Jean-Louis Baroux: "I come from the Forez mountains (the roof of the eastern Auvergne). At my parents' house in the summer, I used to lie on the lawn and watch the planes go by: it was the Paris-Nice route. At the time, I had an aunt who lived in Antibes, and I thought to myself: this is incredible, extraordinary, these people are going to be able to have lunch by the sea. When I was 6 or 7, it took about ten hours by road to get to Antibes. Those planes were absolute magic. You could see them clearly, they flew a bit lower than they do today, in those days. My first flight? It was a Paris-Tripoli, in a Caravelle, with Kingdom of Libya Airlines, at the time of King Idriss 1 st . Thatwas before Gaddafi's coup. I was going to Libya to do my military ser- vice in cooperation. I was scared, I didn't know anything about procedures of a Caravelle, and you needed power to get it off the ground! Then we had to slow down the JT3 engines, which were making an infernal noise, to be less noisy when flying over the neigh- bouring populations: that's when I got scared! I said to myself: we're not going to crash just yet, are we? We forgot that today's planes make five times less noise than those of the previous generation. That's amazing ! I've flown a lot in my life, but this is the event that brought me to the world of aviation. I was in Libya with my wife: my eldest son was born at home in Benghazi. The midwife's husband cal- led his friends, some of whom worked for Air France, and they all came by the house to congratulate us and have a coffee, early in the morning before going to work. At 5pm the same day, one of them came back with a magnificent bouquet of roses! Stunned, I asked him where the flowers had come from - there were none in Libya. Naturally, he replied: "From Rome". I said to myself that the job that allowed you to go and pick up
roses in Rome on the day my son was born and come back to Benghazi in the same evening was made for me!
My fondest flying memory? We were flying as a family to Denpasar, Bali. The plane made a stop in Abu Dhabi to refuel. It was a Garuda Indonesia flight, which had generously placed us in first class, where we were alone. During the stopover in Abu Dhabi, a false manoeuvre damaged the plane's rear door, causing a long delay. We stayed in the cabin. The captain passes by and greets us, wondering if we're not too inconvenienced. I told him no, but that I was afraid we won't have the connection to Denpasar. He told us not to worry. We took off again. On arrival in Jakarta, as we got out of the plane (we only had hand luggages) the customs officers were waiting for us at the bottom of the runway and the DC-10 that was flying from Denpasar to Sydney had also been waiting for us for an hour! Sometimes travelling in First Class changes your life! But then, I was a bit ashamed that all these people had been made to wait for us. My worst memory of a flight? It was a flight from Muhouse to Paris, at a time when I was doing a bit of a tour of France, to meet Air Inter office represen- tatives. The weather was terrible, there was a snowstorm and the plane was shaking on the runway! The pilot told us that he couldn't take off from the main runway because of the wind, nor from the smaller runway because it was too short, but that he could try if 30 people got off. Given the weather conditions and the announcement, it wasn't too difficult to find 30 volunteers. Then the pilot had the luggage counted to make sure he could take off. In the end, the flight went rather smoothly. At the age of 80, Jean-Paul Dubreuil, who handed over the Dubreuil Aéro Group (Air Caraïbes, French Bee) to his son Paul- Henri Dubreuil in 2023, recalls a few memories for us...
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