One hundred days to San Francisco

In 1880 a Marseille sailing ship, the Herald of Morning, reached San Francisco by way of Cape Horn in a record 100 days. Her owner was a shipping company founded in 1863 by Alphonse Barban and taken over in 1871 by Paul Daher, a Syrian businessman. Barban & Daher, as it became in 1887, moved locomotives by sea, supplied pipelines in the Middle East and the family has controlled it for well over a century.

From cargo to composites

Aviation came by way of logistics. From 1989 Daher carried outsize Airbus parts between Southampton and Toulouse, and from 1999 it began buying aerospace suppliers. Today it builds aerostructures for Airbus, Boeing, Dassault and Gulfstream, including the tail boom and fenestron of the Airbus H160. In 2015 a non-family chief executive, Didier Kayat, took over the management for the first time, but the Daher family kept about 80 per cent.

The TBM and the Kodiak

The big step came on 7 January 2009, when Daher took 70 per cent of SOCATA from EADS, and with it the TBM turboprop, born of a Mooney–SOCATA partnership and first flown on 14 July 1988. By July 2023, 1,155 TBMs had been built. In 2019 Daher bought Quest Aircraft of Sandpoint, Idaho, maker of the Kodiak bush plane. In 2025 it delivered 76 aircraft: 51 TBM 960s from Tarbes and 25 Kodiaks from Idaho.

Fabrieken

• Tarbes · Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées — TBM assembly
• Sandpoint · Sandpoint, Idaho, USA — Kodiak production
• Nogales · Nogales, Mexico — Composites factory opened 2010

Mensen

• Paul Daher · owner from 1871 — Syrian businessman whose family still controls the group
• Patrick Daher · chief executive until 2015 — Handed management to Didier Kayat
• Didier Kayat · chief executive from 2015 — First non-family manager in the company’s history

Records en primeurs

• Herald of Morning, Marseille to San Francisco round Cape Horn in 100 days, 1880