Dominique Maunoury

Dominique Maunoury, Catherine’s husband, left for skies said to be calmer shortly before Christmas 2001. His end was peaceful, when it could have been a nightmare. The illness he suffered from shows no mercy once it is allowed to run its course, and having known Dominique well, I like to think that he thus pulled off, beautifully, that final masterpiece of elegance that a departure from the world of the living can be. Dominique was one of a kind. We met in the early days of the CAP 10, in Jean Eyquem’s troupe. We were a little gang of near-kids, fledgling pilots more or less, stammering through our first inverted flights, loops and avalanches.

Next to Dominique, we were only rough drafts of aviators.

Eyquem, who could have been master to us all, watched over it all like Yoda the Jedi Master, assisted by his instructor-lieutenants, among them a lovely, soft-spoken person, as precise in her ways as a Bernoulli equation and with an iron hand: Hélène Frankel. Our little team of aerobatic illiterates included a few characters, among them a young Air France flight attendant from Rennes, who had caught the three-dimensional bug from her doctor father. With strong convictions and a builder’s will, Catherine was not yet called Maunoury. The Maunoury of the gang was Dominique, the scholar.

He was older than us, and in our little world of the permanently broke, this architect from Chartres seemed rich: just imagine, he already owned a sumptuous DR 250, Juliet Kilo. He also seemed the archetype of the perfect leisure pilot, an epicurean of life and of the mind for whom flying a small aeroplane could become a major cultural act: he had travelled across Europe and the Mediterranean, all the way up to the sources of the Nile, and knew how to make every flight, however short, an experience. He had thousands of flying hours, all of them private. Next to him, we were uncultured, mere rough drafts of aviators. Dominique intrigued me straight away with his phenomenal capacity for wonder. His favourite pose was a slight smile beneath sparkling eyes behind an intellectual’s glasses. He seemed fascinated by everything, and by everyone. He knew how to listen, but when it was his turn to speak, you almost felt ashamed to have spoken in front of him, so refined was the aesthetic thought behind his words. One day he began telling me about Chartres Cathedral. As the département’s architect and a specialist of the cathedral, he had helped write a set of majestic volumes on the history of how this wonder of humanity was built. I remained under the spell of that story for a long time — epic, highly technical and sumptuously artistic, wrapped entirely in a great human adventure. He admired without reservation those who fought to make the world more beautiful.

We went together to the Reno pylon races, probably the first Frenchmen to travel to the depths of the American desert, echoing with furious Merlins. Dominique was left speechless, and as soon as he was back in Chartres he began painting, with tremendous evocative power, gleaming Mustangs and Furies hauled along at insane speeds by their gigantic propellers. He owned a rare library full of aviation books and built models of astonishing precision and elegance. One day, years later, during a Tour de France aérien that he followed in his CAP 10, which he flew in the daily air shows, he took my son, then a very little boy, up for his first aerobatic flight. I do mean offered, not gave. Dominique rounded off the corners, softened the loops, commented on the figures in his calm voice, and turned that quarter of an hour of slow three-dimensional waltz into a moment of such elegance that the boy came back changed, deeply convinced that flying was certainly a technique, possibly a science, but also a true art.

The architect with the clinical pencil stroke then built a second career as a painter of the sky, joining the very exclusive circle of aviation painters…

Time went by, and Dominique went on practising friendship with the same sense of precision he brought to everything. He helped Catherine, who had become his wife, to become one of the greatest competition pilots the world has known, like an attentive coach. With his paintings and the exhibitions he organised, he marked the history of French aviators in the second half of the 20th century, without ever stopping flying.

And the rascal flew beautifully… One day, as we were leaving for an aerobatics course at Sainte-Foy, he came to pick me up at Mérignac in Juliet Kilo. In the soft light of a summer evening, we flew over the flawless landscapes of Aquitaine, and through the magic of his very gentle flying he disconnected me from the bumpy world below. It ended with a sideslipping overhead approach of fabulous smoothness, as if the aeroplane were flying itself. Dominique kept his wondering smile until the engine had completely stopped, and when silence slowly returned, before opening the canopy, he said something to me about beauty. I have forgotten the words, but not the meaning.

Thank you, Architect.

Bernard Chabbert