Ignored in Paris, bought everywhere else

Émile Dewoitine learned the aircraft business in the strangest places. Mobilised in 1914, he was sent to Russia in 1915 to run the Anatra works at Odessa and Simferopol, building Voisin bombers under licence, and only came home after the revolution. At Latécoère in Toulouse he then set up the line that turned out more than 600 Salmson 2 reconnaissance biplanes in 1918. In October 1920 he founded his own company in Toulouse. Colleagues called him mimile-bras-de-fer, iron-arm Emile, for his tenacity and his refusal to compromise.

Bankrupt in 1927, back in 1928

His first fighter, the parasol-wing D.1, flew on 18 November 1922. The French Air Force largely ignored it and its all-metal descendants. Foreign air forces did not: the D.1 and D.9 were bought abroad and built under licence in Italy, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, roughly 500 D.1s of all marks in total. It was not enough to keep the company alive. It was liquidated in January 1927, its one live programme, the D.27, handed to the Swiss state works EKW at Thun, where Dewoitine himself spent 1925 to 1927.

Air France to Saigon

He was back in March 1928 with a new firm, the Société Aéronautique Française, and this time France listened. The low-wing D.500 of 1932 and its D.501 and D.510 offspring, 381 in all, became the mainstay of French fighter squadrons in the mid-1930s. The trimotor airliners were just as bold. The D.332 Émeraude flew Paris to Saigon in record time in late 1933, then crashed in the Morvan on the way home on 15 January 1934. The bigger D.338 followed, and Air France flew it to Indochina and Hong Kong.

The D.520: too good, too late

In March 1937 the Popular Front government nationalised the firm into SNCA du Midi. Its last great design, the D.520, flew on 2 October 1938 and was the best fighter France had in 1940. Production came too slowly: of about 900 built, only around 400 existed before the armistice. In December 1940 SNCAM disappeared into SNCASE, the south-eastern state group, and no aircraft ever carried the Dewoitine name again. Dewoitine is still remembered as the founding father of the Toulouse works that became Aérospatiale and, later, Airbus.

Exile, a jet and 8,000 sheep

The founder’s own war was murky. He went to the United States after the armistice, was recalled by Vichy, interned, tried and acquitted, then ran a design office in Paris for SIPA that worked for the occupier on trainers and transports. In 1944 he fled to Spain and then Argentina, where his team produced the I.Ae.27 Pulqui I in 1947, the country’s first jet. A French court sentenced him in absentia in 1948 to 20 years’ hard labour; he was acquitted in 1953, never worked in aviation again, farmed 8,000 sheep in Patagonia and died in Toulouse in 1979.

Factories

• Toulouse works · Toulouse, Haute-Garonne — Dewoitine’s base from 1920; nucleus of the later Aérospatiale Toulouse plants
• EKW (licence partner) · Thun, Switzerland — Took over D.27 production in 1927

People

• Émile Dewoitine · founder and designer (1892–1979) — Ran Anatra’s Russian works in 1915–1917; designed Argentina’s Pulqui I in exile
• Marcel Doret · chief test pilot — Set three world records in the D.1 in December 1924

Records and firsts

• Three world records set by Marcel Doret in a D.1, December 1924
• D.33 Trait d’Union: first French aircraft to fly 10,000 km in closed circuit without refuelling, 1931
• D.332 Émeraude: record Paris–Saigon flight, 1933