Charles Bremner - Times Online - WBLG

Super Sarkozy greets hostages after pirate triumph

France is pleased with the stylish way that its navy and special forces handled the seizure of the Ponant, the big French superyacht that was boarded by pirates off Somalia 10 days ago. Six of the 20 or so pirates were captured by helicopter-borne French commandos as they made an overland getaway with part of the ransom.

The operation, directed by President Sarkozy, was well run and it shows how France can put well-equipped forces into action on the high seas at long distance. The 30 crew, most of them young French citizens, were released on Friday and are flying back to Paris tonight on a military Airbus. Sarkozy is going to the airport to greet them. There were no passengers. The captured Somali bandits -- said to be former fishermen -- are being brought back to Paris to stand trial.

The armed forces have been putting out their story and le Figaro today has details of their intrepid exploit. The pirates, for example, brought two goats on board for milk but they spent a lot of their time draining the ship's copious bars. One pirate disappeared overboard in the night, apparently drunk.

I don't want to dampen the good news, but no-one is asking how much the whole thing cost or wondering about the ransom, said to be 2.5 million dollars, that was paid for the crew's freedom.

[le Ponant (an old word for west)]

French pilots show women can fly

Meet Virginie Guyot. She flies Mirage fighter jets for the French air force and has done two tours based at Kandahar in the Afghan war zone. Captain Guyot, who is 33 and a mother, has just made the news by becoming the first woman assigned to la Patrouille de France, the air force display team.

The eight-jet Patrouille is one of the best. It is equal or superior to the US Air Force Thunderbirds and Britain's RAF Red Arrows. Its tight formation aerobatics is breath-taking (watch one of their videos). Every July 14, the team opens the Bastille Day parade with a low-level run down the Champs Elysees trailing their trademark tricolor smoke.

Guyot, whose father was in the military, got the bug with her first flight in a light aircraft at the age of 12. She is due to become commander of the Patrouille from next year. She never saw flying as a men-only job, she says. "Flying a plane nowadays requires finesse more than physical force."

That has been the case for decades. Only in movies do pilots wrestle with the controls. Most planes are flown with the tips of the fingers. The need for delicacy is part of the reason why women make such good pilots -- including aerobatic ones. Look at Patty Wagstaff who in the 1990s was US aerobatics champion three times. When she was asked how a woman could beat men at such a demanding sport, she used to reply: "Do you think the airplane knows the difference?".

Another advantage is female judgment.

"I shot down Saint Exupéry" says German ex-pilot

I 

Some news scoops are too good to be true. I hope that this one is not false because it will solve one of the great mysteries of aviation -- and wartime history. A former German fighter pilot has claimed to French researchers that he shot down Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of Le Petit Prince and legendary French pilot-author.

Horst Rippert, 88, who lives in Wiesbaden, said that he had suffered remorse all his life after discovering that Saint Exupéry was the pilot of a P-38 Lightning of the Free French Air Force that he blew from the Mediterranean sky on July 31 1944. "If I had known that it was him, I would never have fired," Rippert told the authors who traced him and have produced a book.

[Saint-Ex at the controls of his Lightning, 1944]

Sarkozy's dubious glory in American Airbus deal

Nicolas Sarkozy has been taking credit for the extraordinary decision by the US Defense Department to buy a fleet of Air Force refuelling tankers worth at least 35 billion dollars from EADS, parent of the the European Airbus company, rather than from Boeing.

The French president said that the deal, which has sparked a political storm in the USA, would have been unimaginable if he had not repaired the damage to relations with Washington that had been inflicted by President Chirac's opposition to the Iraq invasion.

"Could one think for a minute that the contract which EADS has magnificently won... would have been signed in the climate of tension that existed between the Americans and French?" Sarko asked in le Figaro.

Sarkozy is right that his warmth towards the US has eased the chill that prevailed under Chirac. This undoubtedly helped the deal with the European Aeronautic, Defense and Space company. But he could be a little more modest. EADS' American contract was the fruit of years of effort, most of it before he won office last May. On top of that, the US order conflicts with his own doctrine of "economic patriotism".   

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Is Colonel Gaddafi a Frenchman?

If Colonel Gaddafi was so eager to linger in Paris when he came last December, it was perhaps because the Libyan leader is half French. His father was an air force pilot from Corsica. That's him in the picture on the left. 

This extraordinary claim has surfaced over the past few days after a report by Bakchich, a French investigative news site. They looked into a legend which has long circulated in Vezzani, a village of 600 people in eastern Corsica. According to this, a Vezzani gendarme's son called Albert Preziosi was stationed in the Libyan desert with the Free French air force in 1941-42. He is said to have had an affair with a local woman at about the time that young Muammar would have been conceived.

