As the public relations-spawned dissection of two flights over the English Channel by electric aircraft late last week got into finer and finer details, a big-picture perspective surfaced in the AVweb inbox. The first flight of an electric aircraft over the English Channel happened more than 30 years ago but it was overshadowed by perhaps an even greater earlier accomplishment by its creator. Two years after Paul MacCready's Gossamer Albatross crossed the channel under pedal power delivered by cyclist and pilot Bryan Allen, a solar-electric version of the aircraft made the crossing and then some. In fact, the Solar Challenger stayed in the air for five hours and 23 minutes and covered 163 miles on a flight from Pontois-Cormeilles Aerodrome, north of Paris, to RAF Manston in the U.K. That flight happened almost 34 years to the day (July 7, 1981) before the dust-up over bragging rights for the conquering of the Channel erupted between Airbus and two other cross-channel efforts.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/news/first-electric-powered-channel-flight-was-34-years-ago