The first pilot in the Siamese sky was a Walloon with Limburg roots

Photo: Wikipedia

I have a soft spot for the earliest aviation pioneers'those magnificent men in their flying machines'. The daredevils in their flimsy boxes, which were really no more than canvas-covered wooden frames held together by some tension cables and a handful of bolts. One of them was Charles Van den Born. He was born on July 11, 1874 in Liège into a well-to-do petty-bourgeois family. His father, Eduard Van den Boorn, who came from Gronsveld near Maastricht, had dropped an o from the family name to give him a more French cachet….

Eduard Van den Born was a talented musician who Premier Prix de Piano obtained at the conservatory of Liège. He became the music critic, often feared for his very sharp pen La meuse, at the time a leading Walloon daily newspaper. His circle of friends included Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Son Charles, unlike his younger brother Emile, did not choose an artistic career but became a cyclist. A sport that is in full development and that at the end of the nineteenth century could count on raging popularity in Belgium.

Between 1895 and 1908, despite his advanced age, he profiled himself as one of the best European track runners and an extremely fast sprinter. Touring all over Europe, this two-time European champion came close to winning the world title three times. Halfway through the 1909 cycling season, he suddenly changed course after meeting former cyclist Henri Farman. Farman was with some success airplanes started producing and offered the speed-crazy Van den Born the chance to take flying lessons with him. On March 8, 1910, he obtained his French pilot's license with the No. 37. On March 31, he also received his Belgian license, which carried the No. 6 ...

After obtaining his pilot's licenses, he turned out to be so gifted that he could almost immediately start working for aircraft manufacturer Henri Farman as a test pilot and flight instructor. In Bouy's school near Chalons, Van den Born trained, among others, the first two French military pilots, Captain Cammerman and Lieutenant Féquant, and he trained the civil aviation pioneers Béaud, Zorra and Cheuret, the British Captain Dickson and the Dutchman Wynmaelen.

With a view to expanding their sales market, various British, American and French aircraft manufacturers focused on Southeast Asia during the same period. In a race against time, their pilots tried to fly over the main cities as quickly as possible and claim the airspace. Charles van den Born was charged with this mission in October 1910 and sent by ship to Saigon together with three Henri Farman IV aircraft, which could be dismantled into eight parts. This French colonial port would with the active support of la Ligue Nationale Aérienne Française and the wife of Antony Vladislas Klobukowski, the governor-general of Indochina, will become the base for his promotional campaign in the wider region.

On December 15, 1910, he left with a slightly sputtering engine from the Pho Tho hypodrome from Saigon to conduct the first-ever flight over Asian territory. An estimated 100.000 spectators attended this historic flight. Initially, he intended to fly a number of flights over Singapore, but the authorities there had forbidden him. They did this because they did not grant this honor to a device manufactured in France. So it is that the Belgian car racer and pilot Josef Christiaens (1882-1919) was the first in March 1911 in a British Bristol aircraft to make the airspace above Singapore unsafe.

In mid-January 1911, Van den Born, who in the meantime had received reinforcements from two mechanics who had traveled after him, arrived in Bangkok. On January 31, amidst massive interest and in the presence of King Rama VI, he ascended from the grounds of the Royal Bangkok Sports Club on in his Henri Farman IV biplane'Wanda'. To our eyes, one of the scarcely preserved Farmans looks as prehistoric as a dinosaur, but to the stunned crowd that showed up for the spectacle in the Siamese capital, this plane was the pinnacle of modernity and engineering ingenuity. Tens of thousands came to marvel at the first plane above Siam. And that Van den Born's performance took place amidst massive interest is confirmed in a diary entry that I found. Cora Lee Seward, the wife of US chargé d'affaires Hamilton King, wrote on that particular 31^e January 1911 in her diary: '…to the Aviation Meet at the Sports Club. There was a big crowd there. We enjoyed meeting old friends as much as seeing Mr. van der Born fly in his biplane. It rose beautifully & came down gracefully but on account of the wind was short of duration. It made several flights with one passenger at a time. We came away before the last flight to escape the crowd.'

Van den Born reportedly gave demonstrations over Bangkok for a week and his three aircraft were displayed at the Sa Pathum horse race track for three weeks. Van den Born is said to be directly behind the creation of the Thai Air Force. After all, King Rama VI was so impressed by Van den Borns' tricks that on 12 February 1912 he sent three officers to France to be trained as pilots. After obtaining their pilot's licenses, the trio returned to Bangkok in November 1913. They brought with them 4 Breguet aircraft and 4 Nieuports IVs that formed the basis for the Thai Air Force.

The replica of Van den Born's Farman in the Hong Kong airport passenger terminal. (DAN SCANDAL / Shutterstock.com)

The last part of his trip took Van den Born to the Far East. He came on board at the end of February 1911 SS Doria arrived in Hong Kong with its three dismantled biplanes. In Hong Kong, however, people reacted very reluctantly to Van den Born's request to be allowed to give a flying demonstration for fear of possible espionage. Only after much negotiation with the authorities, after the intervention of a few important businessmen, was he finally allowed to make a first flight over the city from a beach near Sha Tin in the late afternoon of March 18. A replica of Van den Born's Farman has been hanging in the passenger terminal of Hong Kong airport for several years as a tribute to this aviationpioneer. He ended his Asian 'Grand Tour' with again massively attended flying demonstrations in Canton and Macau.

During the First World War, Van den Born led one of the Belgian Air Force schools in France. After the war he returned to Indochina where he helped to develop the airport of Saigon and from the 1936s he ran a plantation. In December XNUMX he was naturalized as a Frenchman in gratitude for his services rendered to the French nation… During World War II, he was captured by the Japanese and tortured by the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai. However, he survived his captivity and returned to France sick and ruined during the Indochina War.

Charles Van den Born died in 1958 in the Maison de Retraite des Médaillés de l'ordre de la Légion d'Honneur in the castle St.-Val in the French St. Germain-en-Laye.