French Secret Projects 3

[JC Carbonel]

The "1935-42" option is still the more difficult to write as a lot of material is missing or only available through previously-published sources (And the more I write, the more I prefer my mistakes to be mine rather than copied on Cuny and others)

JCC

 

[Michel Van]

I'm very interested in French spaceplanes : Transporteur Aérospatial to Hermès
also if include some french design for un/manned space capsule.

 

[hesham]

Dear JCC,

I prefer to suggest that; French Secret Aircraft Projects ; 1930-1942,and I am ready
to share with you the Info and also help in the writing itself.

 

[Deltafan]

Hi,


I voted French secret projects: fighters, bombers and other warplanes 1935-1942

I must admit that the idea of Hesham (1930-42) would be even better ;D (but is it feasabile ?)


French spaceplanes : Transporteur Aérospatial to Hermès, would be very interesting too.

 

[Avimimus]

I'm most interested in the early stuff (before WWII - including early material - note that I haven't even found a good English history of French aircraft development/use in WWI).

After that, I'd be most interested in STOLL or VTOL.

 

[Silencer1]

Dear JCC!

I'm interested in pre-war combat aircraft. Such book on English could demonstrate the whole picture of French aircraft industry activity during the very complex period: rapid advances in aircraft design and, in the same time, upcoming WW2.

Story of French ADAVs , covering the conception and design from the eve of 20th century are also welcome. There were a lot of interesting projects, as well as prototypes. One thing, that prevents me to place this book on the first place: there were no series-built French VTOLs. So all this activity don't lead to any useful - unlike, for example, British efforts, that leads to Harrier.

Wish you to write the book, that you want to write most!

 

[hesham]

I must admit that the idea of Hesham (1930-42) would be even better ;D (but is it feasabile ?)

My dear Deltafan,

the period from 1930 to 1942 is more interested,and I have the materials for this,and I can
imagine the book divide into three sections,as following :-

- Section one ; gained of 1920s
- Section two (Military Aircraft); Chapter 1 : Fighters
Chapter 2 : Bombers
Chapter 3 : Recce & Observation
Chapter 4 : Seaplanes
Chapter 5 : Flying Boats
Chapter 6 : Experimental & Research
Chapter 7 : Helicopters & Autogiros
- Section three (Civil Aircraft) Chapter 1 : Light and Trainer Aircraft
Chapter 2 : Transport and Airliner
Chapter 3 : Seaplanes & Flying Boats
Chapter 4 : Record Breaker,Stratosphere & Research Aircraft
Chapter 5 : Helicopters & Autogiros
Chapter 6 : Gliders & Sailplanes

And I expect to make this book about 350 pages.

 

[gatoraptor]

As far as VTOL is concerned, in the meantime is this, provided that one can read French:

https://www.amazon.com/Prototypes-Dassault-Decollage-Vertical-Francaise/dp/2352504287/

 

[cluttonfred]

Personally, I would love to see a complete history of French VTOL, built and unbuilt, all in one volume.

 

[Deltafan]

I must admit that the idea of Hesham (1930-42) would be even better ;D (but is it feasabile ?)

My dear Deltafan,

the period from 1930 to 1942 is more interested,and I have the materials for this,and I can
imagine the book divide into three sections,as following :-

- Section one ; gained of 1920s
- Section two (Military Aircraft); Chapter 1 : Fighters
Chapter 2 : Bombers
Chapter 3 : Recce & Observation
Chapter 4 : Seaplanes
Chapter 5 : Flying Boats
Chapter 6 : Experimental & Research
Chapter 7 : Helicopters & Autogiros
- Section three (Civil Aircraft) Chapter 1 : Light and Trainer Aircraft
Chapter 2 : Transport and Airliner
Chapter 3 : Seaplanes & Flying Boats
Chapter 4 : Record Breaker,Stratosphere & Research Aircraft
Chapter 5 : Helicopters & Autogiros
Chapter 6 : Gliders & Sailplanes

And I expect to make this book about 350 pages.

I am convinced that it would be a very, very interesting book (I'll buy it. It's 200% sure). But I am not the one to convince... (maybe more M. Carbonel and/or the Crecy staff...)

 

[Michel Van]

Hesham you idea is good, but i'm afraid that book is limited to 264-282 pages by publisher
better the chapters Helicopters & Autogiros move into French VTOL book

JC Carbonel, what about this sequence of publications ?

French Secret Projects 3: Fighters, Bombers and other planes 1935-1942
French Secret Projects 4: French VTOL 1909-1999
French Secret Projects 5: French spaceplanes & Capsules

On last subject, i can help with data or some photos.

 

[hesham]

Hesham you idea is good, but i'm afraid that book is limited to 264-282 pages by publisher
better the chapters Helicopters & Autogiros move into French VTOL book

JC Carbonel, what about this sequence of publications ?

French Secret Projects 3: Fighters, Bombers and other planes 1935-1942
French Secret Projects 4: French VTOL 1909-1999
French Secret Projects 5: French spaceplanes & Capsules

On last subject, i can help with data or some photos.

OK about helicopters my dear Michel;

But I think it must be like this;

French Secret Projects 3: Military Aircraft 1930-1942
French Secret Projects 4: Civil Aircraft 1930-1942
French Secret Projects 5: French VTOL 1909-1999
French Secret Projects 6: French spaceplanes & Capsules

 

[Sherman Tank]

Personally I'd love to see more information on the 1935-42 era because the English language material on French designs of that time is extremely sparse.

 

[JC Carbonel]

civil airplanes 1930-1942 ? you mean like airliners as in Arc-en-ciel and small "biz-planes" like Simoun? That's way out of my waters !!! I could maybe do "airliners and business planes 1945-2005" but I tell you that if research to find original (period)material on warbirds for this period is difficult, I just would not know by which end tackling civilian subjects.

re : order of books.
*if* it depends on me it would be VTO (beginning with Blériot perhaps even earlier with Capazza) , then spaceplanes (I already took a few contacts and I think Hermes would not be too troublesome... that's the projects from the sixties which I expect to cause difficulties) and finally between-the-wars military. What I have on this last subject is mostly published material (Cuny, Leyvastre, Marchand and co) and considering the trouble the guys at Dassault have finding enough material to build a 1/1 MB 152, I fear a lot of material that was available thirty years ago has been lost, misplaced etc...
Pre-war company archives have got more or less, if not destroyed, turned into puzzle games by the various take-over, amalgamations, fusions etc...and private archive tend to evaporate with uninterested descendants ...

JCC

 

[Arjen]

I voted for military projects 1935-1942. Based on your previous work, I would be very much interested in books about the other subjects too.

 

[hesham]

Dear JCC,

the period from 1935-42 is too small,no enough materials to make a book,but if you
include the military aircraft from 1930 to 1942 or 1945,you will find a large stuff to
create a good one.

 

[JC Carbonel]

Hensham

I had proposed 35-42 because before 1935 the Aircraft were still very much biplanes carry-over from WW1. Monoplanes were generalised only by mid-thirties. And 1942 was because I gave the designers two years of "downside" after the 1940 armistice. 1942 is also the date the German Wehrmacht invaded Zone Libre and hence put under control the Bureaux d'Etudes which had emigrated to Zone Sud.

JCC

 

[hesham]

I know that dear JCC,

but I speak about the materials itself is small,are them enough to make a book ?.

 

[Sherman Tank]

civil airplanes 1930-1942 ? you mean like airliners as in Arc-en-ciel and small "biz-planes" like Simoun? That's way out of my waters !!! I could maybe do "airliners and business planes 1945-2005" but I tell you that if research to find original (period)material on warbirds for this period is difficult, I just would not know by which end tackling civilian subjects.

re : order of books.
*if* it depends on me it would be VTO (beginning with Blériot perhaps even earlier with Capazza) , then spaceplanes (I already took a few contacts and I think Hermes would not be too troublesome... that's the projects from the sixties which I expect to cause difficulties) and finally between-the-wars military. What I have on this last subject is mostly published material (Cuny, Leyvastre, Marchand and co) and considering the trouble the guys at Dassault have finding enough material to build a 1/1 MB 152, I fear a lot of material that was available thirty years ago has been lost, misplaced etc...
Pre-war company archives have got more or less, if not destroyed, turned into puzzle games by the various take-over, amalgamations, fusions etc...and private archive tend to evaporate with uninterested descendants ...

JCC

M. Carbonel,

I commiserate with you over the difficulty of navigating archive collections. I'm currently writing a book on pre-WW1 Royal Navy battle fleet development and the amount of missing material is astounding. The Admiralty managed to completely lose all the files regarding the fleet maneuvers of 1908, which involved the bulk of the Royal Navy's ships! It's taken me a decade and two graduate degrees just to be able to fill in part of the story. And this is without a German occupation and several decades of corporate mergers, nationalizations, and bankruptcies to contend with!

 

[Geist]

A FSP 3 - Sounds great JC! I'll be waiting for!

 

[JC Carbonel]

Hesham, actually my fear is rather a certain blandness of the subject with long list of variants of Bloch 152, Dewoitine 520 and Arsenal VG30. I know that WW2 has sales potential but unfortunately for French wings they were crushed at the very beginning of the story, so we are actually talking "inter-war" period with a pacifist philosophy and shrinking military budgets and not much incentive to move the Bureaux d'Etudes. Things begun to really get alive in the last years of peace and then it was from people out of the mainstream : Delanne, Payen, Fauvel, etc... (Sébastienne Guyot too... a rare girl in the man-dominated world of aircraft designers).

Then I would like to add another proposal (can I modify the poll ? not sure) :
Aéroglisseurs : hovercraft à la française from Ader to Sedam

It is just something I thought of yesterday : we had a few pre-WW2 ideas and during the sixties and seventies Jean Bertin promoted a lot of different designs which could go on water, on ground, on rail even a few "air cushion landing gears" for aircraft (one is in FSP 2). The subject is barely known (I don't know of any French book on the subject, all the hovercraft books I have are in English or in Russian) and there are a lot of different designs going from tiny one-man demonstrators to 500-tons projects.

JCC

JCC

 

[Hobbes]

I'm very interested in French spaceplanes : Transporteur Aérospatial to Hermès
also if include some french design for un/manned space capsule.

Luc van den Abeelen's book on Hermes is pretty comprehensive on the design evolution of Hermes. Were there other French spaceplane projects?

 

[hesham]

OK dear JCC,

and I hope you get sufficient materials for great book.

 

[gatoraptor]

Maybe you could stretch matters a bit and include wartime and postwar developments of French pre-war aircraft. I'm thinking of types like the Swiss D-3803, which was effectively the ultimate update of the M.S.406 series.

 

[JC Carbonel]

I just bought Mr Van der Abeelen book on Hermes. I had this project before his book came out and yes it covers a lot of material and I have to reconsider the opportunity of doing my own book.

JCC

 

[JC Carbonel]

Just checked : I have around 250 entries in my FSP "between the wars" list but many are just engine changes from D52x, Amiot 35x, Br 69x, VG 3x etc...

Will have to have a second look before Telford.

JCC

 

[Deltafan]

Maybe you could stretch matters a bit and include wartime and postwar developments of French pre-war aircraft. I'm thinking of types like the Swiss D-3803, which was effectively the ultimate update of the M.S.406 series.

It could be a good idea too (Dewoitine D.600, Latécoère 299A, D-3804,...)

But 250 entries seems to be already a big start...

 

[gatoraptor]

Maybe you could stretch matters a bit and include wartime and postwar developments of French pre-war aircraft. I'm thinking of types like the Swiss D-3803, which was effectively the ultimate update of the M.S.406 series.

It could be a good idea too (Dewoitine D.600, Latécoère 299A, D-3804,...)

But 250 entries seems to be already a big start...

What the heck was the D-3804?

 

[Arjen]

Probably related to this: DoFlug D-3803
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,19968.msg193736.html#msg193736

 

[Deltafan]

It could be a good idea too (Dewoitine D.600, Latécoère 299A, D-3804,...)

What the heck was the D-3804?

Oops, Mistake. D-3803, of course :-[

Probably my mind was confused with the Swiss C-36 series... : http://all-aero.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3223:efw-c-36-c-3602-c-3603-c-3604-c-3605&catid=45

and in particular, the C-3604... : http://www.loutan.net/olivier/archives/2010/09/19/ateliers-federaux-de-construction-af-c-3604-aviation-suisse/

Sorry...

 

[JC Carbonel]

So if I summarize :

between the war aircraft (eventually annexing Swiss - and Belgian ?- designers) are at the top of the requests, followed closely by VTO. There are interrogations regarding the viability of a book on French spaceplanes and French hovercraft has not evoked anything to anyone.

That's the most hard to do for the author !

JCC

 

[sferrin]

I would have voted for the Spaceplanes too but you can only vote once so VTOL it was.

 

[Arjen]

[...]
French hovercraft has not evoked anything to anyone.
[...]

I would be very interested in a book about Jean Bertin's Aérotrain projects, or indeed any other French hovercraft projects.

 

[sferrin]

[...]
French hovercraft has not evoked anything to anyone.
[...]

I would be very interested in a book about Jean Bertin's Aérotrain projects, or indeed any other French hovercraft projects.

Maybe there isn't enough for an entire book on French work. What about a book that covered the more interesting projects from say, France, the US, the UK, and the USSR/Russia?

 

[Arjen]

Then again...
I'm fairly certain USSR/Russia and the UK alone would merit fat books on hovercraft each. I suspect research about hovercraft in the USA and France might throw up some nice surprises as well.
In 1915/1916, Dagobert Müller von Thomamühl of the Austro-Hungarian Navy constructed a torpedo-carrying hovercraft - see images found here https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/3625-kuk-versuchsgleitboot-first-ever-build-hovercraft/ - and lots of other people in verious countries tried their hands at hovercraft since. A book on international hovercraft highlights might need a wheelbarrow to schlepp to your reading table.

 

[Hood]

There are book on British hovercraft but I'm not sure how far they delve into unbuilt projects, I suspect there are many. Its a niche market but you might get some takers.

I think a 1930s-40s volume would still throw up much that might not have reached English language books before, especially for non-fighter types.
It would probably sell the best to the wider readership and would complement the other WW2 era secret project books the best.
A VTOL book would be interesting, but again many of the fighter proposals are well known (Bill Rose's book) and of course your other two volumes have covered much of this ground.
A space projects book would be interesting too with perhaps more scope for new research?

 

[JC Carbonel]

I completely agree with you but for two points :
- the objective of this post is to help me finding what to suggest to Crécy for French secret projects volume 3
- then there is the question of archives : there is a lot of material out there (believe me , I know!) , but not all belongs to free archives. And it is not just a question of ethics : to write an interesting book one cannot just compile three-view drawings, one needs data, anecdotes to flesh up the stories those drawings. For this access to industrial or personal archives is required, interviews with former designers is even better. One cannot just download a bunch of drawnings from Internet. And while I know to which doors knocking in France, I just don't have this kind of access for Sweden, Russia, USA etc...

Note : Even with my efforts to flesh out the research for french secret projects 1, I have been criticized for just that : compiling drawings without any meaningful stories behind them.

JCC

 

[athpilot]

Hi Mr. Carbonel! Today I received my copy of French Secret Projects 2: it´s really great and well researched. One of the most interesting items to me is the time when the 3rd Reich tried to use the french aviation industry for their own pusposes. This is not only a matter of aircrafts but also of the economic concepts of nazi-Germany. We know that the germans intended to cooperat and trade with their occupied araes in the west: they wanted to install some kind of free-trade zone under their supremacy. From Norway to France and Benelux to Italy. But we do not know much about how this should particularly work. And the whole east (Poland, Soviet Union) was treated as a zone for pure exploitation. So this is one more thing I would like to see a third Volume that covers the timeframe until (or better: including) the german occupation.

Cheers

 

[newsdeskdan]

Hi Mr. Carbonel! Today I received my copy of French Secret Projects 2: it´s really great and well researched. One of the most interesting items to me is the time when the 3rd Reich tried to use the french aviation industry for their own pusposes. This is not only a matter of aircrafts but also of the economic concepts of nazi-Germany. We know that the germans intended to cooperat and trade with their occupied araes in the west: they wanted to install some kind of free-trade zone under their supremacy. From Norway to France and Benelux to Italy. But we do not know much about how this should particularly work. And the whole east (Poland, Soviet Union) was treated as a zone for pure exploitation. So this is one more thing I would like to see a third Volume that covers the timeframe until (or better: including) the german occupation.

Cheers

You mean this sort of thing (see attached). Yes, that would be good.

 

[Archibald]

Frecnh spaceplaaaaaaaaaaanes ! Alas, it only ranks 3rd so far. Dang.