All Intensive Purposes

There were many accidents during the Grand Aviation Week at Rheims, August 22-29, 1909, but none of them fatal:

The aviator Henri Rougier . . . started his plane in the wrong direction and had to land perilously close to the spectators; a certain Mme Villars, suddenly seeing the plane braking in front of her, fainted in the best Victorian manner, and a less fortunate young woman who had just enjoyed her sandwich in the meadows was hurt on her ankle by Rougier's undercarriage, though the physician said it was not anything dangerous. . . . On the third day, Henri Fournier's plane crashed and, a little later, so did Louis Breguet's. On the sixth day, [Louis] Paulhan, hoping to start for the distance competition, found his machine caught in a sudden gust of wind and pushed down against the runway; one wing broke, the propeller was destroyed, and Paulhan's last chances to compete for the award were gone (he was observed to weep). On the final day, [Louis] Blériot was lucky to escape alive from a burning plane. He had started early to ready his machine for the last race when the spectators noticed that his motor was aflame in midair. Blériot tried to land briskly, but the plane crashed. He himself emerged on fire and rolled on the soil to extinguish the flames; behind him the plane burned in a cloud of black smoke. Blériot was in shock, having suffered a wound on his forehead and a shoulder injury, and his hands were burned . . . .

Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 40-41 (FSG, 2002).