Henri Fabre

Henri Fabre (* June 29, 1882 Marseille; † 1 July 1984) was a French aviation pioneer, who in 1910 performed the first flight in a seaplane.

Life

Henri Fabre was an engineer who examined the aircraft from Louis Bleriot and Gabriel Voisin early. Then he decided in 1909 to start with the construction of the first prototype of a seaplane. Fabre has invested a lot of time in the construction of the float. This knowledge helped him later to equip foreign aircraft with floats.

The prototype, however, had only a weak 18 kW (25 hp) motor and therefore did not fly. The next machine was a powerful 37 kW ( 50 hp ) Gnôme radial engine. He named the aircraft Hydravion.

Fabre had never flown, and it required some courage to rely on his delicate aircraft. The Hydravion seaplane was conceptually a duck aircraft in grid construction and had a pusher propeller.

On March 28, 1910, the start attempts began in Martigues near Marseilles. The second launch was successful, and the plane flew about 600 m. The next day it was even 6 km. The filigree Hydravion proved to be very stable. After a crash while landing the aircraft was revised. In April 1911, the new version started with the pilot Jean Bécue in Monaco. However, the aircraft was destroyed in the strong surf on the shore.

As Fabre had no financial reserves, he presented the construction of new aircraft and built a float henceforth, eg for Voisin.

The Hydravion can be seen in the Musée de l'Air et de l' Espace at Le Bourget today.

Fabre flew around a year before Glenn Curtiss and is thus regarded as the builder of the first fully functional seaplane. According to some sources, although they undertook already in 1901 the Austrian Wilhelm Kress attempts to fly a seaplane, but this is still controversial.