The heavy transport that proved to be the ultimate manifestation of Louis Breguet’s interest in flying leviathans
DEVELOPMENT
Born on 2 January 1880, Louis Breguet was among the founding fathers of the French aviation industry. Initially his interest was in rotary wings, something that persevered until his death on 4 May 1955 through a series of gyroplanes and even a fan-in-wing design. That was his inventor side. But he was also an industrialist who conceived many successful aircraft, the most famous being the First World War-era Breguet XIV bomber, which earned him the nickname ‘Louis XIV’, after the French ‘Sun King’. In the early 1920s, he built the types XX, XXI and XXII under the umbrella name ‘Leviathan’. They were indeed sizeable machines, propelled by four engines in different configurations — the first design had all four driving a single propeller. This was Breguet’s first venture into big transports, though the XXI was bought by the army and became a bomber. During that decade and into the 1930s he advocated large aircraft for the transport of cargo and passengers including two trans-Atlantic designs: one a high-speed helicopter, the other a flying wing.
Therefore it should be no surprise that before World War Two …
