Rue du Capitaine Ferber

February 8, 1862, Ferdinand Ferber was born in Lyon to a family of French merchants. A brilliant student, he obtained his baccalaureate at the age of 17 and his engineering degree from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris three years later. afterwards, he entered the artillery with the rank of lieutenant. A true enthusiast of science and new techniques, this assiduous reader of the works of Jules Verne began to be interested in balloon flights in 1883

Frankfurt

But in 1904, Ferdinand Ferber began to work on a treatise on the use of the first gliders by the military. He exposes some absolutely revolutionary ideas: if the one consisting in making the artillery (its original weapon) regulated by airplanes is not surprising, this mission was then entrusted to balloons;on the other hand, Captain Ferber envisaged to provide the army with an independent air force, in the image of the navy. It must be capable of lining up fighter planes to clear the sky of enemy aircraft. Ferber has just invented the principle of hunting and the principle of air superiority. He also envisaged airborne artillerymen dropping bombs on enemy positions. The air bombardment is nil, at least on paper. That same year he was made a knight of the Légion déHonneur for his air action.

On May 27, 1905, on the Châlais-Meudon airfield in western Paris, he made the first flight of an airplane powered by a Levavasseur monoplane with two contra-rotating propellers. Ferber personally developed this system. Thereafter, he assisted the Levavasseur company in the development of the Antoinette monoplane guns. In parallel, Ferber continued to try to convince the high military spheres of the relevance of an air weapon. On July 25, 1909, he was one of the few people less close to Louis Blériot's exploit, the two men were friends. Ferber sees him off from France.

A few weeks later, on September 22, 1909 Ferdinand Ferber, during a demonstration aérienne a Beuvrequen in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais his biplane Voisin goes into a spin and crashed. The French aviator tries to get out, stammers a few words, and collapses. He died a few hours later in the hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer of an internal hemorrhage. Ferdinand Ferber is one of the first victims of the aviation populace