Vocation : Travel : Aviation field

Louis Pierre Mouillard (September 30, 1834 – September 20, 1897) was a French artist and innovator who worked on human mechanical flight in the second half of the 19th century. He based much of his work on the investigation of birds in Algeria and Cairo. Around the early 1900s he was considered the father of aviation.
Mouillard's most famous work, L'Empire de l'Air, in which he proposed fixed-wing gliders, was published in France in 1881 and soon became a widely recognized classic. It was translated into English by the Smithsonian Institution in their annual report of 1892 and reprinted in 1893 as The Empire Of The Air.
Mouillard studied at the School of Fine Arts at Lyon and Paris but settled in Algeria at Mitidja after the death of his father. Here he constructed several gliders before returning to France in 1865. Around this time he managed to glide 138 feet at about 30 feet height. He also described the use of a screw to provide lift and propulsion to a glider in 1890. He was appointed a professor of drawing at the Cairo Polytechnic in 1866 during which time he took a lot of interest in the flight of vultures. He studied the requirements of gliding flight in birds. In 1897 his design was patented in the United States of America by Octave Chanute. His biographer Arthur Henry Couannier posthumously published a book on gliding flight in 1912 titled Le vol sans battement (flight without flapping). He foresaw the use of aluminium as the metal of choice for aircraft and was possibly the first - with the possible exception of British engineer M.P.W. Boulton in 1868 - to introduce control surfaces to the wing.
Mouillard realized the importance of wings, gliding and the future of aviation at a time when balloons were considered the only practical way to carry humans and flapping machines had failed. He inspired the work of many others including Octave Chanute and Otto Lilienthal. Mouillard was described by Wilbur Wright as one of the greatest missionaries of the flying cause. Mouillard believed that flight would unify the world, that the empire of the air would be for all humanity to own and that it would eliminate the need for boundaries and armies. He has been termed as a utopian:
C'est même la suppression, dans un temps très court, des nationalités: les races seront rapidement mélangées ou détruites, car il n'y aura plus de barrières possibles, pas même ces barrières mouvantes qui se nomment les armées. Plus de frontières!... plus d'îles!... plus de forteresses!... où allons-nous? Il faut bien avouer que nous sommes en face de la plus large expression de l'inconnu ... Nous pouvons donc nous rasséréner et contempler ce but avec calme: ce phare, c'est cette immense loi de la nature qui se nomme le progrès; et progrès est synonyme de bien.
Translated: "This will result in the rapid removal of nationalities: races will be mixed or quickly destroyed, as there will be no barriers, not even these moving barriers that are called armies. No more borders! ... or islands! ... or fortresses! ... Where are we going? We must admit that we are facing the great unknown [...] But we can reassure ourselves of the results, this is the law of nature we call progress, and progress is synonymous with good."

Mouillard died, largely unrecognized and in poverty, at Cairo in 1897. In February 1912 a statue was erected in Cairo to his memory. The statue was made by Guillaume Laplagne and was erected on a black basalt base and was located near the Heliopolis Grand Hotel but this no longer exists. The base of the pedestal bears the word Oser! meaning "dare" which he had printed on the cover of his book. The vulture in front of the pedestal is based on his illustration used in his 1881 book. Rue Pierre-Mouillard is a Paris street named in his honour.

Pierre-Georges Latécoère (French: [pjɛʁ ʒɔʁʒ latekɔɛʁ]; 1883–1943) was a pioneer of aeronautics. Born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, he studied in the École Centrale Paris and, during the First World War, started a business in aeronautics. He directed plants that made planes and opened the first airlines that operated from France to Africa and South America.
Pierre-Georges Latécoère was the founder of the aeronautical industry in Toulouse. As the son of the owner of a sawmill in Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the Pyrenees, he took an early interest in technology. In 1903, after an outstanding secondary school career he began his degree at the Parisian Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. On returning to the Pyrenees he modernized his father's firm, specializing in the manufacture of railway wagons. Thus, during the First World War, the profits from government contracts allowed him to set up a large, modern factory in the Toulouse suburb of Montaudran. Before doing so, he had also produced a rush order of 600 Salmson aircraft, which the army urgently needed. Having become an aeronautical enthusiast, he decided to create the company Société des lignes Latécoère (later known as Aéropostale), carrying mail from France to Morocco, Senegal and South America - the first aircraft being flown by such well-known pilots as Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry. Finally, he started manufacturing aircraft in his own name, and notably the great seaplanes such as the Latécoère 631.
The Latécoère company still exists in 2024.

