The rainbow tri-motor

René Couzinet, a schoolteacher’s son from the Vendée, was filing aviation patents while still a student at the Angers school of arts and crafts; he eventually held 91. As a young air force officer on duty at Le Bourget on 21 May 1927, he helped rescue Charles Lindbergh from the crowd. That year he began building the Couzinet 10 Arc-en-Ciel, or Rainbow: a wooden three-engined monoplane with a thick wing and a sharply tapered fin, conceived for the Atlantic. Hispano-Suiza lent the engines free of charge. It first flew from Orly on 7 May 1928.

Mermoz and the South Atlantic

Disaster dogged the early years. Re-engined as the Couzinet 11, the first Arc-en-Ciel crashed on 8 August 1928, killing mechanic Georges Lanet and pilot Maurice Drouhin. In February 1930 a fire at Meudon destroyed the second aircraft and all its drawings; engineer Georges Le Moy redrew the plans from memory. The result, the Couzinet 70 Arc-en-Ciel III, first flew on 11 February 1932, and on 16 January 1933 Jean Mermoz flew it from Senegal to Natal in Brazil, with Couzinet aboard. Fifteen thousand people greeted its return to Le Bourget. Meanwhile the four-seat Couzinet 33 Biarritz had made the first flight from France to New Caledonia in 1932.

Good aircraft, no buyers

Officialdom never warmed to Couzinet. Marcel Dassault is quoted as saying that he made good aircraft but did not know how to sell them. State orders for Air France were cancelled, and by 1933 the firm was near bankruptcy and its design office was folded into Breguet. Couzinet worked in Brazil during the war and came home to closed doors; his flying-saucer RC-360 never left the model stage. On 16 December 1956 he shot his wife Gilberte, widow of Mermoz, and then himself.

المصانع

• Meudon workshops · Meudon — Lent by Émile-Louis Letord; destroyed by fire in February 1930
• Île de la Jatte workshops · Neuilly / Levallois, near Paris — Destroyed in the war; permission to rebuild refused

الناس

• René Couzinet · founder and designer (1904–1956)
• Georges Le Moy · engineer — Redrew the Arc-en-Ciel plans from memory after the 1930 fire
• Jean Mermoz · pilot — Flew the Arc-en-Ciel across the South Atlantic, 1933

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• First air link from France to New Caledonia, Couzinet 33 Biarritz, March–April 1932