The missile that sank a destroyer

In May 1982 an Argentine Navy jet released a sea-skimming missile at HMS Sheffield in the South Atlantic. The destroyer burned and was lost, and days later the container ship Atlantic Conveyor followed. The weapon was the Exocet, and its name became a byword for a new kind of naval war. Few remember that it was started in 1967 by Nord Aviation, a state-owned company that also built transport aircraft, ramjet fighters and some of the world’s first guided anti-tank missiles, and which had ceased to exist twelve years before the Falklands.

Born of a strike

Nord was born of politics. After the general strike of 1936, Léon Blum’s Popular Front government nationalised France’s military aircraft industry into six regional companies. The northern one, the Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques du Nord, or SNCAN, absorbed the Potez works at Méaulte, CAMS at Sartrouville, ANF Les Mureaux and the Amiot and Breguet plants in Normandy. Before the war it built mainly other firms’ designs; only the Potez 63 series went into full production.

A Messerschmitt called Pingouin

Under occupation SNCAN was allowed to build a German touring aircraft, the Messerschmitt Bf 108, and after the Liberation it simply carried on, calling it the Nord 1000 Pingouin; 286 were made. Then came its own designs, above all the Nord 2501 Noratlas, a twin-boom military transport that entered French service on 6 December 1953. France took 228, West Germany ordered 187, most built in Germany, and the Noratlas went to war with Israel, Greece and Portugal. In all 425 were built. In 1954 SNCAN absorbed SFECMAS and took the name Nord Aviation.

The flying pipe

Nord’s research aircraft were spectacular. The Gerfaut delta became, on 3 August 1954, the first European aircraft to exceed Mach 1 in level flight without afterburning. The Griffon II, a turbojet inside a huge ramjet duct, set a 100 km closed-circuit record of 1,643 km/h on 25 February 1959, winning its pilot André Turcat the Harmon Trophy; the Mirage III, simpler and cheaper, got the production orders. Meanwhile the wire-guided SS.11, in service from 1956, became one of the first effective anti-tank missiles; with its derivatives, more than 170,000 were sold.

Exit into Aérospatiale

Nord also took over Max Holste’s Super Broussard and turned it into the pressurised Nord 262 airliner, which first flew on 24 December 1962, and it partnered West Germany on the C-160 Transall. Its main sites were Châtillon, Bourges and Méaulte. On 1 March 1970 Nord merged with Sud Aviation and the ballistic-missile agency SEREB to form SNIAS, soon known as Aérospatiale, which in 2000 became part of EADS, today Airbus. The Exocet, the Milan and the HOT, all begun at Nord, went on under the new name.

Továrny

• Châtillon · Châtillon, south of Paris — Main design and missile site
• Bourges · Bourges airport, Cher — Bulk of aircraft facilities
• Méaulte · Méaulte, Somme — Former Potez works

Lidé

• André Turcat · test pilot — Set the 100 km closed-circuit record in the Griffon II, 1959; won the Harmon Trophy

Rekordy a prvenství

• Gerfaut: first European aircraft to exceed Mach 1 in level flight without afterburning, 3 August 1954
• Griffon II: 100 km closed-circuit world record, 1,643 km/h, 25 February 1959