#sud aviation

[usafphantom2]

A ‘Vautour’ II.N, the all-weather fighter variant of the twin-engine SO.4050 ‘Vautour’, here in the colours of Normandie-Niemen.

© Collection Jean-Paul Barillot

@AviationMarlene via X 🇫🇷

[airsllides]

airsLLide No. 636: F-GCJT, Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle 10B3, EAS Europe Aero Service, Paris-Orly, July 12, 1986

In the mid-80s, EAS offered seasonal charter flights out of various airports in France, using a pair of Boeing 727s and up to five Caravelle 10B - with occasional subleases, that number tended to oscillate. The carrier's maintenance base and headquarters was located in Perpignan, the bulk of operations was however concentrated on Paris-Orly airport.

Apart from the charter flights, EAS regularly also provided substitute capacity to Air Inter's domestic scheduled flights, mainly in the off-season when demand for tourist flights was lower.

And to reinstate - the full titles of the airline was Europe Aero Service, the missing letters in the above picture seem to have peeled off and were not replaced for some time.

[nocternalrandomness]

Alouette III's on the flight line at Air Base Alpnach

[opelman]

F-MGEX / 4229 - Sud Aviation (Aérospatiale) SA 342 L1 Gazelle by Laurent Quérité Via Flickr: Meeting Aérien Airshow Aérotorshow 2024 Alat French Army Valence Chabeuil LFLU France IMG_7779

[bigglesworld]

Sud-Aviation SE-210 Caravelle III ‘Dauphine’. Type first flew in 1955. 80 passenger AC. At Ringway EGCC. In 1965

[airsllides]

airsLLide No. 44066: F-ZACE, Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle III, Centre d'Essais en Vol, Montelimar, April 8, 2023

Preserved on Display: The small general aviation airfield of Montelimar-Ancone in Southern France is home to the European Fighter Aircraft Museum (or Musée Européen de l'Aviation de Chasse as it is officially called in French). Apart from a vast indoor and outdoor collection of miltary aircraft, it is also home to a former airborne research Caravelle of the French Aeronautical Institute as well as a Dassault Falcon 20 jet used by the same institution.

[airsllides]

airsLLide No. 1343: ex SE-DAA, Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle III, SAS Scandinavian Airline System, Stockholm Arlanda, July 15, 1987

Lost and Forgotten: We dive into the month of August with a series of tributes to those battered, rusty, forlorn relicts that end up in a corner of many an airport where a once glorious silverbird of the skies ends her career as fire trainer, spare donnor, object of a decade-long legal conflict or simply as abandoned ship of an unresponsive owner.

Scandinavian Airline System SAS - whose insignia you can still partially trace on the tail - entered the jet age on April 26, 1959 when it became the first commercial customer to fly the brand-new French short-haul jet, the SE-210 Caravelle I. The ship named «Finn Viking» welcomed the first ever paying customers to fly the elegant jet just days before the French national carrier Air France began commercial operations with the type. «Finn Viking» was the third of 272 Caravelles ever built, and it wore the tail number LN-KLH.

Over 28 years after this historic day of glory at SAS, her younger sister SE-DAA «Eskil Viking» who rolled off the production line as the forth Caravelle, i.e. immediately behind «Finn Viking», sits in front of Stockholm Arlanda's airport fire station, alone and stripped of all glory. A big thank you here to the duty officer who was kind enough to open the gate for to two travelling aviation enthusiasts, allowing them a quick shot and visual inspection of that white old Caravelle the fire crews used for training purposes.

[airsllides]

airsLLide No. 910: SE-DHA, Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle 10B3, Transwede, Las Palmas, March 30, 1987

Scandinavian carriers had no inhibitions using short-range airliners such as the Caravelle on pretty long flights - think of Sterling Airways who used Caravelles even to serve intercontinental destinations, flying the type to Asia and North America, albeit with fuel-stops en-route.

Transwede, formed in spring 1985 with three units of the type and operating out of , was no exception to this rule. It's former Finnair Caravelle above had some six hours to go on her flight from Sweden, presumably from the carrier's base Stockholm Arlanda or Malmö in the South, to Las Palmas on the Canary Islands.

Transwede later replaced the ageing French airliners with more state-of-the art MD-83s specifically designed for extended range flights to leisure destinations, before it was ultimately acquired by Braathens of Norway in 1996 and rebranded as Braathens Sverige (i.e. Sweden).