Aeronautics in Clairac

The beginnings of aeronautics in Clairac
Initially, there is a postcard of the early twentieth century: “Departure from Kuhling to the aerodrome of l'Usclade (mounted on monoplane Bleriot) - Clairac”. And the questions come up: So there was an airfield at Lusclade, on the Longueville plain? However, this curtain of trees hardly resembles the fields on the left bank of the Lot... For this event, a special postcard was published?

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And this card remains put aside in his binder, although it is not very common among cartophiles.

Until the day we decide to learn about this famous Kuhling, come to make an aeronautic demonstration in Clairac.

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Paul Louis Kuhling was born on 13 December 1870 in Düsseldorf, naturalized French on 23 March 1891, and released from military service on 1 December 1918, after having fought in the artillery and then in the air force; we don't know the date of his death. In July 1910 he obtained his pilot's licence on a Blériot monoplane, and from then on, he continued to perform, with more than 300 meetings in nearly 3 years! His proud moustache takes us back to the good years of the tiger brigades, and was to enable him to seduce easily the pretty villagers who came to admire him. The Blériot monoplane is the one on which Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel for the first time in 37 minutes in July 1909! The mythical aircraft is now kept at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

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But let us return to Clairac, and let us read instead the daily  Express du MidiExcerpt from the Express du Midi of 19 April 1911
 published in Toulouse, on April 19, 1911: “Clairac's keen curiosity about the April 23rd aviation day is growing every day. The subscription lists are filling up very quickly, all the Clairacais wanting to join in this magnificent celebration. Mr. Kuhling, who came here on Saturday, said the Lusclade field, which is about 500 meters from Clairac, is a perfect fit for aviation”. In his recollections published in Le populaire du Lot-et-Garonne, Rodolphe Roubet recounted the event he attended on April 23: “The airfield was improvised in Lusclade. A considerable crowd answered the organizers' call and, despite uncertain weather, the plane took its flight.… The aircraft rose to about two hundred or three hundred meters, flew over Bourran and the plain surrounding it and returned to land flawlessly without having tried to cross the Lot and fly over Clairac”.

Yes, these meetings were exceptional celebrations (the man had only been flying for a few years), and for the adventurous pilots, they had become a means of subsistence and of financing their passion. In 2012, Le Télégramme de Brest recalled that for a Kuhling performance in Vannes in April 1912, 30,000 people came, including the bishop, the prefect and the mayor! The tickets in the stands were sold for 3 francs, 2 francs in the stadium and 50 cents on the pitch: 10,000 francs of revenue.

Let's finish by going back to our postcard, because it was an extra income for airmen who moved from town to town with a ready-made map on which there was only to reprint the name of the village and its “aerodrome for a day”. And if we explore a little closer L'Express du Midi, we discover that the article was almost duplicated from one performance to another: Thus, on 3 April 1911 (15 days earlier), the journalist wrote about a meeting in Cazaubon “M. Kuhling, who came here on Friday, said that our racetrack was a great fit for aviation and his commitment is pretty much won”…

A few years later, it was on this same plain in Lusclade that the Schlumbergers' private plane landed when they came to their Roche property on holiday.