Pioneer of French Civil Aviation
After World War I, Commandant Saconney became President of the Commission for the Application of Meteorology to Aerial Navigation, which later became the International Commission for Aeronautical Meteorology. This Commission provided guidance and coordination to the International Aeronautical Meteorology. This commission was part of the International Meteorological Organization (IMO), the predecessor of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which was established in 1919. At that time, he was reckoned to be the authority in his field.
Then he was in charge of organising French civil aviation. Between 1919 and 1922, Colonel Saconney was the director of the civil aviation (see in this respect "Le Plan Saconney" . In a report from the National Advisory Committee for aeronautics, entitled “commercial aviation in France” (1922), it was said that the first step of the creation of the commercial aviation in France was realised by Colonel Saconney. The report states that between 1919 to 1922, the French commercial aviation acquired its first experience and its supremacy by setting permanent air routes between Paris-London, Paris-Brussels, Paris-Strasbourg-Prague-Warsaw, Paris-Geneva, Bordeaux-Toulouse-Montpellier, Nimes-Marseilles, Toulouse-Casablanca and Bayonne-Bilbao. According to General Nudant, Saconney was the architect of the French military and civil aviation. Further, he launched the creation of different airports including the Aéroport de Marseille on the Étang de Berre ](see Louis François, L'aéroport de Marseille-Marignane, « Les Études rhodaniennes », 1929, vol. V, 5-1, p. 163).
In 1922, he rejoined the army and became a member of the Council of the French Air Force and went up in the military hierarchy.
Saconney inaugurated in 1926, with the Mayor of Dijon, the first air-lighthouse, specially designed for air navigation. sited on the Mont Afrique ((fr)).
Saconney died in Dijon on 14 July 1935 leaving behind him two sons and one daughter.
Read more about this topic: Jacques Theodore Saconney
Famous quotes containing the words pioneer, french and/or civil:
“Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Central heating, French rubber goods, and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man’s ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)