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Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés
SPAD was a French aircraft manufacturer.
Deperdussin
The company was set up in 1911 as the Société des Aéroplanes Deperdussin, becoming the Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes Deperdussin in 1912. Founder Armand Deperdussin had been a travelling salesman and a cabaret singer in Brussels, before making his fortune in the silk business. Deperdussin became fascinated by aviation in 1908, and in 1909 he established an aircraft works at Laon. Deperdussin himself was not a noted designer, but he hired the talented engineer Louis Béchereau as technical director. Béchereau would be responsible for SPAD aircraft designs thereafter.
The first SPAD aircraft built in any quantity were the Deperdussin TT and the Deperdussin Monocoque. Both were mid-wing braced monoplanes, similar to Louis Blériot's Blériot XI, and the Nieuport 4, a layout popular with military and civilian clients in the period before the First World War. The TT was a considerable export success, and 63 were built by the Lebedev company in Russia. The model was also purchased in small number by foreign clients from Deperdussin, and built at Highgate, England by the British Deperdussin Company, run by D Lawrence Santoni and John Cyril Porte[1].
The first Schneider Trophy competition was run on 16 April, 1913, at Monaco and won by a Deperdussin Monocoque at an average speed of 45.75 mph (about 73 km/h).
In 1913, Armand Deperdussin was arrested on charges of fraud. He was not brought to trial until 1917. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, but released immediately as it was a first offence. Deperdussin never recovered from the incident and committed suicide in 1924.
Béchereau
With Deperdussin's disgrace, the future of the SPAD company was endangered. A consortium led by Louis Blériot bought up the company's assets in 1913 and appointed Béchereau to run the business. The new entity, known as the Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés, was better known as SPAD.
Early Béchereau-SPAD designs serving during the First World War were unusual two-seat biplanes which combined aspects of pusher and tractor configuration, known as a push-pull configuration. The pilot sat behind the airscrew, as in a tractor design, but the gunner was seated in nacelle, or pulpit, in front of the propellor, attached to the landing gear. These designs, the SPAD A-series of models A.1, A.2, A.3, and A.4, were built in very small numbers, around sixty each for French and Russian air forces, and were neither popular nor successful. Other early Béchereau designs were generally less successful. Only the SE, a large twin-engine biplane bomber, was successful on trials, but it was not ordered due to the even greater success of Béchereau's next design.
Béchereau's first real success was the SPAD S.VII. Developed from the SPAD 5, of which 268 were ordered but none certainly built as SPAD 5s, the SPAD S.VII was a single-seat tractor biplane fighter of simple and robust design powered by the new Hispano-Suiza water-cooled V-8 engine. Compared to earlier fighters, when the SPAD 7 appeared in 1916, it seemed a heavy and unmanoeuvrable aircraft, but pilots soon learned to take advantage of its speed and strength. Some 3,500 SPAD S.VIIs were built in France during the First World War, 120 in Britain, and 100 in Russia, although far more had been ordered from a new factory in Yaroslavl which was not completed until after the Russian Civil War.
Béchereau's subsequent designs until 1918 followed the basic outline of the SPAD S.VII. The two-seaters, the SPAD 11 and SPAD 16, were built in moderate numbers, around 1000 of each type, but two-seater SPADs were much less successful than the rival Breguet 14 (5,500 built) and Salmson 2 (3,200 built). Single-seat developments of the SPAD 7 were more successful. The SPAD 12 was a minor variant, the first to use the geared output Hispano-Suiza V-8 engine, which allowed it to be armed with a 37 mm Hotchkiss cannon (moteur-canon) firing through the propellor hub. Tested successfully by ace Georges Guynemer, the general conclusion on the SPAD 12 is that only very skillful pilots could exploit its powerful armament. Accordingly, although 300 were ordered, most were completed as normal SPAD fighters, with possibly one or two of the SPAD XII aircraft even serving with the US Air Service in France.
The SPAD S.XIII was essentially the SPAD S.VII redesigned around a more powerful, geared drive Hispano-Suiza engine, as was used on the SPAD XII. This was produced in even greater numbers, the exact total is uncertain with figures from 7300 to 8472 being quoted in different sources. Single-seat SPADs were flown by many ace pilots, including Italy's Count Francesco Baracca and the United States Army Air Service's Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, two of the Entente's highest-scoring aces of WWI, with 34 and 26 victories respectively. Georges Guynemer was, as has already been noted, highly successful with the SPAD S.XII, as well as the SPAD S.VII and SPAD S.XIII. At the end of the First World War, all 1152 single-seat fighters on the strength of French front line air units were SPAD 13s. It is reported that nearly 900 SPAD XIII fighters were eventually to end up in American service.
Although SPAD had been successful, and had reaped very large profits, the very high profits in aircraft manufacturing had led to increased competition during the war. In 1916, for example, over 98% of the SPAD fighters built had come from factories owned by SPAD and Blériot. By 1918, with large industrial concerns competing for contracts, this had fallen to 43%. SPAD designs accounted for around 20% of French aircraft produced during World War One. Louis Blériot's 1913 investment was a very profitable one.
Blériot-SPAD
Post-war the company became Blériot-SPAD. The first of its designs to be known by this name was Bécherau's elegant monocoque SPAD 20 biplane. First flown in 1918, the SPAD 20 was not delivered until 1920. The return of peace meant orders were small; only 93 were built.
The return of peace also meant that the company had to face the problem of dealing with its liabilities under the excess profits tax of 1 July 1916. As modified in 1917, this imposed an 80% tax rate on almost all "excess profits". The calculation and collection of the tax was a controversial issue, and very large amounts were still outstanding as late as 1940, when the German occupation rendered the whole question irrelevant. With the future uncertain, SPAD was fully incorporated into the Blériot organisation in 1921, and the company effectively disappeared, although a number of Blériot types were marked as SPADs.
References
- Davilla, James M. & Arthur M. Soltan, French Aircraft of the First World War. Flying Machines Press, Stratfort, Connecticut, 1997. ISBN 0-9637110-4-0
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