La Grande Semaine d'Aviation de Champagne
Reims, France, August 22th - 29th 1909

• The events
• The venue
• The planes
• The results
• References

The Reims/Bétheny airfield

The 1909 Reims meeting was held on Plaine de Bétheny, a large plain north of Reims. The installations for the event were enormous, and they were all temporary. They were centred on an existing horse-race course and military practice ground, but for the ten-kilometre race course the area needed to be doubled. Neighbouring farm fields, altogether 1510 lots of land, were rented for the price of a year's harvest. They were prepared as well as possible and grazing sheep were brought in. This work was complicated by the unusually wet weather. A temporary railway station was built, which on the last day of the meeting alone transported 120,000 people.

The grandstands had previously been used at the automobile Grands Prix at Dieppe, but they were enlarged. They contained 3,000 seats and had three floors for the press, a buffet restaurant for 600 persons, bars which served 35,000 bottles of champagne during the meeting, gardens, reception rooms, rest rooms, hair-dresser, shoe-shining shop, newspaper kiosks, tobacco shops, a flower shop, a shop where you could buy spectacles with "smoked glasses" to protect against the sun, post office and telegraph and telephone services. The telephone installations were the biggest ever for an event of the kind, with direct lines to Paris, London, Berlin and Brussels, and almost 20 km of underground lines. In the evenings parts of the tribunes were electrically lighted and one could dine until ten o'clock in the evenings, listening to an orchestra. A hangar was built for each competitor.