The 1911 Bleriot XI – Flight over Toronto

This model was built in 2011 specifically for a museum in Toronto, Canada, to commemorate the first flight of the Bleriot XI just over one-hundred years before, in 1910, when Frenchman Compte Jacques de Lesseps, flew his plane over the city.

The model started as a standard kit from Amati, in Italy, but several modifications were made to make the airplane more realistic and to match the airplane’s configuration during that flight. The kit fabric was replaced with much finer, and denser cloth. Typically, scale model kits come with cloth coverings, whether for sails, or for airplane wing coverings, that are not to scale. Our fabric is more realistic at 1:10 scale. Next, the kit proposed a polyester string to replicate the wire structure. We created a miniature Nicopress and created all the wire structure with actual piano wire, a very hard material that works very well for scale models.

The model spent a couple of years at the museum, and was then used to travel around with the curator while he was campaigning for new funds for a new museum.