ALOUETTE, GENTILLE ALOUETTE

Predictable and vice-free − although very thirsty − the dependable Alouette’s handling would suit a low-time pilot

- Pat Malone

Seventy years ago the French aviation company Sud Est designed and built a helicopter called the Alouette, and it was a bit of a dog. The celebrated test pilot Jean Boulet wrung an impressive performance out of the prototype when he set a world closed-circuit distance record of 675nm, but the company knew it was in a blind alley−such oddities as twin tail rotors mounted on a V-shaped tail, and the lack of puff from a 200hp Salmson piston engine, meant that this particular Alouette never went into production.

So Sud Est decided to do something really radical. They kept the powertrain and discarded almost everything else, and most importantly they decided they were going to make their old dog into the first production helicopter in the world with a turbine engine. At the time, this was far from a no-brainer. Turbines were temperamental, used lots of fuel and had short lives and greedy maintenance appetites, and they were treated with suspicion by right-thinking engineers. But Sud Est had to take a leap of faith to make their Alouette fly, and they decided to risk it.

They found what they needed in the premises of a Polish refugee called Josef Sydlowski, who’d been working in Germany but had fled Nazi-era anti-semitism and taken his engineering genius to a little town called Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre in southern France. After the German invasion he had further removed himself to Switzerland. His company, which he called Turbomeca, ticked over during the occupation, and when the unpleasantness was over Sydlowski went back and began to develop turbine engines.