A Hundred Years Of Flying: Salvador Hedilla

Where would Mallorca be without aircraft and without airlines? Well, it would still be where it has long been. Stuck in the middle of the Mediterranean, 250 or so kilometres off the Spanish mainland, but cast adrift without a paddle, save for those of ferry services coming to the rescue. But without aircraft and without airlines, Mallorca would be nowhere. Hence, when Iceland erupts, when air-traffic controllers (French or Spanish) go on strike and when Ryanair announces it won't be flying from Airport A in the UK to Palma in winter, there is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Once upon a time, Mallorca was ruled by the waves and wedded to the sea. No longer. Many years ago, the deep blue of the skies assumed the crown of passenger transport and made palaces of airports on terra firma.

It wasn't of course always like this. Before the jet plane was being used to any great degree, it couldn't have been like this, and the last one hundred years can - almost - be divided into two halves of airport transport: pre-jet and post-jet. And of the pre-jet, there are the very earliest of years when there were no passengers as such, only the occasional joy rider.

In October last year, I wrote about the first plane that was ever seen in Mallorca. Having been brought in kit form and assembled, it flew on 28 June, 1910 at the Balearic Hippodrome in Pont d'Inca. Julien Mamet made two flights in his Blériot XI monoplane. There were meant to have been three, but the plane crashed during the second flight. Mamet was relatively unscathed,, but he packed up his plane (what was left of it) and never came back.

There were to be other magnificent men in less than magnificent flying machines who came to Mallorca and offered short trips in their planes, but before they came, there was an event on 2 July, 1916 that was every bit as historic as Mamet's unfortunate appearance six years earlier, one that I mentioned only in passing in the previous article. On that day, they gathered near the beach of Can Pere Antoni by Portixol and waited. Eventually he arrived. He, in a monoplane that he had himself designed. He was Salvador Hedilla. He was making the first ever air crossing from Barcelona. But when he did arrive, he didn't land where he was supposed to. They had gathered to watch him touch down, but he overshot. Instead, he ended up in a field in Son Sunyer, i.e. a fair way down the coast near to what is now Arenal. Nevertheless, the 20,000 or so who had turned up to greet him cheered him with enthusiasm, albeit he wouldn't have been able to hear them from that distance. So impressive was the feat, though, that he was awarded the Mediterranean Cup, a gold trophy from King Alfonso XIII.

Hedilla was originally from Cantabria. When he was seventeen, he emigrated to Argentina and worked for a railway company. It was here that he began to develop an interest in mechanics. He was to establish the first ever bicycle repair shop in Buenos Aires and then discovered motor bikes. In 1903, he established a land speed record of an average of 120 kilometres per hour during an eighty kilometre test.

It was a sense of daring and adventure which led him to want to fly. So, in 1913, he sold up in Argentina and headed back to Europe, enrolling in a school of aviation in Molineaux in France. 

Like Mamet he gave exhibitions. And also like Mamet they could sometimes end in failure. In October of 1913 he planned to show his skills in Santander, only for the first flight in his Morane-Borel monoplane to crash. Though he was able to make several successful exhibition flights, the plane was distinctly unreliable. A new one, a Morane-Saulnier, wasn't an awful lot better. On its maiden flight in March 1914 it crashed and was totally destroyed. Hedilla, remarkably, was unharmed. Undeterred, in 1915 he went to Cuba and took part in various air shows there. He was then employed as a pilot and designer and as the director of the Catalan School of Aviation in Barcelona. It was in the workshop of Pujol and Cornabella where he supervised the building of the plane that would take him to Mallorca.

Though the one-hundredth anniversary isn't, strictly speaking, until next year, they're celebrating the start of the one-hundredth year nevertheless. Hedilla is going to have a park named after him, and his monument, currently at the airport, is due to be moved nearer to where he landed.

What a difference a hundred years make. Hedilla could have witnessed this difference, but that wasn't to be. A year later his plane crashed near Barcelona and he was killed. He was 35.