Try travelling between the centres of the British and French capitals in just over an hour nowadays, and you’d find the feat unattainable. But this was what a British European Airways team managed in the 1959 London-to-Paris air race, and a new Comet 4B was key to their efforts
When Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail offered a prize of £1,000 — worth somewhere around £150,000 now —to the first person to pilot an aircraft across the English Channel, Louis Blériot’s winning flight on 25 July 1909 took about as long as today’s Eurotunnel crossing, at 36 minutes 30 seconds. To celebrate the event’s 50th anniversary in 1959, the Daily Mail famously again stepped up, offering £10,000, or almost £290,000 in today’s money, for a race in either direction between London’s Marble Arch and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Besides being a celebration of Blériot, the newspaper “had in mind the functional purpose of showing that inter-capital travel can, and must, be speeded up”. It concluded, “The race has clearly shown the way —streamlined ground organisation and swifter transport between city centre and airport.”
The 10-day competition to establish the fastest time between the two historic arches began on Monday 13…
