The Prototype 02
This question I have often asked during my survey and I have received many false and sometimes fanciful answers. French people who were old enough to take an interest in current affairs between 1965 and 1974 should remember this. Indeed, this name designates a process applied to a means of transport, making it revolutionary.
To begin with, we must present the man who, with his team, imagined and developed this process.
Jean BERTIN, polytechnician, founded after having been an engineer at SNECMA, the research and development company that bears his name: this with the aim of building a bridge between science and industrial technology.
The activity of the company began in the production of silencers for jet engines.
It was in 1957, during the development of one of these pieces of equipment, that Louis DUTHION, the company's engineer, highlighted an unforeseen phenomenon that had been known in France since 1910: the ground effect.
Discovered at the end of the 1916th century by the English scientist YOUNG, it was not used until 75 in the construction of an air cushion boat which reached XNUMX km/h.
It was in 1958 that the BERTIN company was informed that an Englishman named COCKERELL had just applied this discovery, as an islander, to an amphibious vehicle: there was a simultaneous discovery, or rather rediscovery.
The French team, meanwhile, turned to land transport.
Air cushion principle
The search for financial partners having failed, it was the Armed Forces who ordered a vehicle capable of moving on unprepared ground. It was baptized "TERRAPLANE BC4" and carried out its first tests on January 7, 1962.
It is following this experiment that the BERTIN team will study flexible skirts. Their focus will give the team a serious lead. Indeed, thus equipped, a vehicle traveling on perfectly flat ground can move at a very low flight height. Hence the idea of a prepared track ensuring, in addition to support, guidance. The shape of the inverted T having been chosen for safety and implementation issues, a prototype on a reduced scale was produced. 1,25m long and 0,25m wide, electrically powered, it moved on an elevated track about twenty meters long. From February 1963, the tests began in front of a good number of French and foreign personalities. These tests giving complete satisfaction, the realization of a prototype that could carry a few people became essential.
Prospecting began with the SNCF and the RATP, with a view to a commercial application. The RATP quickly let it be known that only the "wheel on rail" system suited its needs. As for the SNCF, after a more thorough study, it indicated that it was not interested in a system putting, for example, Paris at 1h30 from Lyon.
The promoters of the concept contacted a brand new body: the Delegation for Regional Planning, headed by Olivier GUICHARD. This one was seduced by the idea and released the credits for the realization of a vehicle, on a ½ scale, which can carry a few passengers.
The Ministry of Transport will not be able, for lack of credits for research, to support the team of the “Société d’Etude de l’Aérotrain” created in April 1965.
From the month of May of that same year, the studies and the construction of the track were going well. Established on a disused section, without level crossing, of one of the Paris-Chartres lines, it is made up of prefabricated concrete sections, placed on studs a few tens of centimeters from the ground.
As for the experimental vehicle, it was completed on December 16, 1965, when only one kilometer of track was available out of the 6,7 planned. Nevertheless, it was transported to the site, with a view to carrying out a test there, at the end of December.
The AEROTRAIN 01, 10,11m long and 2,6 tons in weight, is guided and supported by air slightly compressed by two fans driven by two Gordini motors of 50 HP each. Propulsion is provided by a 260 hp aircraft engine and a three-blade reversible pitch propeller.
The cockpit accommodates two technicians and the cabin, placed behind, four passengers.
After placing the machine astride the track and starting the Renault engines, it rose, letting the air escape through a gap of 2 to 3 mm, thus creating the air cushion. To move it, a simple push of the hand was enough since the AEROTRAIN did not touch the track at all.
The propulsion engine was started and the 01 made a round trip on, or rather above the concrete kilometer. It easily reached 90 km/h, high speed over such a short distance.
It took until mid-February for the route to be completed.
The wait seemed long to the team, since there were no modifications to be made, the machine working perfectly.
On February 21, the track and the prototype 01 were officially inaugurated. It reached 100 km/h that day in front of all the press and 200 km/h a few days later, without having undergone any modifications.
"The plane without wings", as Jean BERTIN nicknamed it, was even presented in Eurovision. At that time, the SNCF was talking about raising the speed of certain luxury trains from 140 to 160 km/h, whereas one could travel at 200 km/h on board a simple and inexpensive machine.
Visitors followed one another to Gometz where the AEROTRAIN operated every day. Ministers, journalists, simple curious, all wanted to see the train of the future...
It is in order to check the resistance of the air cushions at higher speeds that the 01 was equipped with a booster rocket together with the aircraft engine, bringing the power to 1700 Ch.
It will reach 303 km/h on December 23, 1966 ahead of Olivier GUICHARD and André SEGALA, President of the SNCF.
At the same time, the General Management of the SNCF launched the C03 project, code name of the project “railway possibilities on new infrastructures”. The genesis of the TGV began.
