Caudron C.445 Goéland
The Caudron C.445 Goéland was a French six-seat light twin of wooden construction, the principal production model of the Goéland family that first appeared in 1934. The Armée de l'Air adopted it as the C.445M for communications and crew training, Air Bleu flew it on night mail routes, and it was exported to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Spain. Production continued under German occupation, with aircraft built for the Germans and others requisitioned, while further Goélands served the Vichy regime and French units operating from Britain. Production restarted after 1945, including 510 post-war C.445/3s, and Air France employed the type as a crew trainer for many years. The family's production totalled 1,702 aircraft, among them 114 C.445s and 404 C.445Ms; no Goéland survives today.
Why It Mattered
The Goéland was a six-seat French light twin that first appeared in 1934, and its C.445 version became the family's principal production model before the Second World War. It mattered because it gave France a standard small transport that doubled as a crew trainer: the Armée de l'Air took the type as the C.445M for communications duties and crew training. Production of all versions reached 1,702 aircraft, a run that continued under German occupation and restarted after the war. Air France was still employing its Goélands as crew trainers many years after the war ended.
Design Notes
Marcel Riffard designed the Goéland to meet a need for a fast, economical and comfortable transport carrying a limited number of passengers. The structure was wood: a two-spar wing of spruce and plywood with a plywood skin, and a fuselage that was likewise plywood-skinned except for its nose section and upper decking, which had stressed sheet-metal covering. Flaps occupied the whole trailing edge of the wing inboard of the ailerons and extended beneath the fuselage. The main landing gear retracted rearwards to lie wholly enclosed within the engine nacelles. The cabin accommodated six passengers, with baggage holds fore and aft and a toilet at the rear; the pilot and co-pilot sat side by side with dual controls, the co-pilot doubling as wireless operator. The C.445 itself kept the counter-rotating propellers introduced on the C.444 and increased the dihedral of the outer wing panels.
Operational History
Before the war, the Armée de l'Air adopted the C.445 as the C.445M and used it for military communications and crew training, and some C.445Ms served with the Aéronavale. Civil operators included Air France, and Air Bleu put several C.445s to work flying mail at night between Paris and Spain, while Régie Air Afrique flew the type across North Africa. Goélands were sold abroad to Aeroput of Yugoslavia and to Bulgaria and Spain, and two C.445Ms were supplied to the Belgian Aéronautique Militaire in 1940. French production of the C.445 itself totalled 114 aircraft, and the militarised C.445M added 404. After the German occupation of France, 44 C.445s and 10 C.445Ms were requisitioned, some flying Lufthansa routes and others with the Luftwaffe. At Billancourt and Issy-les-Moulineaux, the factories turned out substantial numbers of C.445Ms and C.449s for Germany, until a heavy RAF raid in 1943 slowed output at Billancourt to a trickle. The Germans used the Goéland as a pilot, radio and navigational trainer and for communications, and the specialised C.447 ambulance version served on casualty transport. Other Goélands served the Vichy regime and were scattered through France's overseas empire, most of them in North Africa, while several C.445s operated in the United Kingdom after June 1940. The French government took control of the Caudron plant in 1945 and renamed it the Ateliers Aéronautiques d'Issy-les-Moulineaux, where work on the C.445M and C.449 went on under the AA.1 designation. The post-war C.445/3 production version reached 510 aircraft, and in the post-war reorganisation Caudron became part of SNCA du Nord and the type continued as the Nord Goéland, with 325 built. Air France began 1946 with twenty-three C.445s and nineteen C.449s at its disposal; they flew domestic night mail for a time before settling into years of crew training.
Afterlife
Air France was still using the type to train crews in 1957, when one of its C.449 trainers was photographed at Pontoise-Cormeilles, near Paris. No Goéland survives: the French archaeology journal ADLFI states that no aircraft of the type exists anywhere in the world today. What is left of the type has come out of the ground: in 2016, researchers surveyed the wreck of a C.445, built in 1938, that had crashed on 4 August 1941 near Puilaurens in the Aude. The report calls the recovered elements unique, precisely because no complete aircraft remains. The wreck also brought a forgotten name back into print: the ADLFI report describes its passenger, Claire Roman, as a woman pilot who was as well known in the 1930s as Hélène Boucher or Maryse Hilsz, and an exhibition on the finds and on her life opened at the Aéroscopia museum in Toulouse in early 2017.