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A pioneer in aviation was Percy Sinclair Pilcher. Unfortunately, when he was wishing to demonstrate his flying machine in September 1899, he is said to have engine trouble, and so, not wishing to disappoint his audience, went up in his glider instead.
This he'd flown successfully many times before, even achieving a record for the longest distance covered. This time there was a technical problem, and he crashed, dying two days later. There's a memorial to him at Stamford Hall, in Leicestershire, where he crashed, and a replica of his Hawk is at the Hall also.
It's one of the great "if onlies" of history - Cranfield University, over a hundred years later, tried his design, and after a bit of tinkering, it worked. If poor Pilcher hadn't been killed, maybe he'd have been the one to achieve the first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight.
As for a hundred years since the Channel crossing, what always amazes me is that such was the development we could have just a few years later - something Dover knows all about, of course, having had the first bombs dropped in Britain falling there in December 1914 (in the harbour, and then, famously, on Christmas Eve)
