Been meaning to put these up for a while. I've been working through a stack of old French press photographs — roughly 1908 to the early 1930s — scanning them from the original glass plates, and there's a fair bit in there I'd never seen before.
The pre-war meeting stuff is the part I keep coming back to: Reims in 1909, the Nice meetings, the Monaco hydravion contests with Breguet and SPAD floatplanes being craned about. There's a lovely shot of a Voisin hydroplane called 'Le Canard' on the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt in 1911, and Eugène Renaux flying a Farman seaplane round a lighthouse at Saint-Malo in 1912. The one that got me, though, is Nungesser and Coli getting the Levasseur 'White Bird' ready at Le Bourget in 1927, only days before they vanished over the Atlantic.
A lot of the smaller makers I'd honestly never heard of — Schreck, Paul Schmitt, the big Bréguet 'Léviathan' transport — so I've had to do a fair bit of digging to work out what's what.
Stuck the collection up here if anyone fancies a browse — nothing to buy, I just reckon they deserve to be seen rather than sitting in a box:
https://www.professionalaviationphot...eers-1908-1932
And if you spot anything I've labelled wrong — aircraft, pilot, location or date — please shout. Early French aviation isn't my strong suit and a few of the captions are educated guesses at best.