Blériot Aéronautique

Blériot Aéronautique was a French aircraft manufacturer founded by Louis Blériot. It also made a few motorcycles between 1921 and 1922 and cyclecars during the 1920s.

Louis Blériot was an engineer who had developed the first practical headlamp for cars and had established a successful business marketing them. In 1901 he had built a small unmanned ornithopter, but his serious involvement with aviation began in April 1905 when he witnessed Gabriel Voisin's first experiments with a floatplane glider towed behind a motorboat on the river Seine. A brief partnership with Voisin followed, but after the failure of the Blériot III and its modified version, the Blériot IV, the partnership was dissolved and Blériot set up his own company, "Recherches Aéronautique Louis Blériot" (Louis Blériot Aeronautical Research).

Blériot XI as first built

Unlike the business started by Gabriel Voisin, which was a straightforward design and manufacturing concern with Voisin acting as aircraft designer, Bleriot's establishment was, as its name suggests, essentially a privately funded research establishment, employing various engineers and designers. Owing to this it is difficult to establish the extent of Blériot's involvement in the actual design of the aircraft which bear his name. Over the next few years a series of aircraft of varying configurations were produced, each one marginally more successful than its predecessor, and culminating in the Type XI with which he became famous for being the first to fly across the English Channel in 1909.

The publicity gained by this achievement brought the company orders for large numbers of the Type XI, and several hundred were eventually made. This commercial success enabled the research side of the business to expand considerably, and in the years before the First World War a startlingly heterogeneous collection of aircraft were produced, although none came close to being as successful as the Type XI.

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