Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Tokamaks | Different approaches around the world

    Look east, look west ... tokamak projects are underway in different parts of the world. All of them are benefiting from and complementing the pioneering work al [...]

    Read more

  • Construction site | A guide to work underway

    Just like the ITER worksite, drone photography is also making progress. This view of the ITER platform is the sharpest and most detailed of all those we have pu [...]

    Read more

  • Vacuum vessel repair | A portfolio

    Whether standing vertically in the Assembly Hall or lying horizontally in the former Cryostat Workshop now assigned to component repair operations, the non-conf [...]

    Read more

  • European Physical Society | ITER presents its new plans

    The new ITER baseline and its associated research plan were presented last week at the 50th annual conference of the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Di [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | The platform's quasi-final appearance

    Since preparation work began in 2007 on the stretch of land that was to host the 42-hectare ITER platform, regular photographic surveys have been organized to d [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

Region celebrates first seaplane flight

The first seaplane in history took off from the waters of Étang de Berre one hundred years ago, on 28 March 1910. (Click to view larger version...)
The first seaplane in history took off from the waters of Étang de Berre one hundred years ago, on 28 March 1910.
Seaplanes are the dinosaurs of commercial aviation history. They once ruled the skies but became almost extinct during the course of evolution.

The first seaplane in history took off from the waters of Étang de Berre one hundred years ago, on 28 March 1910. It was a frail-looking machine equipped with a small 50 HP engine. Its designer and pilot, an engineer from Marseille named Henri Fabre, rode it astride, as if riding a winged horse.

Pegasus, however, was not the name Henri Fabre chose for his "hydro-aeroplane." The 27-year old engineer preferred to name his invention Le Canard (The Duck).

On that first flight, Le Canard flew a distance of about 500 metres, twice as far as the Wright brothers' aeroplane seven years earlier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On the same day, Fabre, who had never flown before, not even as a passenger, performed five other flights and made an elegant landing—or "alighting" which is more proper for seaplanes—in the Martigues marina.

Unaware that it was paying homage to Henri Fabre, Pan American Airlines opened the world's first transatlantic passenger service in 1939, between New York and Marseille. (Click to view larger version...)
Unaware that it was paying homage to Henri Fabre, Pan American Airlines opened the world's first transatlantic passenger service in 1939, between New York and Marseille.
Henri Fabre, whose feat will be celebrated throughout the region this week-end, opened the way for long-distance commercial flight. A good decade before regular aircrafts, seaplanes were to venture across the transatlantic route.

Unaware that it was paying homage to Henri Fabre, Pan American Airlines opened the world's first transatlantic passenger service in 1939, between New York and Marseille. And just as Le Canard had done 29 years earlier, the fabled Yankee Clipper, Boeing's 74-passenger luxury "flying boat", would land on and take off from the waters of Étang de Berre.

return to the latest published articles