The First Air Races - Circuit de l'Est 1910

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Circuit de l'Est
France, August 7th - 17th, 1910

The Circuit de l'Est course

The initial proposal for the "Circuit de l'Est", published on August 29th, 1909, was a five-stage course with stops at Paris, Dijon, Belfort, Nancy, Lille and Paris. The straight-line distance between those towns was around 1,060 kilometres.

The course went through several iterations during the preparations. Dijon appears to have been dropped early, and the committee also, after listening to the aviators, decided to abandon the stop in Belfort, which would have required a dangerous flight over the mountainous Vosges region to reach Nancy. A stop at Reims was added.

The town of Douai, which already had a working airfield at La Brayelle, was disappointed that neighbouring Lille, where a new airfield would have to be prepared, had been proposed. Different solutions were put forward, including a special stage Douai-Lille-Douai, but in the end, Douai was chosen as staging town.

Reims was replaced by Mézières-Charleville, which is situated further to the north and therefore made the course somewhat shorter.

The final course was presented on June 16th: Paris - Troyes - Nancy - Mézières-Charleville - Douai - Amiens - Paris, six stages, officially totalling 785 kilometres.

The final list of airfields was published on July 26th. In the following days, long lists of the villages and towns that would be passed by the flyers were published. The course was marked with flags on church towers and other prominent buildings. On the right side of the course, it would be marked with red flags with white bands, on the left side with white flags with red bands. All in all, more than 400 such flag posts were listed.

A map of the course, including some of the stops of different pilots during the first two stages. (1)

Stage 1: Paris - Troyes, 135 kilometres