A monoplane with bicycle chains

Fernand Lioré had been building aeroplanes since 1908, including part of Blériot’s swamped order book after the Channel crossing. His 1909 monoplan had one engine but two contra-rotating propellers driven by bicycle chains. Henri Olivier, an electrical engineer who as a teenager had crashed a Lilienthal-style glider into trees, supplied an engine and made the first flight himself despite never having flown, breaking only a skid. On 4 January 1911 they formed a company. Lioré proposed the initials LeO and a lion’s head emblem: leo is Latin for lion.

A thousand Blériots, Moranes and Nieuports

They chose the safer path of building other designers’ aircraft. From March 1912 their Levallois works turned out some 100 Blériot XIs for private owners, then held exclusive production of Morane-Saulnier types and built Nieuports: about a thousand aircraft between them. In the war they built Nieuport 10s and 17s, Morane-Saulnier Ns and Sopwith 1½ Strutters. The workforce grew from 50 in 1912 to more than 2,000 by 1918, and monthly output reached 110 aircraft in January 1919, after the war had ended.

Flying boats and a flying bar

After 1918 Lioré set up a flying-boat design office at Clichy aimed at routes to North Africa, and an airline that became Aéronavale in 1921. LeO flying boats and seaplanes multiplied: the H-190 family, the H-242 airliners for the Mediterranean, the H-257bis naval bombers. On land, the twin-engined LeO 21 airliner flew Air Union’s Paris routes; one prototype was refitted in 1929 as an avion-bar and another was converted by the Wagons-Lits company as a flying dining car.

LeO 20, the night bomber

The company’s backbone was the LeO 20, a big twin-engined night bomber biplane first flown in 1927. Some 320 were built, and it served the Armée de l’air well into the 1930s, some converted to train parachutists. In 1928 LeO bought the Argenteuil works of Nieuport-Astra and rebuilt it for flying boats, with 1,300 workers and 170 engineers. By the 1930s Lioré et Olivier was France’s third-largest aircraft maker, behind Breguet and Potez, with plants at Argenteuil, Clichy and Rochefort.

Nationalised, and the LeO 45

Nationalisation came in 1936. On 1 February 1937 Argenteuil and Clichy went into the new SNCASE, and Rochefort into SNCASO. Just two weeks earlier, on 16 January 1937, a LeO design by the young engineer Pierre Mercier had flown: the LeO 45, a sleek all-metal bomber that reached 624 km/h in a dive. Built by SNCASE, 561 were produced. It arrived too late to matter in 1940, then fought for Vichy and Free French forces alike and served until September 1957.

Továrny

• Levallois-Perret works · Levallois-Perret, Hauts-de-Seine — Boulevard de la Révolte, then rue de Villiers (11,000 m²) from 1912
• Clichy · Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine — Flying-boat design office from 1918; to SNCASE 1937
• Argenteuil · Argenteuil, Val-d’Oise — Ex-Nieuport-Astra works bought 1928; flying boats; to SNCASE 1937
• Rochefort · Rochefort, Charente-Maritime — Assembly of naval seaplanes; to SNCASO 1937

Lidé

• Fernand Lioré · co-founder — Held 80% at founding; president of the aircraft industry association from 1927
• Henri Olivier · co-founder, technical director — Born 1885; first flew the Lioré monoplane
• Pierre Mercier · engineer — Led the LeO 45 design
• Paul Asantchéeff · head of the Argenteuil design office

Rekordy a prvenství

• LeO 45 prototype reached 624 km/h in a dive during 1937 testing