Preziosi was killed when his aeroplane was shot down over Russia in 1943. As a member of the famous Normandy-Niemen squadron, he has been celebrated as a hero in his home village ever since. An air force base near the town of Solenzara, is named after him. Not a shred of evidence exists to stand up the Gaddafi legend but the physical resemblance is so strong that it has persisted.

Electric flight over France

As we know, the French did more than any other nation to pioneer aviation a century ago. Now they have scored another flying first. Little noticed by the outside world, on December 23, a pilot took off from an Alpine airfield and flew for 48 minutes in the first light aircraft to be powered by electricity.   

With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d'Argencon, have just achieved.

Their "Electra", a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. "This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It's a machine built for anyone with a pilot's license."

Gas guzzling at the Paris air show

Jet fighters make a din, cost hundreds of millions, they pollute like crazy and they are made to kill people. But there are few things more heart-stopping than seeing one showing off low in the summer sky over Paris.

All right, you have to love aeroplanes. For those who do so and those who make their living from them (not necessarily the same thing), the Le Bourget air show is a feast. Even if you don't fancy seeing a 20-tonne Dassault Rafale fighter pulling turns with the agility of a dancer, Le Bourget's biennial Mecca of the aviation business is great spectacle. I have just dropped in there with my 16-year-old son, soaking up sights that ranged from glider aerobatics to  the new A380 Airbus performing steep turns over the field. The amazing thing is that the giant airliner, which can carry 850 people, makes little noise.

The same could not be said for the John Travolta's Boeing 707. The actor, who is Hollywood's biggest pilot, flew his old private airliner into le Bourget on Wednesday. He was full of praise for the Airbus and French aviation when he chatted with us reporters.

La France Tranquille

Here is the antidote to an excess of French politics and forgive a brief digression into the sky.

Seen from a thousand feet on a sunny Saturday morning, France is a picture of tranquility. For months, the French have been absorbed by a presidential campaign that enters its final week today. With its promise of change and a new generation in power, the race has gripped the country. You can hear the argument everywhere, not just in the media, but at bus-stops, work places and cafes -- and even in the sky.

When you cruise in a small plane over the towns and countryside, the densely populated Ile de France is a vision of peace, order and prosperity. It is the ideal of candidates' speeches and the idyll envied by visitors. Twinkling in the spring sun, even the banlieue housing estates -- home to the 2005 riots -- look less grim, enfolded into the rolling landscape with rivers and village churches. You can see this from pictures that I snapped yesterday, flying around Paris and Normandy from Moisselles, the grass airfield tucked into the northern suburbs, where my elderly aeroplane is based.

Central Paris is only 12 miles away, but you take off over maize fields then forest and after three minutes you are over the Oise river and L'Isle Adam, a much-painted town that was home to Honoré de Balzac.

The Oise flows into the Seine, with barges hauling the fuel and materials to keep Paris running. The sun glints on hypermarket parking lots crammed with Saturday shoppers and then the horizon fills with green and yellow fields. It is only from the air that you can see how many châteaux are scattered around the Paris area, most of them well hidden from the roads. If you fly up the Seine [left] but steer around Rouen, a carpet of unbroken countryside rolls below the wings until you are over the coast half an hour later.

[Monday election update from newspaper here]

Strange baguettes and the French X-files

The scene sounds like a French comedy. On a sunny winter afternoon,  Monsieur Blaise, a 35-year-old dairy inspector, drives home through the Languedoc countryside after visiting his aunt. A strange object appears overhead. Mysteriously, the engine of his Citroen stalls. Struck with terror, Blaise runs for his life. He later describes the mysterious craft to the gendarmes."It was a kind of cigar that I compared to a baguette of bread."  His Citroen refuses to start for another day.

M. Blaise's encounter of the after-lunch kind, which took place in January 1981, was meticulously recorded and analysed by a unit of the CNES, the French national space agency. It has now been put on line along with 400 sightings of suspected UFOs -- OVNIs in French -- from the official Gallic X-files.

Eventually some 100,000 documents, covering 1,650 cases going back to the early 1950s, will be available in the first such exercise in public transparency. Like the United States in the post-war years, the French state has taken its UFOs seriously and devoted resources to interviewing witnesses and analysing sightings scientifically. The fascinating thing is that a full 28 percent of the cases remain an absolute mystery. These are decribed as "inexplicable despite precise witness accounts and the good quality of material information gathered." 

Naturally UFO fans from around the world are now jamming the site of the GEIPAN, the agency's "flying saucer division", as sceptics call it. 

Paris in black and white

Picture Paris and chances are that the images that flash into mind include those nostalgic shots of ordinary people by Robert Doisneau, Brassai, Willy Ronis and the other street photographers of the post war era. More than ever, they are everywhere. As well as filling the world's poster shops, the monochrome icons of 1940s and 1950s France are stacked high as post cards in Paris kiosks. The Amélie film of 2001 was one long homage to their style.

