Description

French language text and captions.
In 1959, Henry Potez launched a project for a short-haul civil aircraft with four turboprops, which should restore the position it occupied among pre-war French aircraft manufacturers. Its objective: to replace the hundreds of DC-3s still flying around the world. But the P.840 finds neither customers nor support from the State.
Pierre Parvaud immerses us in the French political-industrial world of the 1960s, with all the twists and turns of the program. With the Potez engineers, he makes us follow the day by day design, testing and development of the 84 and its derivatives 840, 841 and 842. He describes without complacency the obstinacy of Henry Potez for the success of his program and its industrial strategy errors.
Supported by detailed technical reports, embellished with very rich iconography, this work takes stock of a program about which very little has been published to date. A program which will have led Air Fouga and Morane-Saulnier to their ruin rather than saving them. And which, despite itself, will have been one of the instruments of the re-composition of the French aeronautical landscape of the 70s.