Man about to cross the Channel on a wing and a prayer

MOST of the passengers on this morning’s flight LX345 from Heathrow to Zurich will not think twice when they hear the captain trotting out the usual blurb over the loudspeaker.

They will be unaware that, a fortnight from now, that same pilot will be attempting one of the boldest flights of modern times. And Captain Yves Rossy of Swiss International Air Lines will not be in his Airbus A320 on that occasion. He will be flying an eight-foot strip of carbon fibre strapped to his back and powered by four small engines from a model aircraft.

If all goes well, he will be the first man in history to cross the Channel as a human jet. If it does not go according to plan, he could find himself floating in the busiest shipping lane in the world. Or worse.

But having jumped out of more planes with more strange contraptions attached to him than almost anyone alive (or dead), Yves is full of confidence. Not only will he have three parachutes on his back but, just the other day, he managed to fly the same distance as the Channel using his latest prototype and land safely. However, on that occasion, he was flying over his native Switzerland, where he did not have to worry about oil tankers and tides.

‘If I calculate everything right, I will land in Dover - but if I get it wrong, I take a bath,’ he says cheerfully when we meet at his suburban home outside Geneva. ‘So I must ask the Big Bird up above in Heaven to help me.’ Yves Rossy is a real-life Buzz Lightyear, the winged character in the Oscar-winning film Toy Story, who takes to the skies with a cry of: ‘To infinity and beyond!’

Classical scholars might prefer the analogy of Daedalus and Icarus, the mythical ancient Greek characters who fled captivity in Crete with man-made wings (Yves would, doubtless, prefer to be compared to Daedalus, who made it, rather than Icarus, his son, who flew too close to the sun, melted his wax bindings and crashed to his death). His latest creation is so extraordinary that he has even been classified as a UFO. It required several meetings with the Swiss government before Yves managed to prove that he was not an ‘unidentified flying object in Swiss airspace’.

‘Perhaps some people think I am mad,’ says the former fighter pilot. ‘But I do not play with death. I want to survive. I will not do anything stupid.’ Really? The plan is that on or around September 24, Yves will climb into a light aircraft somewhere near Calais with his wing firmly strapped on to his back and a live television crew from the National Geographic Channel filming his every move.

When the plane is at 8,000ft, he will fire up the four little jet engines attached to the underside of the wing and then jump out. In the plane, the wingtips are always folded or Yves would not fit through the door. Once in the open air, he will pull a cord and the two spring-loaded ends will snap open to give him a full wingspan of just over eight feet.

He will open up his engines, dive for a few seconds to pick up a speed of around 200mph and then level out at around 5,000ft before flying in a straight line at roughly 115mph to England. As long as the wind is not above 10mph in the opposite direction, he should have enough juice to get him to Kent.

There, he will pull his parachute ripcords and drop safely on to Blighty’s fair shores.

It all looks fairly simple on paper. But if so, how come no one else has done this before? I have come to Geneva to find out.

The technology is James Bond-meets-Thunderbirds, so I expect to discover a huge hangar full of boffins in white coats and headphones glued to computer screens.

Instead, I find a basement garage containing a windsurfer, a mountain bike, a motorbike, a punchbag, water-skis, mountain skis, snowboards, scuba kit - and a thing that looks like an aerofoil off the rear end of a racing car. This is more of a toy cupboard than a cutting-edge laboratory.