Electric power Cri Cri beats Airbus to the punch across the English Channel

[praveen4143]

Looks like Airbus wanted to have the privilege of being the first electric powered airplane to cross the English Channel but they weren't playing fair. They got Siemens to pull strings to make Pipistrel cancel their plans to do that before Airbus could. In all this havoc, Hugues Duval went ahead and crossed the channel yesterday in his electric power Cri Cri. All I can do is laugh at this sequence of events. Either way, clean power and aviation won in all this chaos!

http://www.flyer.co.uk/aviation-news/ne ... rtnum=2327

EDIT: Another new piece on the Cri Cri - translated from French (I think) by the almighty Google - https://translate.google.ca/translate?s ... edit-text=

Lots of videos here - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... ctric.html

[David MacRay]

I hope Pipstrel follows this up by going both directions with new motors.

I like the looks of the Airbus unit though.

[Slick Goodlin]

I find the way history repeated itself very satisfying here.  106 years ago, Latham (who?) pretty well had the first channel crossing in the bag.  He was well funded, well publicized and everyone knew he would either be first to cross the channel by air or the first to have to swim home after ditching.  When the big day came, Latham woke up to the news that some Bleriot guy had already taken off.  Oops.