SNCASE Armagnac
French long range airliner with 4 piston engines, 1949
The SNCASE S.E.2010 Armagnac was a large French airliner of the late 1940s built by SNCASE (Sud-Est). The aircraft's disappointing performance and range prevented it from achieving commercial success. Although the SNCASE Armagnac did not have a sterling career, its passenger compartment design gave it a much roomier feel and greater capacity and foreshadowed the future wide-body jet airliners.
Design and development
Designed originally around a French requirement for an 87-passenger, long range airliner issued in 1942, the S.E. 2000 was to have been powered by four 2,100 hp Gnome-Rhône 18R engines. At an early stage, the S.E. 2000 was abandoned in favour of a larger, more capable version, the S.E. 2010 Armagnac.
The Armagnac was a cantilever mid-wing monoplane with retractable tricycle landing gear designed for transatlantic service. A number of versions were planned from a 60-passenger "sleeping berth" version to 84-passenger, 108-passenger and 160-passenger versions.
After delays to the planning because of wartime conditions, work proceeded quickly at Toulouse, Marseilles and Paris, where various components were being built and tested. The Armagnac was designed from the outset in a Cook-Craigie production line prior to the first prototype which flew on 2 April 1949 with Sud-Est Chief Pilot Pierre Nadot at the controls but was lost on 30 January 1950 while still undergoing tests. The first production series aircraft F-BAVD flew on 30 December 1950.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “SNCASE Armagnac” is french long range airliner with 4 piston engines, 1949. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through SNCASE, Armagnac and French, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 25, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q848024. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 1942, 2000 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “SNCASE Armagnac” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.