The Farman F.60 Goliath had been designed during the First World War as a heavy night bomber. By the time it was ready, the war was over. Henri Farman converted it for passengers - twelve to fourteen seats in two cabins, two open cockpits for the crew, two 260-horsepower Salmson engines - and from 1919 it became the workhorse of the new airline industry. Goliaths flew the first daily passenger service from Paris to London. They opened routes to Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest. By 1921 the type was the most common scheduled airliner in the world, with examples in service from Czech Aerotransport to Belgium's Syndicat National d'Étude des Transports Aériens. SNETA had been founded in 1919 by the Belgian aviation industry to develop civil air services; one of its routes was the mail run between Croydon Airport, just south of London, and Brussels-Evere. The aircraft that fell into the Channel that August afternoon - registration O-BLAN, manufacturer's serial number 7248/17 - was an O-BLAN Goliath flying that route.

The Goliath had lifted off from Croydon at 12:25 that afternoon. Croydon was then London's airport - a grass field surrounded by the brick suburbs of South London, terminal building, signal mast, the modest control architecture of an industry only two years old. The route to Brussels passed almost due east across Kent, out over the Channel between Dover and Calais, then on to Belgium. Delsenne was at the controls. Rijckers, the mechanic, was responsible for what an engineer could do in flight - which on a Goliath, with its engines exposed in nacelles between the wings, meant occasionally climbing out onto the lower wing in flight to deal with whatever needed dealing with. The flight had to clear the Strait of Dover. At about 1:32 something failed catastrophically. The witnesses on the French shore - the gendarme who reported the explosion - described the airframe coming apart before it fell.

The system that responded to the crash was the system that the new aviation industry had not yet built. The gendarme reported by telegraph. Calais picked up the message and passed it to Boulogne and Gravelines. The local fishing fleet, harbour yachts, and even submarines were ordered out to look for wreckage. A British witness, Herbert Sullivan, watched the crash from his yacht Zola at sea and sent a radiogram. The South Eastern and Chatham Railway packet steamer - a cross-Channel mailboat - received Sullivan's message and relayed it on to the General Post Office in London. Sullivan recovered a bag of mail from the wreckage and sent it on to Brussels. Within hours, three countries' communications had been mobilized by a single crash. The wreckage was located three nautical miles off the French coast, then later reported by another steamship as drifting off the Belgian shore. Of the two men aboard, no trace was found. They are listed as missing in the official records, the formal way to say that the Channel kept what it took.

What the SNETA crash marked was the first loss of a Goliath in civilian service. The aircraft type had a remarkable run - more than sixty built, flown by airlines across Europe and beyond, in service well into the 1930s. By the end of the 1920s the Goliath had been replaced on prestige routes by faster trimotors and metal monoplanes, but it had done the historically essential work of proving that scheduled air travel could be a business. Other Goliath losses would follow - the type, like every aircraft of its generation, had a substantial accident record by modern standards. None of those statistics existed in 1921. What existed was a mail bag being forwarded to Brussels, two men's names entering the lists kept by the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives, and an industry beginning to learn what would later become routine: that the open water between Britain and the Continent did not give back what it took, and that air travel across it would have to be redesigned around the assumption that things would, sometimes, fall.