Modified once again using a Fouga Magister reactor, the 01 reached 345 km/h on November 1, 1967.
Faced with such results and such rapid progress, the Minister of Transport, Mr. Edgard PISANI, expresses the desire to see a relationship established between Lyon-Bron and Grenoble, with a view to the Olympic Games.
The study quickly carried out led to a project consisting of a single-track line of 86 km, traveled in 30 minutes, at a cruising speed of 200 km/h.
Unfortunately, as government decisions were not taken in time, it became clear that the line could not be completed in time.
The first opportunity for the AEROTRAIN to transport real travelers had just been missed.
Nevertheless, the dazzling results of the 01 caused Mr. PISANI to place an order, on December 18, 1967, for a full-scale 18 km test track, which could later be integrated into a Paris Orléans line.
The contract provided for an 80-seat vehicle capable of cruising at 250 km/h on a line planned for 400!
Work began quickly and by December 1968, 10 km of track had already been laid. The Gometz line, meanwhile, will see another record broken. By prototype 02. Responding to an order from March 1967, it was well streamlined, two-seater and powered by a Pratt & Whitney engine of 1250 kg of thrust.
It reached 300 km/h from the first tests in May 1968 and shattered the 01 record by reaching 422 km/h, helped by a booster rocket, on January 22, 1969.
The AEROTRAIN I-80, intended for the Orleans base, was presented to the public on July 7, 1969 at Le Bourget.
He was transported a few days later to the Orleans base.
The setting on track is carried out on September 10, on the 12, it reaches 200 km/h and on the 13, 250 km/h. This was the maximum speed he could reach with the ducted propeller driven by two 2200 hp turbines that fitted it. Progress was going as fast as the AEROTRAIN.
It was on November 13, 1969 that he demonstrated the closing of the preliminary tests before the Minister of Transport and the Delegate in charge of Planning and Regional Development.
In October 1973, it was modified for very high speeds, receiving an airliner turbo-jet engine. Very quickly, it reaches 400 km/h.
If you had counted among the 2900 people it transported at more than 350 km/h during its numerous tests, you would certainly have been surprised to have no more problems doing your mail on board than at your office.
As for the filmmakers who filmed the tests, they did so without support, in the cabin, the track passing in front of them at 110 m/s.
The world speed record for an air-cushion land vehicle was beaten on March 5, 1974 with an average speed of 417,6 km/h for a peak of 430 km/h, thus demonstrating the viability of the concept.
It should be noted, however, that these speeds are not commercially competitive; this being true for all modes of transport. Indeed, to go from 200 to 400 km/h, you have to quadruple the thrust to overcome air resistance and have 8 times more power.
Mr. BERTIN will conclude very early that an economically reasonable speed should not exceed 350 km/h.
Faced with such dazzling results, several relationships were considered.
These include Paris-Orléans, Paris-Lyon, Orly-Etoile, Brussels-Geneva via Luxembourg and Basel, Calais-Fourmies via Dunkirk and Maubeuge, Aix en Provence-Marseille, Orly-Roissy, La Défense-Cergy Pontoise. These last two having been very close to their realization. The first was to connect Orly to Roissy via Joinville le Pont, over a distance of 56 km, covered in just 20 minutes. Orly was then 14 minutes from the Opera by connection to the RER. This achievement, which will subsequently be lacking, is set aside to achieve La Défense-Cergy.
The study was once again carried out quickly, leaving the choice of several modes of propulsion.
The contract was finally signed on June 21, 1974, and the AEROTRAIN would be able to prove its capabilities and thus constitute a showcase for French innovation.
But on July 17, the government let it be known that it no longer wanted to build the line.
All these years of research, trials, successes were reduced to nothing. A few other attempts to put the AEROTRAIN into service were made, but the announcement in September 1975 of the commissioning of the TGV on Paris-Lyon gave the final blow. Jean BERTIN, exhausted from all these years of work, disappeared on December 21, 1975.
His work is still there.
Locked up in their hangars, sometimes vandalized, the various AEROTRAIN models are victims of the onslaught of time and disrespectful visitors.
Despite these 13 years of sleep, the AEROTRAIN concept has not aged a single thing.
The qualities highlighted during the tests are still valid: economy, speed, high frequency, preservation of the environment and comfort.
The opening of Europe in 1992 would perhaps be the occasion to recognize that Mr. BERTIN was on the right track as early as 1962, by planning to equip the European Community with a truly new mode of transport.
Further information :
Source text: Aerotrain and Naviplane.fr
NB. I lived near Gometz-la-Ville when I was little, and I passed near the remains of the Aérotrain, needless to say that my imagination was racing, well now I know why...
Strangelove,
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