Garros was a fine sportsman-particularly
on the tennis court-who proved to be a natural and skilled aviator.
He took part in numerous pioneering air races, and in 1912 became
the official test pilot for manufacturer Morane-Saulnier, breaking
the world altitude record in one of its monoplanes.
During WWI Garros served in the French military air service and
developed Raymond Saulnier's design for a device that would allow
guns to be fired through the disc of aircraft's rotating propeller;
a steel plate, attached to each blade, deflected any rounds that
might hit it. Garros was killed in action on 5 October 1918.
To Frenchmen today, the name Roland Garros is more readily identied
with tennis than aviation. After Frenchmen Jacques "Toto"
Brugnon, Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet and René Lacoste ("The
Musketeers") won the Davis Cup on American soil in 1927,
the re-match in Paris the following year called for a setting
worthy of the occasion, so the Stade Français club offered
to sell the tennis authorities a three-hectare site close to Porte
d'Auteuil, posing only one condition: that the new stadium bore
the name of one of its former members, Roland Garros. The Stade
Roland Garros was inaugurated on 29 July 1928, and remains the
focal point of French tennis.
