SPAD

SPAD was an aeronautical manufacturer French.

Beginnings - the Deperdussin era

The company of the Deperdussin Airplanes was created by Armand Deperdussin in 1911. It had been successively commercial traveller, then chansonnier with Brussels and had made quickly fortune in the trade of the Soie, it was impassioned for aviation as of 1908.

Under its direction it was then the company of the Deperdussin Airplanes. The seat of the company was with Bétheny, close to Rheims, after having had its first hangars with Laon-Chambry as of 1909.

It is this year there that Armand Deperdussin met the engineer Louis Béchereau, a great regard was established very quickly between them, one having the capital, the other the genius of the technical innovation. He immediately entrusted to Béchereau the technical direction of the company, this last developed the famous monoshells types to with it; Jules Védrines brought back the Coupe Gordon Bennett to France in 1912, regained the following year by Maurice Prévost with Rheims - Bétheny on the same type of apparatus exceeding for the first time the bar of the 200 km covered in hour (205,5 km).

In 1912, the company taken administratively the name of Production company of the Airplanes Deperdussin (S.P.A.D.) but it was known by way of press only under the name of Deperdussin, character strong in vogue in the Parisian world of the time and whose arrest, for very discussed reasons always (embezzlement), in August 1913 made very great noise, its judgment was to be marked only… the March 10th 1917. He was declared guilty, condemned to 5 years of prison but was immediately released with the title of the French law as regards primary delinquency and dealt never again with aviation. When it committed suicide in a hotel room in 1924, it had 30 francs out of pocket.

During the Deperdussin era the following models were developed:

Standard Deperdussin B
Deperdussin Monoshell

The Blériot era

To the Air Show which opened its doors the December 5th 1913, the firm very badly in point juridically but with the fact of its technical glory, exposed three new monoplanes of which the winner of the last cut Gordon Bennett of the November 28th.

The Deperdussin business was initially taken again by the firm of mechanical engineering automobile Delaunay-Belleville and the receiver Raynaud operates to lodge the Deperdussin patent applications the equipment of planes. They included the remarkable patent n°475 151 of the January 22nd 1914 protecting a system from shooting through the axis of the propeller.

In August 1914, a group of industrialist led by Louis Blériot assembled a new business which acquired the credits of the company. At that time the design of famous future SPAD was already on the drawing table of Louis Béchereau. And when it is a question of giving a name to this new military apparatus, Alfred Leblanc, the right-hand man of Blériot and old victorious of the Circuit of the east in 1910, set on an international idiom which made fury at the time, the Volapük, had the idea to take again the name of Spad, which in this universal language meant " vitesse". It was adopted from the start and these four letters made it possible to preserve the acronym initial all while changing some the significance, that became: Company (anonymous) For Aviation and its Derivatives . Thus into the lapse of memory the name fell from Armand Deperdussin, after a too short fame which had carried it to the firmament.

Under the direction of Blériot the following models were developed:

SPAD HAS 1
SPAD HAS 2

SPAD has 3
SPAD has 4
SPAD has 5
SPAD S.VII
SPAD S.XII
SPAD S.XIII
Blériot-SPAD S.XVII
Blériot-SPAD S.XVIII
Blériot-SPAD S.XX
SPAD S.26
SPAD S.31

End of the company

Planes SPAD knew their hour of glory during the First World War, Louis Béchereau, the chief technical officer received the July 7th 1917 the Croix of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of the hands even of the captain Guynemer who had largely contributed to the development of the SPAD VII, XII and XIII, with the November 11th, 1918 15.977 SPAD of any types had been built; but after 1918 the reputation of the company declined. Louis Blériot not having very appreciated the fact that Béchereau pays a homage supported to Armand Deperdussin lasting his lawsuit in 1917, Louis Béchereau left the company for that of the Avions Bernard where it continued to direct the construction of the last 2500 SPAD financed by the state to this company while having the insurance to be able to carry out theoretically carrying plans for the future in parallel. In addition Louis Blériot who had created after the war a new company for the manufacture of civil aircrafts, the company Blériot Aéronautique , became of this fact a competitor of his own company. Thus in 1921 company SPAD was integrated into the company Blériot Aéronautique and in 1936 the company of Blériot was nationalized.

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