A silk broker who sang in cabarets

Armand Deperdussin was born in Liège in 1864 and had been a travelling salesman and a cabaret singer in Liège and Brussels before he made a fortune in silk. Watching Louis Blériot’s triumphs turned him into an aviation man. He could not design an aeroplane himself, so he hired one who could: Louis Béchereau, a graduate of the Arts et Métiers who had once helped on Clément Ader’s machines. Aircraft works followed at Laon and at Grenelle on the edge of Paris, with flying schools and boat yards on the side.

Monocoque: the first aircraft past 200 km/h

Béchereau’s big idea was the monocoque fuselage, a smooth shell that carried its own loads. The Deperdussin Monocoque racer won the Gordon Bennett Trophy in 1912 with Jules Védrines at the controls, the first flight past 100 mph, and again in 1913 with Maurice Prévost, who became the first pilot to exceed 200 km/h. A Deperdussin floatplane also won the very first Schneider Trophy at Monaco on 16 April 1913.

Gearresteerd in augustus 1913

Behind the records was a hole. Deperdussin entertained lavishly and paid for prizes and competitions with loans raised against forged receipts from his silk business. On 6 August 1913 he was arrested for fraud. He waited four years for trial, was convicted in March 1917 of embezzling 32 million francs, given a suspended sentence, and took his own life in Paris in 1924. The company went into administration as the Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes Deperdussin, the first use of the letters SPAD.

Blériot keeps the letters

A consortium led by Louis Blériot bought the assets and kept the initials, which now stood for Société Pour L’Aviation et ses Dérivés. Béchereau stayed on. His first wartime designs were odd: the SPAD A-series two-seaters put the gunner in a pulpit in front of the propeller, attached to the undercarriage. Then came the SPAD VII of 1916, a tough single-seater built around the Hispano-Suiza V8. Georges Guynemer took delivery of his on 27 August 1916, and called Béchereau the ace of constructors.

The SPAD XIII and the aces

The SPAD XIII, first flown on 4 April 1917, was the masterpiece: faster, more powerful, and built in numbers that sources put between 7,300 and 8,472. Francesco Baracca, Italy’s top ace, and Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s, scored in SPADs. By the Armistice all 1,152 single-seat fighters in French front-line units were SPAD XIIIs, and nearly 900 served with the Americans. Demand was so great that by 1918 most SPADs were built under licence by other firms; in 1916 SPAD and Blériot had built over 98 per cent themselves.

Taxed out of existence

Peace was harder than war. The SPAD XX of 1918 won only 93 orders because the Nieuport-Delage NiD.29 was preferred, and the excess-profits tax of 1916, raised to 80 per cent in 1917, came due. In 1921 SPAD was folded completely into Blériot Aéronautique, though Blériot went on marketing some types as Blériot-SPADs. Béchereau had already left to found Avions Bernard.

Fabrieken

• Grenelle works · Paris — Main Deperdussin and SPAD factory from 1911
• Laon werkt · Laon, Aisne — Deperdussin’s first aircraft works, 1909

Mensen

• Armand Deperdussin · founder (1864–1924) — Convicted 1917 of embezzling 32 million francs
• Louis Béchereau · chief designer (1880–1970) — Pioneer of the monocoque fuselage; designed every SPAD
• Louis Blériot · owner from 1913–1914 — Led the consortium that bought the bankrupt firm

Records en primeurs

• Gordon Bennett Trophy winner 1912 (Jules Védrines) and 1913 (Maurice Prévost)
• Het eerste vliegtuig dat de 200 km/u overschreed, in 1913.
• Winnaar van de eerste Schneider Trophy, Monaco, 16 april 1913