Propellers from the rue de Javel

Pierre Levasseur entered aviation at 19, showing a helicopter propulsion device at the first Paris aero show in 1909. In a small workshop on the rue de Javel he began carving wooden propellers, and by 1911 Levasseur propellers drove aircraft by Blériot, Nieuport and Deperdussin. In 1913 he built other people’s designs, including the Tubavion of Ponche and Primard, described by French Wikipedia as the world’s first attempt at an all-metal aeroplane. By the 1918 Armistice he had produced 350 SPAD fighters, wings for FBA flying boats and more than 1,500 propellers.

Aircraft that could swim

Between the wars Levasseur became a specialist supplier to the French Navy. His biplanes had a trademark safety feature: a watertight, boat-shaped fuselage and jettisonable undercarriage, so a crew could put down on the sea and float, though not take off again. The PL.2 torpedo bomber, designed with Blackburn, was the first type to serve aboard France’s first aircraft carrier, Béarn, and the PL.4, PL.7 and PL.10 followed it onto the deck. The PL.7s were still aboard, thoroughly obsolete, in 1939.

The White Bird

Levasseur’s fame came from a failure. In 1927 the firm modified a PL.4 into the PL.8 for the war ace Charles Nungesser and navigator François Coli, who were chasing the Orteig Prize for the first non-stop Paris to New York flight. Painted white, with Nungesser’s skull-and-coffin emblem, L’Oiseau Blanc left Le Bourget on 8 May 1927 and was never seen again. Its jettisoned undercarriage is the only confirmed relic. Pierre Levasseur died in Paris in 1941.

المصانع

• Rue de Javel workshop · Paris, 15th arrondissement — First propeller workshop; replaced in wartime by a site at place Félix-Faure

الناس

• Pierre Levasseur · founder (1890–1941) — Propeller maker and naval aircraft builder
• François Denhaut · chief pilot of the flying school — Later known for the first flying boat
• Émile Farret · chief engineer — Worked on the PL.8 with Nungesser and Coli

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• PL.2 was the first aircraft type to equip the carrier Béarn, 1926