Émile Dewoitine (26 September 1892 – 5 July 1979) was a French aviation industrialist.

Valérie André (French pronunciation: [valeʁi ɑ̃dʁe] ; born 21 April 1922) is a veteran of the French Resistance, a neurosurgeon, an aviator and the first female member of the military to achieve the rank of General Officer, in 1976, as Physician General. In 1981, she was promoted to Inspector General of Medicine. A helicopter pilot, she is the first woman to have piloted a helicopter in a combat zone. She is also a founding member of the Académie de l'air et de l'espace.As a member of the military, she is not addressed as "Madame la Générale" (a term reserved for spouses of generals) but as "General".She started as a Medical Captain in Indochina in 1948, already a qualified parachutist and pilot, in addition to being an army surgeon. While in Indochina, she realized that the most difficult part of her duties was retrieving the wounded, who were often trapped in the jungle. She returned to France to learn how to pilot a helicopter, then flew one to Indochina. From 1952–1953, she piloted 129 helicopter missions into the jungle, rescuing 165 soldiers, and on two occasions completed parachute jumps to treat wounded soldiers who needed immediate surgery.One typical mission occurred on 11 December 1951, when casualties were in urgent need of evacuation from Tu Vu on the Black River. The only available helicopter, stationed near Saigon, was dismantled, flown to Hanoi by a Bristol Freighter and reassembled. Captain André then flew into Tu Vu despite heavy mist and anti-aircraft fire. There, she triaged the casualties, operated on the most pressing cases and then flew the urgent wounded back to Hanoi, two at a time. Later, she was put in command of a casualty evacuation flight.
She continued in Algeria as a Medical Commander in 1960, where she completed 365 war missions. She rose to the rank of Medical Lieutenant Colonel in 1965 then to Medical Colonel in 1970. She had a total of 3200 flight hours, and received 7 citations of the Croix de Guerre.
She has written two collections of memoirs : Ici, Ventilateur! Extraits d'un carnet de vol. (Calmann-Lévy, 1954) and Madame le général (Perrin, 1988).
She is one of eight women to hold the Grand-croix (Great Cross) rank in the Legion of Honour, with Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Jacqueline de Romilly, Simone Rozès, Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Yvette Farnoux and Gilberte Champion.
She is the aunt of politician André Santini.
She turned 100 on 21 April 2022.

Stéphane Abrial (French pronunciation: [abʁiɑl]; born 7 September 1954), is a French general who is the previous commander of Allied Command Transformation based in Norfolk, VA, one of the two NATO strategic commands. His previous posting was as the Chief of Staff of the French Air Force.

Jacques Loussier (26 October 1934 – 5 March 2019) was a French pianist and composer. He arranged jazz interpretations of many of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, such as the Goldberg Variations. The Jacques Loussier Trio, founded in 1959, played more than 3,000 concerts and sold more than 7 million recordings—mostly in the Bach series. Loussier composed film scores and a number of classical pieces, including a Mass, a ballet, and violin concertos. His style is described as third stream, a synthesis of jazz and classical music, with an emphasis on improvisation.

Adrienne Bolland, born Boland, (25 November 1895 – 18 March 1975) was a French test pilot. She was the first woman to fly over the Andes between Chile and Argentina. She was later described as "France's most accomplished female aviator", setting a woman's record for loops done in an hour. The French government eventually recognized her with the Legion of Honor and other awards. Since her death, she has been commemorated with a postage stamp of Argentina.
Born into a large family outside Paris, she became a pilot in her twenties to pay off gambling debts. An early crossing of the English Channel led René Caudron, her employer, to send her to South America to demonstrate his planes, where she made her Andes crossing, assisted, she later said, by a tip relayed to her from a medium. Later in her life she became involved in leftist political causes, and eventually became part of the French Resistance.

Pierre Pouyade (25 June 1911 – 5 September 1979) was a French Air Force general, World War II flying ace, and a commander of the Normandie-Niemen squadron. By the end of the War he had scored eight solo victories and two group victories, all but one on the Eastern Front.

Jacqueline Auriol (French pronunciation: [ʒaklin oʁjɔl]; 5 November 1917, Challans, Vendée – 11 February 2000) was a French aviator who set several world speed records.