1883-1913 (French Pilot's Licence No. 9)
Arthur Charles Hubert Latham was born in Paris on January
10th, 1883. His family was wealthy, his father was a trader of indigo
and other commodities and his mother came from a banking family. His
father, who had English family background, died when Hubert was two
years old and he was raised in a cosmopolitan environment. He spoke
fluent English and German and studied in Oxford before his military
service. He was a sportsman and tried several sports, including
hunting, ballooning and speedboat racing. He also made an expedition
exploring Ethiopia and travelled to the far East.
In 1908 he became interested in flying and approached Léon
Levavasseur's Antoinette company, where he learned to fly and
became the company's chief pilot. He famously competed with Louis
Blériot over who would be first to fly over the English Channel, but
lost after ditching because of engine problems.
He was the undisputed master of handling the difficult Antoinette
monoplanes. He beat the world altitude record a couple of times and
scored several spectacular successes, for example at the 1909 Reims,
Blackpool and Berlin meetings. His looks, manners and lifestyle made
him an international celebrity. His flying prompted long-time aviation
journalist Harry Harper to almost fifty years later write that "I
do not think there was ever a finer pilot".
However, there were also lacklustre meetings where neither the
Antoinettes nor Latham performed well, such as the 1909 Frankfurt and
Port-Aviation meetings and the 1910 Heliopolis meeting. In 1910 and
1911 he participated in several more meetings and made a tour of the
USA, where he famously shot two ducks from his airplane with a shotgun,
but the Antoinettes were getting outdated and he never achieved the
same level of success again.
When the Antoinette company folded in the end of 1911 Latham, probably
frustrated with aviation and Levavasseur, turned to exploring and
big-game hunting and travelled to French Congo in Africa. On June 25th,
1912 he was killed under obscure circumstances in what is now southern
Chad. The official reports described it as a hunting accident and that
Latham had been mauled by a wounded buffalo, but there are also
indications that his injuries were not consistent with that and that he
might have been murdered by his porters.
When the first French "Brevets de Pilote" where granted in
1910, Latham received No. 9, based on the alphabetic order between the
first fourteen holders.
Hubert Latham participated in the following air race
meetings:
- Reims 1909
- Berlin 1909
- Frankfurt 1909
- Port-Aviation October 1909
- Blackpool 1909
- Heliopolis 1910
- Nice 1910
- Lyon 1910
- Budapest 1910
- Rouen 1910
- Reims 1910
- Belmont Park 1910
- Baltimore 1910