For a few extraordinary years before the First World War, France was the centre of the flying world. While the Wright brothers guarded their patents across the Atlantic, it was on French airfields — Issy-les-Moulineaux, Port-Aviation at Juvisy, the great meeting ground at Reims — that aviation became a public spectacle, a sport and an industry all at once. We’ve spent recent months digitising a collection of press photographs from this period, and the deeper we got into them, the more it struck us how little of this material is widely seen today.
The collection runs from 1908, when powered flight in Europe was barely a year old, through to the long-distance ambitions of the early 1930s. Its heart is the pre-war “meeting” era — the air shows that pulled tens of thousands of spectators out to watch fragile biplanes haul themselves around pylon courses. The Grande Semaine d’Aviation at Reims in August 1909 was the first of the great ones, and the shots of the hangar line at Bétheny, rival machines parked wingtip to wingtip, catch a moment when nobody yet knew which design would win. The makers read like a roll-call of early flight — Farman, Breguet, Nieuport, SPAD, Caudron, Voisin, Blériot — sitting alongside names that have all but vanished, like Schreck, Paul Schmitt and the curious Appareil Fernandez.
The water-flying images are some of the most charming. There’s a Voisin hydroplane actually called Le Canard paddling about on the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt in 1911, the Monaco seaplane meetings with Breguet and SPAD floatplanes being craned in and out of the harbour, and a lovely frame of Eugène Renaux taking a Farman seaplane around a lighthouse at the Saint-Malo meeting in 1912. The aviators are here too — Louis Paulhan over Port-Aviation, Henry Rougier’s Voisin at the 1910 Nice meeting, Georges Kirsch and his Nieuport at the 1920 Gordon Bennett Cup at Étampes.
One photograph stops you cold. Charles Nungesser and François Coli, readying the Levasseur L’Oiseau Blanc — the White Bird — at Le Bourget in 1927, taken only days before they lifted off for New York and were never seen again. It remains one of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries. Not far from it sits the Farman Goliath being prepared in 1919 for a flight to Dakar, an early reach toward the great trunk routes that would soon become Aéropostale.
Every image has been scanned at very high resolution from the original glass plates and period prints, which is why the detail holds up the way it does — rigging wires, the weave of the fabric, the faces in the grandstands. Press photographs like these were never made to survive; that any reached us in this condition is mostly down to luck.
We’re still working through the identifications — early French aviation is a deep and occasionally contradictory field — and we’d genuinely welcome corrections from anyone who knows it well. In the meantime the collection is online to browse, and individual images are available for licensing and as fine-art prints.