Émile Dewoitine

Émile Dewoitine (born September 26, 1892 in Crépy , Département Aisne , † July 5, 1979 in Toulouse ) was a French aircraft designer and industrialist.

Youth and military service

Émile Dewoitine has been interested in aviation since childhood. He attended high school in Reims and then entered the École Bréguet in Paris, where he opted for the major electricity.

From 1911 he did his military service with the Aéronautique Militaire , where he made his first flight in February 1911. He became a "balloon pioneer" (sapeur-aérostier) and then an aircraft mechanic at the École Blériot military flight school at today's Étampes -Mondésir airport and took part in reconnaissance flights with Farman double-deckers in Algeria and Tunisia . He finished his military service in February 1914, but was called up again when the war broke out in August. In 1915 he was seconded to Russia to the aircraft company Anatra , where he supervised the licensed production of two-seater bombers of the Voisin LAS type in Odessa and Simferopol . After the October Revolution in 1917, he returned to France. There he was assigned to the Service des fabrications de l'aéronautique (SFA) in Toulouse, which had been newly formed by Pierre-Georges Latécoère . Latécoère was to produce Salmson II A.2 reconnaissance aircraft and Salmson II B.2 bombers under license and Dewoitine was responsible for setting up the production lines. The first machine in the series flew in May 1918 and more than six hundred aircraft were in production by the time production was discontinued in December 1918. Dewoitine was released from military service in 1919 and resigned from Latécoère in 1920.

Aircraft designer

Dewoitine stayed in Toulouse and founded his own company in October 1920, the Société anonyme des avions Dewoitine (SAD). As part of a government tender , he developed a single-seat fighter, the Dewoitine D.1 . His design won the competition and two prototypes were ordered in 1921. The first D.1 flew in November 1922 and was a success. Marcel Doret , hired as Dewoitine's chief pilot, broke three world speed records with the D.1 in December 1924 . A total of 230 copies were built, including 30 for the naval aviators stationed on the Béarn, which was converted into France's first aircraft carrier between 1923 and 1926, and 44 for export to Serbia . In addition, more than 100 were built under license at Ansaldo in Italy.

Three-sided view of the P.1

During these years Dewoitine also developed various bomber and transport aircraft, patented several types of wing spars and also turned to a new field, gliding . He constructed the P.1 in May 1922, which was followed by the slightly larger P.2 in August. It was followed by the P.3 and the P.4 in 1923. All four showed good flight characteristics and achieved considerable flight times.

Dewoitine D.27

In January 1927 Dewoitine was forced to liquidate his company , but managed to stay in business thanks to the development of the D.27 light fighter that had just started . The further development of the aircraft was relocated to the federal construction workshops in Thun , Switzerland , and he himself also moved to Thun. The prototype of the D.27 completed its maiden flight on June 3, 1928. As early as March 1928, Dewoitine went into business again with the Société Aéronautique Française - Avions Dewoitine , but although the Service Technique Aéronautique (STAé) bought a total of five differently motorized pre-series machines in 1929 , there were no orders from the French Air Force . Towards the end of 1929, however, the Swiss Air Force decided to replace the Fokker D.VII biplane, which had already been developed in 1918, in their fighter squadrons and purchased a total of 66 aircraft over the next few years.

Meanwhile, Avions Dewoitine in Toulouse has developed a number of military and civil aircraft, including the Dewoitine D.500 , the French Air Force's first all-metal monoplane fighter, and the very successful Dewoitine D.338 passenger aircraft . The D.338 was based on the Dewoitine D.33 test aircraft designed for long-distance record flights and built in two copies . The first of the two set a long-distance record for circuits in June 1931 with the pilots Marcel Doret and Joseph Le Brix , when she was the first to exceed the 10,000 km mark in 70 non-stop flight hours with 10,520 km.

Dewoitine D.520

In 1936, Dewoitine's company, like all aircraft manufacturers in the country, was nationalized and renamed SNCAM (Societé Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du Midi). Soon afterwards, Dewoitine began developing the Dewoitine D.520 , the best French fighter in World War II, which was particularly distinguished by its maneuverability and good sinking and swooping properties and was used from 1940.

Second World War

After the Franco-German armistice of June 22, 1940, Dewoitine traveled to the USA , where he intended to persuade General Henry Arnold and Henry Ford to produce fighter planes with him. He was recalled to France by the Vichy regime , interned there and first convicted of treason and then acquitted. He then worked for the German company Arado as head of a 200-person work group that developed the light version of the Arado Ar 96 trainer aircraft , the Arado Ar 396 , made of wood because of the scarcity of duralumin . He then went back to the Société industrial pour l'aéronautique (SIPA), which he founded in 1938 after the nationalization of Avions Dewoitine, which manufactured the Ar 396 for the Air Force under an agreement between the governments in Berlin and Vichy .

post war period

I.Ae.27 Pulqui I

Fearing political inconvenience after Liberation - he was accused of supporting the enemy and endangering the external security of the state - Dewoitine went to Spain in 1944 , where he worked at Hispano Aviación on a further development of the D.520, and then in May 1946 to Argentina . There he developed the I.Ae. interceptor for the Fábrica Militar de Aviones in 1946/47. 27 Pulqui I ("arrow"), the first jet fighter ever built in South America . Although the machine did not get beyond the prototype stage, Argentina was only the fifth country that had succeeded in building its own jet fighter. In Argentina Dewoitine was also involved in the development of the “Boyero” for the Argentine aero clubs and in Spain in the development of the AISA AVD-12 liaison aircraft , to which the Spanish Air Force then preferred the CASA- built Dornier Do 25 .

On February 9, 1948, Dewoitine was sentenced by a French court in absentia to 20 years of forced labor, deprivation of civil rights and confiscation of his property. Only in 1953 did he return to France after the amnesty was enacted in July 1953. He then lived temporarily in Patagonia , where he owned a sheep farm, then in Switzerland and finally in Toulouse, where he died in 1979.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The engineering school École Bréguet, founded in 1904, was renamed in 1966 to École supérieure d'ingénieurs en électronique et électrotechnique and has functioned as ESIEE Engineering since 2008 .
2. ↑ http://www.aviafrance.com/voisin-las-aviation-france-9121.htm
3. ↑ P = planeur = glider
4. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: j2mcl-planeurs.net
5. ↑ http://www.aviafrance.com/dewoitine-p-2-aviation-france-4503.htm
6. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: j2mcl-planeurs.net
7. ↑ http://www.aviafrance.com/dewoitine-p-3-aviation-france-4504.htm
8. ↑ http://www.aviafrance.com/dewoitine-p-4-aviation-france-4505.htm
9. ↑ The machine was then lost in Siberia in July 1931 while trying to make the first non-stop flight from Paris to Tokyo . The second D.33, with which Doret and Le Brix made a second attempt, also crashed on September 12, 1931 by Ufa ; Le Brix and the mechanic René Mesmin lost their lives.
10. ↑ After the Second World War , the SNCAM was incorporated into the SNCASE (Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques du Sud-Est). In 1957 the SNCASE became part of Sud Aviation . In 1970 Sud Aviation merged with Nord Aviation and SÉREB to form Société Nationale Industrielle Aérospatiale (SNIAS). In 1998, Aérospatiale merged with Matra Haute Technologie to form Aérospatiale-Matra , which on July 10, 2000 merged with other European companies to form EADS .
11. ↑ SIPA was a supplier for other aviation companies from 1938 to 1940 .
12. ↑ en: FMA I.Ae. 27 Pulqui I
13. ↑ es: I.Ae. 27 Pulqui I

Web links

• http://www.ampa.ch/avion_d26_plus.htm