Image: 00.jpg

Editorial
Issue 04 to be re-published on Monday 24 September

This third prototype of the Gazette is the first of two or three issues from a partial collection of pictures taken during Spring 1983, precisely between April 20 and May 28 when the Flotille 25F organized ( a few before its July 29th scheduled disbandment ) on its Lann-Bihoué NAS in French Britanny, a huge meeting opened to all people who served the Neptune or flew it in any of the French Aéronavale units which used it during some 30 years. I got several occasions to fly with 25F which, until disbandment, was a perfect one, fully operational though its ageing and obsolescent Neptunes forced to an enormous day and night labour from mechanics and I remember, just after a meal, when driving the several kilometers separating the base Officers' Mess and the Flotille barracks, the C/O telling me his sadness because, due to financial restrictions in the French Army Budgets, he had to find a bad pretext to evince three men, just three months before the end of his unit ; this tells these three in fact were ejected from the Navy, the end of the Neptune also signing the end significant needs in France of mechanics specialised with the very big piston-engines ...and the worst was that two of these men had worked all the night to put an aircraft in flying status early in the morning...

This is the reason of Edito picture 00, because I knew the unit with a fantastic fighting spirit when " she " was living in fact a full state of announced death...And I never heard a single of the men had words other than admiration for their old and unforgettable mounts...

It was like if they continued for infinity with their frinky God of The Seas...

JMJ Lefebvre