What Cody did in 1910 was fly 185 miles and 787 yards, and ten months later 261 miles and 810 yards. The yards were calculated as precisely as a javelin throw, and it is this that underlines the drama of those achievements and the nerve it took to accomplish them.

Listen for a moment to Tommy Sopwith, another early flier, talking in old age about what it had been like amongst the tapioca and the wire:

One minute you were going flat out across a field and there was all this vibration around you which got worse and worse until, suddenly, there was no vibration at all. At that point you knew you were flying, and you had just one worry then. How were you going to get the thing down?

But within a year of flying for 20 yards Geoffrey de Havilland was taking his wife up, and their new-born baby, the two of them sitting side by side in garden chairs. Garden chairs! It is such homely details that are so amazing.

When Cody’s effects went for sale at Sotheby’s in 1996 they included a piece of tree no bigger than a chopping block, which came with the catalogue entry, ‘Used as a picket for the aeroplanes belonging to Colonel Cody’. He had used it as he may once have used a hitching rail for his horses in a cowboy past that may, or may not, have been. But there are no doubts about the sequel.

In August 1913, with the ex-captain of Hampshire as passenger, Icarus fell out of the morning sun. But the bodies are buried, the wreckage and the horror tidied away, and Alexander Frater comes, drinking his Barossa Valley Shiraz, eating his fish pie, and watching others eat their steamed prawns, all details carefully recorded. I liked this book.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP