Lieutenant Teste’s achievement was the culmination of a great deal of hard work and experimentation. Six years previously Rene Coudron, who would become a First World War ace conducted a series of experimental flights on May 8, 1914, when he took off in the bay of Saint-Raphael from a 34.70-metre long platform that had been constructed on the torpedo boat Foudre. This event made France the third nation after the United States and the United Kingdom to launch an aircraft from a ship. During the First World War, the French chose not to pursue this approach and poured their efforts into the development of seaplanes instead.
After the end of the war, some small-scale tests were conducted with the Arras-class aviso Bapaume which was refitted with a temporary flight deck in 1920. On October 20, 1920, Lieutenant Paul Teste took off from the Palyvestre base at the controls of a single-seater Hanriot. After having spotted the hull of the Béarn in the harbour of Toulon, he made a perfect landing, and entered the history of naval aeronautics.
The Marine Nationale in the late 1910s, began to witness the worldwide development of aircraft carriers and enviously they put in motion a plan to build their own. The French put in motion Project 171 that would see the incomplete hull of the Normandie-class battleship rebuilt with a continuous unobstructed wooden flight deck extending from bow to stern. The ship was eventually launched on 15 April 1920. In these early days of naval aviation, ingenious and improvised ways of launching and recovering aircraft were employed with the French solution to stopping a landing aircraft being an arresting wire weighed down with heavy sandbags.
