From sawmill to shells

Toulouse became Europe’s aviation capital because of a railway-wagon builder. Pierre-Georges Latécoère, born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre in 1883, took over his father’s joinery firm in 1906 and steered it into rolling stock for the Compagnie du Midi. Rejected for active service because of poor eyesight, he invested during the First World War in two Toulouse factories, one for shells and one for airframes; in September 1917 the business became an aircraft maker. With Émile Dewoitine running production, the Montaudran works built about 800 Salmson 2A2 reconnaissance aircraft for the French Army before the armistice.

The Line

Latécoère looked at the hundred warplanes left on his lines and saw a mail service. On 25 December 1918, with the pilot René Cornemont, he opened a route from Toulouse to Barcelona, and his Lignes Aériennes Latécoère, known simply as La Ligne, pushed on to Casablanca and, in 1924, to Dakar. Under the operations chief Didier Daurat its pilots included Jean Mermoz, Henri Guillaumet and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Wind, Sand and Stars opens with his enrolment by the Latécoère company in 1926. Pilots forced down in the Sahara were sometimes captured and ransomed.

Mermoz and the South Atlantic

In 1927 Latécoère, refusing outside finance, sold the airline to Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, who renamed it Aéropostale; its assets later went into Air France. The factory kept supplying it. On 12 May 1930 Mermoz flew a Laté 28-3 floatplane, the Comte de La Vaulx, from Senegal to Natal in Brazil in about 21 and a half hours, the first postal crossing of the South Atlantic. About fifty Laté 28s were built. The four-engined Laté 300 Croix du Sud followed, and it was in that flying boat that Mermoz vanished at sea on 7 December 1936.

The ships of the skies

The flying boats grew. The six-engined Laté 521 Lieutenant de Vaisseau Paris flew on 10 January 1935 and set an FAI payload record of 18,040 kg in 1937. Latécoère refused to join the nationalised industry in 1936–37, sold his Montaudran, Anglet and Biscarrosse sites to Louis Breguet in 1939, and died in 1943. His last giant, the Laté 631, was at its first flight on 4 November 1942 the largest flying boat yet built. Air France flew it to the French West Indies from July 1947, but after Flight 072 vanished with 52 people on 1 August 1948 the type was withdrawn, and flying-boat production ended in 1950.

Doors, harnesses and survival

Latécoère survived by reinventing itself as a supplier. It built Malafon anti-submarine missiles for the French Navy and parts for the Caravelle, Jaguar and Étendard. In 1989 the employees bought the company, and it became a partner of Airbus, making fuselage sections for the A330 and A340, doors for the A380 and, in composite, the passenger doors of the Boeing 787. After heavy debts and a 2015 restructuring, the American fund Searchlight Capital took control in 2019. In 2025 the group reported revenue of 756 million euros, a net loss of 32 million and about 6,000 employees.

工厂

• Montaudran works · Toulouse-Montaudran — First Toulouse aircraft plant and La Ligne’s airfield; sold to Breguet in 1939
• Rue de Périole works · Toulouse — Built from 1939; Laté 631 production
• Biscarrosse · Biscarrosse, Landes — Flying-boat base; sold to Breguet in 1939
• Letov Kbely · Prague, Czech Republic — Former Czech aircraft maker acquired in 2000
• Toulouse-Montredon · Toulouse — Automated plant opened after leaving the historic city-centre works

人们

• Pierre-Georges Latécoère · founder (1883–1943)
• Émile Dewoitine · production chief, 1917 — Later founded his own company
• Marcel Moine · chief engineer
• Didier Daurat · operations chief of La Ligne
• Jean Mermoz · airmail pilot — First postal South Atlantic crossing, 1930
• 安托万·德·圣埃克苏佩里 · airmail pilot and author
• Pierre-Jean Latécoère · head of the company from 1961

纪录和第一

• First postal crossing of the South Atlantic, Jean Mermoz in a Laté 28-3, 12 May 1930
• FAI record with a payload of 18,040 kg at 2,000 m, Laté 521, 30 December 1937
• Laté 631 was the largest flying boat yet built at its first flight in 1942