Everyone remembers the Airbus A380 as the great double-decker of the skies. Almost nobody remembers that France built one two generations earlier. In 1953, Air France put into service a broad-shouldered, four-engined airliner with two full passenger decks and a lift between them — the Breguet 763 Provence, known to all simply as the Deux-Ponts: the “Two Decks.”
Quick Facts
- Type: Breguet 763 “Provence” — double-deck airliner
- Prototype first flight: Br.761, February 1949
- Air France service: from 10 March 1953 (Lyon–Algiers)
- Capacity: up to 107 passengers, over two decks, with an internal lift
- Engines: four Pratt & Whitney R-2800 radials
- Built: only about 20 aircraft
Two decks, in the age of the propeller
Breguet began sketching the double-decker in 1944, before the war had even ended, and the prototype Br.761 first flew at Villacoublay in February 1949. The definitive Br.763 followed, entering Air France service on 10 March 1953 with an inaugural run from Lyon to Algiers.
Inside, it was genuinely a two-storey aircraft: up to 107 passengers, 59 on the upper deck and 48 on the lower, connected by an internal elevator. Four big Pratt & Whitney R-2800 radials, built under licence by SNECMA, cruised it along at around 240 mph.
Workhorse of the Mediterranean
Air France flew the Deux-Ponts mainly on its Mediterranean network from Paris — Algiers, Corsica, North Africa — and occasionally across to London. That cavernous twin-deck fuselage made it a natural freighter, too: some flew with cargo on the lower deck and passengers above. Air Algérie operated the type, and the French Air Force took a militarised version.
The soldier and the sunset
The military Br.765 Sahara soldiered on with the Armée de l’Air well into the 1970s, hauling freight across France’s far-flung commitments. But the airliner had arrived just as the jet age was dawning. Only around twenty Deux-Ponts were ever built, and faster, pressurised jets soon made the stately piston double-decker obsolete. It retired quietly, and France’s first double-decker slipped from memory.
Half a century before the A380 boarded travellers on two levels, a French airliner was already doing exactly that over the Mediterranean. The Deux-Ponts was never a commercial triumph — but it was an idea far ahead of its runway.
Sources: Vintage Aviation News; Simple Flying; aviafrance; Wikipedia.
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