A bankruptcy lawyer takes the controls

The man who launched France into the jet-airliner age was not an engineer but a bankruptcy lawyer. Georges Héreil, a Parisian who had spent the 1930s winding up failed companies, was sent in 1946 to liquidate the state aircraft group SNCASE. Instead, at 39, he became its president. He licence-built de Havilland’s Vampire as the Mistral, backed a turbine helicopter, and ordered two prototypes of a short-haul jet. When SNCASE merged with its western sister SNCASO on 1 March 1957 to form Sud Aviation, Héreil ran the combined company — by the end of 1964 the largest aircraft manufacturer in continental Western Europe, with 24,500 employees in ten French cities.

The Caravelle and the engines at the back

The jet Héreil ordered was the Caravelle. It first flew on 27 May 1955, and its big idea was where it put the engines: two Rolls-Royce Avons hung on the rear fuselage, leaving a clean, quiet wing. The nose and cockpit were taken straight from the de Havilland Comet. SAS flew the first paying passengers on 26 April 1959, Air France followed, and for several years the Caravelle had no jet rival in its class at all. Even United Airlines bought 20. By 1972, 282 had been built, beating the 200 that Sud Aviation had needed to break even.

The Alouette and the mountain

On the other side of the business, Sud was quietly building the helicopter industry Europe still lives off. In April 1956 the first production Alouette II was completed: the first production turbine-powered helicopter in the world. On 3 July 1956, before it had even entered civil service, one flew the first helicopter mountain rescue, lifting a climber who had suffered cardiac arrest above 4,000 metres. Test pilot Jean Boulet took altitude records in it, then speed records in the three-engined Super Frelon. The Alouette III, Puma and Gazelle followed, and by the mid-1960s Sud Aviation was exporting more helicopters than any European rival.

Supersonic ambitions

Success made Sud ambitious. Its engineers moved en masse from the Caravelle to a supersonic successor, the Super-Caravelle, which won the French government contest against Nord Aviation and Dassault. The cost frightened Paris and London alike, and in November 1962 the two governments pushed Sud Aviation into partnership with the British Aircraft Corporation. The result was Concorde, which first flew from Toulouse on 2 March 1969. Héreil did not stay to see it. He had wanted to grow the Caravelle into a family of airliners — much as Airbus later would — and in 1963 walked out to run the carmaker Simca for Chrysler. Concorde costs ran to more than six times the first estimates.

Washing machines, strikes and Maurice Papon

Sud Aviation was a stranger company than its aircraft suggest. Around 1960 it made washing machines, dishwashers and television sets under the Frigeavia and Teleavia brands. In 1967 de Gaulle installed a new president: Maurice Papon, forced out as Paris police chief over the Ben Barka affair and convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for wartime deportations. It was under Papon that more than 2,600 workers at the Bouguenais plant near Nantes downed tools on 14 May 1968 and occupied the factory for a month — the first and the longest occupation of May 68, triggered by a plan to cut hours without full pay.

Thirteen years, then Aerospatiale

In 1965 Sud bought the bankrupt Morane-Saulnier, and in 1966 it set up a subsidiary, SOCATA, to carry on Morane-Saulnier’s Rallye family of light aircraft. In 1967 it signed the Anglo-French helicopter deal with Westland that put Pumas and Gazelles into British service and gave Sud a 30 per cent share of the Lynx. Then, after just 13 years, the company disappeared on paper. In 1970 it merged with Nord Aviation and the missile firm SEREB to form Aérospatiale, which carried the Concorde, Airbus and helicopter work on and later fed into Airbus Helicopters.

Factories

• Toulouse (Blagnac and Saint-Martin) · Toulouse, Haute-Garonne — Caravelle final assembly and Concorde first flight
• Marignane · Marignane, Bouches-du-Rhône — SNCASE plant opened in 1939; heart of the helicopter business
• Bouguenais · near Nantes, Loire-Atlantique — Former SNCASO site; occupied by its workers 14 May to 14 June 1968

People

• Georges Héreil · president 1957–1962 (SNCASE from 1946) — Bankruptcy lawyer who ran SNCASE from 1946; father of the Caravelle; later head of Simca/Chrysler France
• André Puget · president from 1962 — Air force general
• Maurice Papon · president 1967–1968 — Later convicted of crimes against humanity (1998)
• Henri Ziegler · president from 1968 — Last president before the 1970 merger
• Jean Boulet · chief helicopter test pilot — Altitude records in the Alouette II, speed record in the Super Frelon

Records and firsts

• Alouette II: helicopter altitude record 8,209 m (1955) and 10,984 m (1958), Jean Boulet
• Super Frelon: absolute helicopter world speed record, 350.4 km/h, 23 July 1963
• Gazelle: two closed-course helicopter speed records, 307 km/h and 292 km/h, 13 May 1967
• First production turbine-powered helicopter (Alouette II, 1956)
• First helicopter mountain rescue, 3 July 1956