You couldn't take those photos any more because France's ridiculously strict law requires the subject's prior approval. A signed  waiver is needed for publication. This applies even to people who might appear in the background, as Magali, our Paris photographer, was lamenting the other day as we walked down the street spotting Doisneau-type scenes. And, of course, do not even think about photographing children -- as Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the others did all the time.

Now anyone with a mobile phone can play the photo-reporter. You don't have to haul around a Leica, or a boxy Rolleiflex like the oldies. But a batch of exhibitions around Paris this winter show the vast difference between art and the quick snap. Doisneau is featuring in a fine (free) exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville until April 3. The City Hall is of course the scene of his over-commercialised Baiser de L'Hotel de Ville.

Captain flies without aircraft

You settle into a Swiss airliner and hear the welcome "this is your captain speaking". You picture a reassuring guy with four rings on his sleeve, greying temples and the steady hand of command. Now try imagining your captain leaping into the sky dressed only in a flying suit and a pair of wings and answering to the the name Jet Man.

Implausible as it may sound, this is the double life of Captain Yves Rossy, 47, a devoted  -- some would say mad -- aviator who has come closer than anyone so far to achieving the ancient dream of flying like a bird.  If you think the festive week has got the better of me, watch Jet Man's video . It's not quite Superman or Icarus. He straps a pair of wings to his back and swoops around the sky with the help of four tiny jet engines. Few might want to try, but no-one else has done it.   

Pioneers and patriotism

  Everyone knows that aviation was invented in France. That may sound like a provocation to admirers of Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, yet the French believe it and in many ways they are right. Today, on the Bagatelle field in the western Paris parkland,  we are to watch a flying machine take off in a re-enactment of the flight that is officially recorded as the world's first by an aeroplane. 

The contraption is a faithful replica of the "14bis", a boxy, bamboo-framed plane with a 50hp motor which Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Franco-Brazilian showman, coaxed into the air on the same spot in November 1906. For France and Brazil that 21-second hop over 220 metres marked the start of powered flight and the centenary is being celebrated with fanfare as such in both countries. This is a good example of how the facts can be clouded by patriotism and prejudice (yes, France-versus-USA again, I'm sorry). Yet, France has good grounds for claiming to be the main home of aviation.

Landing in Breton trouble

If you want to get somewhere quickly, don't take a small plane. The old rule was confirmed again this morning when I found myself facing a platoon of heavily armed and rather nervous soldiers of the French special forces on the rainswept tarmac of an airport in Brittany. Oops, was my first thought. I must just have done something bad, like violating prohibited air space, and they have come to get me.   

It was mid-morning and a time when I should have been at my desk in Paris.  The little episode was of no importance and has nothing to do with our usual matters of moment, so read on only for the sake of anecdote. It's a chance to mention a beautiful corner of the world and another example of French hospitality towards aviators.

Flying points

While France glides into another long holiday weekend (VE Day), here is a reply to queries and points about my last flying posting that were raised by Peter Carrington, Selwyn, Michael Robertson, Edward Johns and Sarah. Stop here unless you are of an aviating nature.

French in the air

Flying along the Normandy coast at the weekend, I witnessed a little episode of Anglo-French misunderstanding that could have had dire consequences.

The air around the delightful airfield at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, a port south of Dieppe, was busy with aviators enjoying a spring Saturday. The radio frequency was filled with the position-reporting that goes on at fields without traffic control. You try to ensure safety and some order by telling other pilots where you are and what you will do next. In France this is done in French.

As I was joining the circuit to land, a woman's voice announced in English that her plane was landing on runway 25. Everyone else, however, was using runway 07, which is the same one in the opposite direction. The British crew did not understand the chatter and bowled into the circuit in the wrong direction while the French pilots scrambled to get out of their way.

Enjoying French skies

For shrugging off the daily grind, there is nothing like taking to the sky with your own wings. Apart from the United States with its big tradition of citizen flying, there is nowhere like France for enjoying the pleasures of the air.

I was reminded of this yet again on Sunday morning, when, after a month pinned down by bad weather, I coaxed my old aeroplane off a muddy grass runway under a cold blue sky.  Overhead, a big Airbus  was hauling its passengers out from Charles de Gaulle airport just six miles away. Behind lay the outline of Le Bourget, the original Paris aerodrome, where Charles Lindbergh touched down in 1927 after his epic flight from New York.  Back in the southern distance, you could make out the Eiffel tower. 

Seven hundred feet below, the fields and woods were still in their winter brown as I took the corridor north to the Oise and the riverside villages that were painted by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Pissaro.    The great thing from the air is that you don't pick up the modernity. Even highways fail to blot the lie of the old landscape. The engine noise becomes a drone and the world looks peaceful below.