MONDAY marks the 95th anniversary of the first flight by a woman across the English Channel.

Less than three years after Louis Bleriot’s first solo flight in 1909, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the Channel on April 16, 1912.

She borrowed a 50hp single-seat plane from Bleriot for the flight, taking off from Dover at 5.30am and landing on a beach near Hardelot, France, 59 minutes later.

But the news of her pioneering achievement was overshadowed by the loss of life on the Titanic.

During the week-long event, she was to fly her new two-seater Bleriot monoplane recently shipped from France.

Less than three months later, on July 1, she was killed when she was thrown from the same Bleriot plane while taking part in an aviation show in Massachusetts. A passenger also died.