ARK NETWORK reference.ch · populus.ch    
 
  
French aviation from 1945 
 
 
Rubriques

Liens

 Home

French firms from 1936 to the 70's...

Well it's not easy to understand how the French aviation firms were organised from 1936 to our days... here's some explanations. 
 
1910-1936 the time of the pioneers 
 
When aviation started to grow in the 10's, lots of pioneers gave their name to the firm they funded. In the 20's, there was more than 15 firms! Most known were Bleriot and Farman, but there was plenty others such as Hanriot, Amiot, Lioré et Olivier... 
 
1936 time of the nationalisation 
 
When left-wing parties came to power in 1936, they were worried that the armement industry belong to the private sector.  
In a sense, they were right: there was so much conspiracies in the 30's...  
There was also a need to improve the efficiency of the aviation industry, which was in disastrous state at a time Germany became a growing threat... 
 
so governement decided to nationalise all the firms. It was made on an odd, geographic pattern! This mean that aviation firms were grouped from their position on the country... 
 
In the end, after the 1940 defeat, situation was as follow  
Various firms were named SNCA (Société Nationale de Construction d'Avions) which was followed by their geographic position (SO, SE, C and N which mean Sud-Ouest, Sud-Est, Centre and Nord). 
SNCASO 
SNCASE 
SNCAC 
SNCAN 
 
SNCA remind SNCF no? Quite logical, the railways were also nationalised in 1937!  
 
1936-1970 time of merging public firms... 
 
Of the four SNCA, the SNCAC go bankrupt in 1949, victim of the failure of the Cormoran cargo. 
Of the three surviving firms, the two "southern" (SNCA SO / SE ) merged on 1st March 1957, giving birth to Sud Aviation.  
SNCAN become Nord Aviation.  
In 1970, Nord and Sud aviation merged into the SNIAS, quickly named Aerospatiale.  
 
1970-2000 Aerospatiale and Dassault.  
 
2000 EADS 
 
Aerospatiale then merged with CASA (from Spain) and DASA (from Germany) the three becoming EADS in 2000...  
 
But some private firms survived... 
 
In fact , 1936 nationalisation were quite a mess... and the 1940 defeat added even more confusion.  
That's why two pioneers, named Dassault and Breguet, managed to keep control of their firms, or created new design bureaus.  
In the 50's, they competed with public firms. 
In the 60's, Breguet had more and more difficulties and in 1967, French governement push Dassault to buy the firm. Dassault-Breguet was born... the firm become a private pole against Aerospatiale and later EADS.  
In the end, the firms were not in competition because they were working in different fields of activity. Aerospatiale left combat aircrafts to Dassault after its bid in the alphajet competition was rejected in 1971.  
That's still the situation today!  
 
 

 

(c) Archibald Francois - Créé à l'aide de Populus.
Modifié en dernier lieu le 6.12.2006