Yves Rossy raised his arms triumphantly in a ploughed field, several hundred metres away from the planned landing site. “Thank you,” he said to the journalists running to greet him. “It’s like I am in a second world. It is a mix of reality and dreams. I am flying with a wing and just a turn of my head. It was the perfect flight, as planned. It was a mixture of being euphoric and concentrated.” The most testing moment was immediately after he dropped out of the aircraft, when he had to switch from freefall skydiving to powered flight. The jets, which his team had lit in the cabin of the plane, burned to life without a hitch. “That is a critical moment. Many times I have had to cut away the wing, so that was tense. After that it is just pleasure.”

The only drama came a minute into the flight when he realised that he had forgotten to set his stopwatch, which he needed to calculate how much fuel he had left. “I knew I had 13½ minutes’ endurance. So I did realise after the first minute, ‘Oh, s***, I forgot.’ I thought, ‘OK, just go straight and you will be fine.’”

He said that it never occurred to him to be fearful. “I was under tension, but fear? The day I have fear, I don’t go.”

He did not think his jet-wings would supersede conventional airliners – where, he observed, one can drink champagne – but hopes to form an aerobatic troupe to rival the Red Arrows.

Asked whether he sang to himself as he flew over the Channel, he said: “No. But I did say, very loudly, ‘Thank you’.”

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