On 21 May 1956, Léo Valentin, the Frenchman known as ‘Birdman’ and billed as ‘The Most Daring Man in the World’, was crouched in a plane above Liverpool Speke Airport. The author of Je suis un homme-oiseau was preparing to leap out wearing wings made from balsawood and alloy. He planned to retire after this one last leap: the £200 he was set to earn from the Liverpool Air Show would help fund his dream of owning a provincial cinema back in France.
‘To see a man fling himself into space …’ he once wrote. ‘It is a mad action. You want to turn away, but you are fascinated, watching the man who takes pleasure in taunting death.’
An estimated 100,000 spectators were gathered on the airfield below; George Harrison, aged thirteen, and Paul McCartney, just shy of his fourteenth birthday, had cycled there together.
The two boys watched as Valentin hurled himself from the back of the plane. But as he leapt, one of his wings splintered against the plane’s door frame. ‘We watched him drop and went, “Uh-oh … I don’t think that’s right,”’ recalled Paul.
Valentin spun around and around, out of control. His parachute failed to open, and then his backup parachute wrapped around him, like a shroud. This made it easier for the crowd below to see the plummeting figure.
‘We thought, “Any second now his parachute’s gonna open,” and it never did. We went, “I don’t think he’s going to survive that.” And he didn’t.’
Valentin fell to the ground in a cornfield, ‘spreadeagled like a bird’, in the words of one spectator.
In 1964, John Lennon advised the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, against eating the cheese sandwiches at Speke Airport. He had once been employed at Speke as a packer, he told him, and he used to spit in them.
In spring 2002, Speke Airport was renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport. Along with John F. Kennedy, Leonardo da Vinci and Josef Strauss, John Lennon is one of very few people to have an airport named after them. A seven-foot-high statue of John overlooks the check-in hall, and a vast Yellow Submarine stands on a traffic island at the entrance. The airport’s motto is taken from his song ‘Imagine’: ‘Above Us Only Sky’.