The annual French Open tennis tournament is held at the Roland Garros Stadium in Paris, a venue named after a French fighter pilot and keen tennis fan who was shot down and killed on this day 91 years ago just one month before the end of the first world war and one day before his 30th birthday. Roland Garros started flying in 1909, less than 6 years after the Wright Brothers had conducted the world’s first successful aeroplane flight.
Garros became a well-known aviator prior to World War I, in 1913 conducting the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean Sea from France to Tunisia. When the war began he joined the French army. Aeroplanes were ineffective as fighting machines because the propeller at the front of the aircraft prevented the use of guns firing in the direction of travel. Garros helped to develop an interrupter mechanism which enabled a gun to shoot through a propeller, and in April 1915 he became the first person to shoot down an enemy plane using interrupter gear.
Later the same month, Garros’s plane was forced to land behind German lines and Garros was taken prisoner, while the Germans were able to examine his aircraft and create their own interrupter gear. In February 1918 Garros rejoined the French army after managing to escape from a German prisoner of war camp, and just over seven months later he was killed in action.