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Updated: May 6, 2025
Hucks was an interested spectator at Brooklands when Pegoud flew there in September, and he felt that, given similar conditions, there was no reason why he should not repeat Pegoud's performance. He therefore talked the matter over with M. Bleriot, and began practising for his great ordeal.
The trick flying of pre-war days soon became an everyday matter; Pegoud astonished the aviation world before the War by first looping the loop, but, before three years of hostilities had elapsed, looping was part of the training of practically every pilot, while the spinning nose dive, originally considered fatal, was mastered, and the tail slide, which consisted of a machine rising nose upward in the air and falling back on its tail, became one of the easiest 'stunts' in the pilot's repertoire.
During the preliminary operations his patron, M. Bleriot, stood beside the machine, and chatted affably with the aviator. At last the signal was given for his ascent, and in a few moments Pegoud was climbing with the nose of his machine tilted high in the air.
Railway lines, forests, rivers and canals, large towns, prominent structures, such as gasholders, chimney-stalks, and so on, all assist an airman to find his way. Visitors to Brooklands aerodrome on 25th September, 1913, saw one of the greatest sensations in this or any other century, for on that date a daring French aviator, M. Pegoud, performed the hazardous feat of flying upside down.
Meanwhile the Allies were gradually completing their preparations for the great coup from which so much was expected. On August 31, 1915, the science of aviation lost one of its most daring and brilliant exponents by the death of Alphonse Pégoud. No man before him ever took such liberties with the law of gravitation or performed such dare-devil pranks at dizzy altitudes up in the sky.
But Pégoud still carried his good luck and, managing to steady the craft, sailed away amid a hail of German bullets." Of all the fighting on the western front during the month of August, 1915, the main interest attaches to that carried on in the struggle for the important mountain peaks in the Vosges which dominated German positions in the Alsatian valleys and plain.
The bold Pégoud had several times fought with too enterprising Fokkers or Aviatiks; Captain Brocard had forced down one of them in flames over Soissons; and the latest recruit of the escadrille, this youngster of a Guynemer, was burning to have his own Boche.
Indeed, as Pegoud himself says: "I have used a standard type of monoplane on purpose. Almost every aeroplane, if it is properly balanced, has just as good a chance as mine, and I lay particular stress on the fact that there is nothing extraordinary about my machine, so that no one can say my achievements are in any way faked."
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