Tom Crouch

THIS NOVEMBER we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first officially recorded flight of an airplane in Europe, on November 12, 1906. After three-quarters of a century, Alberto Santos-Dumont, the man who made that flight in his 14-bis, remains the most colorful, complex and enigmatic of the pioneers who shaped the early growth of European aviation. He was "Le Petit Santos" to the Paris multitudes who loved him, for he stood only five feet and five inches tall in his high-button "elevator" pumps, and he rarely allowed his weight to climb much over 110 pounds. His prominent ears, wide-set intense eyes, trim mustache and thinning hair, slick with pomade and parted in the middle, marked him as a natural subject for the newspaper and magazine caricaturists of the era.