The flying fish

On 4 May 1982, in the South Atlantic, the British destroyer HMS Sheffield was hit by an air-launched missile fired by an Argentine Super Étendard. Sheffield sank, and three weeks later two more of the same missiles struck the container ship Atlantic Conveyor. Overnight the whole world knew the missile’s name: Exocet, French for flying fish. Few people noticed the maker. It was Aérospatiale — the same state-owned company whose Toulouse hangars had built Concorde, which held half of the new Airbus, and which led Europe’s Ariane rocket. One company, in other words, built both the most glamorous airliner in the sky and the most feared anti-ship weapon of its day.

Three state firms, one giant

Aérospatiale was a merger of mergers. In 1936 France’s Popular Front government nationalised the aircraft industry into regional state companies. These had been merged into Sud Aviation and Nord Aviation by the late 1950s. In 1970 Sud, Nord and the ballistic-missile agency SEREB were joined as the Société nationale industrielle aérospatiale, SNIAS. It was the largest aerospace company in France, and at one point the state owned 97 per cent of it. Its first chairman was Henri Ziegler, an aviator who had run Air France from 1946 to 1954. From 1974 the company wrote its name in lower case, aerospatiale, leaving off the acute accent on purpose.

Concorde, and the lesson learned

The biggest job it inherited was Concorde. Prototype 001 was built by Sud at Toulouse and first flew there on 2 March 1969, flown by André Turcat. Airlines held options on more than 100, but politics, cost overruns, the oil crisis and the noise row left only Air France and British Airways as buyers. Just 20 Concordes were built. Scheduled flights began on 21 January 1976. The airliner was a technical marvel, the first with fly-by-wire controls, and a commercial flop. Aérospatiale’s managers took the lesson to heart: never again a programme where politics, rather than a single firm, made the decisions.

Building Airbus with no orders

That lesson shaped Airbus. On 18 December 1970 Aérospatiale and its German partners formed Airbus Industrie, each with a 50 per cent stake, to build the A300, the world’s first twin-engined wide-body airliner. It first flew from Toulouse on 28 October 1972. At first nobody wanted it, but Aérospatiale kept building aircraft without orders. French law would have made laid-off staff cost 90 per cent of their pay for a year anyway. The gamble worked. The A300 reached 561 deliveries, and Airbus went on to challenge Boeing. Years later an Airbus chief said there would be no Airbus without Ziegler. The same logic gave Europe Ariane, which first flew on 24 December 1979 with Aérospatiale as prime contractor.

The helicopter works at Marignane

The quiet money-maker was helicopters. From Sud, Aérospatiale inherited the Alouette II, the first production helicopter with a gas turbine engine, along with the Alouette III, the Super Frelon, the Puma and the new Gazelle, the first helicopter with a shrouded fenestron tail rotor. On 21 June 1972 test pilot Jean Boulet took a Lama to 12,442 metres, a helicopter altitude record still standing half a century later. Then Marignane, near Marseille, produced a new generation of its own: the Écureuil, or Squirrel, which first flew on 27 June 1974 under chief engineer René Mouille, followed by the Dauphin 2 and the Super Puma. The Puma alone sold 697 before French production ended in 1987.

Flops, feuds and a president’s brother

Not everything flew so well. The SN 601 Corvette business jet, which Aérospatiale hoped to sell at six a month, stopped in 1976 at just 40 aircraft; a US distributor sued after getting one uncertified demonstrator instead of 70 jets. Cost overruns on the Corvette and Concorde brought new management. From 1975 to 1983 the company was run by General Jacques Mitterrand, brother of the future president. In 1981 he signed the agreement with Aeritalia that created ATR. In 1991 the European Commission blocked Aérospatiale’s bid, with Alenia, for de Havilland Canada. French reports also linked the company to suspected helicopter deliveries to apartheid South Africa through front companies in breach of the embargo.

Dissolving into Airbus

The end came in stages, after the Cold War. In 1992 Aérospatiale merged its helicopter division with that of Germany’s DASA to form Eurocopter, keeping 70 per cent. Its satellite business went to Alcatel. In 1999, as the Jospin government moved towards privatisation, it merged with Lagardère’s Matra Hautes Technologies, and Aerospatiale Matra was launched at the Paris Air Show on 11 June 1999. Thirteen months later, on 10 July 2000, it joined DASA and CASA to form EADS, today’s Airbus. The name has gone, but its heirs are everywhere: Airbus, Airbus Helicopters, MBDA, ArianeGroup, Thales Alenia Space and Daher.

Factories

• Head office · Paris — Corporate headquarters, since sold
• Toulouse · Toulouse, Haute-Garonne — Concorde and Airbus final assembly; now Airbus
• Saint-Nazaire and Nantes · Loire-Atlantique — Airliner fuselage and structures; now Airbus
• Méaulte · Somme — Aerostructures; now Airbus
• Marignane · near Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône — Helicopter design and production; now Airbus Helicopters headquarters
• Les Mureaux · Yvelines, near Paris — Ariane launchers and ballistic missiles; now ArianeGroup
• Bourges · Cher — Tactical missiles; now MBDA
• Cannes · Alpes-Maritimes — Satellites; now Thales Alenia Space
• Bordeaux and Rochefort · Gironde and Charente-Maritime — Aircraft maintenance and aerostructures; now Stelia and Sabena technics
• Tarbes · Hautes-Pyrénées — SOCATA light aircraft; now Daher

People

• Henri Ziegler · chairman, 1970–1973 — Former Sud Aviation chief and first head of Airbus Industrie; 1906–1998
• Charles Cristofini · chairman, 1973–1975
• Jacques Mitterrand · general, chairman 1975–1983 — Brother of President François Mitterrand; signed the ATR agreement in 1981
• Henri Martre · chairman, 1983–1992 — Engineer involved in Concorde, Airbus and Ariane; 1928–2018
• Louis Gallois · chairman, 1992–1996 — Later CEO of Airbus and of EADS
• Roger Béteille · A300 technical director — Co-founder of Airbus; chose English as the programme’s working language
• Jean Boulet · chief test pilot, helicopters — Set helicopter altitude records in the Alouette II and the Lama
• René Mouille · chief engineer — Led design of the Écureuil
• André Turcat · test pilot — Flew Concorde 001 on its first flight, 2 March 1969

Records and firsts

• Lama: absolute helicopter altitude record of 12,442 m, set by Jean Boulet on 21 June 1972 and still unbeaten
• A300: world’s first twin-engined wide-body airliner
• Concorde: first airliner with fly-by-wire flight controls
• Gazelle: first helicopter with a fenestron shrouded tail rotor; two speed records in May 1967
• Super Frelon: FAI absolute helicopter speed record, 23 July 1963
• Ariane 1: first flight on 24 December 1979, with Aérospatiale as prime contractor
• Dauphin 2: three speed records between London and Paris in February 1980