orm of the
Bournemouth week, July 10th to 16th, 1910. This gathering is noteworthy
mainly in view of the amazing advance which it registered on the Rheims
performances. Thus, in the matter of altitude, Morane reached 4,107
feet and Drexel came second with 2,490 feet. Audemars on a Demoiselle
monoplane made a flight of 17 miles 1,480 yards in 27 minutes 17.2
seconds, a great flight for the little Demoiselle. Morane achieved a
speed of 56.64 miles per hour, and Grahame White climbed to 1,000 feet
altitude in 6 minutes 36.8 seconds. Machines carrying the Gnome engine
as power unit took the great bulk of the prizes, and British-built
engines were far behind.

The Bournemouth Meeting will always be remembered with regret for the
tragedy of C. S. Rolls's death, which took place on the Tuesday, the
second day of the meeting. The first competition of the day was that
for the landing prize; Grahame White, Audemars, and Captain Dickson had
landed with varying luck, and Rolls, following on a Wright machine with
a tail-plane which ought never to have been fitted and was not part of
the Wright design, came down wind after a left-hand turn and turned left
again over the top of the stands in order to land up wind. He began to
dive when just clear of the stands, and had dropped to a height of 40
feet when he came over the heads of the people against the barriers.
Finding his descent too steep, he pulled back his elevator lever to
bring the nose of the machine up, tipping down the front end of the tail
to present an almost flat surface to the wind. Had all gone well, the
nose of the machine would have been forced up, but the strain on the
tail and its four light supports was too great; the tail collapsed, the
wind pressed down the biplane elevator, and the machine dived vertically
for the remaining 20 feet of the descent, hitting the ground vertically
and crumpling up. Major Kennedy, first to reach the debris, found Rolls
lying with his head doubled under him on the overturned upper main
plane; the lower plane had been flung some few feet away with the engine
and tanks under it. Rolls was instantaneously killed by concussion of
the brain.

Antithesis to the tragedy was Audemars on his Demoiselle, which was
named 'The Infuriated Grasshopper.' Concerning this, it was recorded
at the time that 'Nothing so excruciatingly funny as the action of
this machine has ever been seen at any aviation ground. The little
two-cylinder engine pops away