Biography | Olivier Chansou — The Farman Building Where He Ran DGAC Staff

People treat 50 rue Henry-Farman as only the glass front of French civil aviation.

The street itself is younger than his career.

Paris named rue Henry-Farman on 23 August 1995, after the aviation pioneer, on the 15th-arrondissement edge with Issy-les-Moulineaux.

By 2009 the DGAC seat at number 50 was where Chansou served as sous-directeur des personnels, deputy director for staff, until 2012.

He arrived from three years as head of the Centre en route de la navigation aérienne Sud-Ouest.

That centre still sits on avenue de Beaudésert in Mérignac, beside Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport.

The Farman job was not radar scopes.

It was the technical staff of the Direction générale de l'Aviation civile, the people who keep those scopes staffed.

No words of his are quoted here.

The public record is the sequence of titles.

In 2012 he left this building for Bordeaux again, this time as director of four DSNA Sud-Ouest services — CESNAC, SIA, SNA/SO and CRNA/SO — about 1,100 agents.

The 2009 to 2012 stretch is the Paris hinge between two Bordeaux commands.

The pin is the public ministry site at number 50, not a private address.

Photo: LPLT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons