By akademiotoelektronik, 02/05/2022

Gerard Feldzer. The Icarus of sunlights

Read on his CV: inventor of the peanut shelling machine, the potato gun and the Condom Fly, the condom-shaped hot air balloon. OK, stop, no need to spread more, to spoil these first magic lines. We enlarge the photo, we cover the page with an easy title, style “he prefers love in the air”, and we fold the saplings.

Alas, Gérard Feldzer owes his notoriety not to the aperitif revolution, nor to his weapon of massive derision, but to his aeronautical knowledge. Because this 71-year-old man who looks like Pierre Richard is also a former captain. And when a plane falls, there he is, available and indestructible as a consultant, on the sets of BFM TV and elsewhere, to make sense of the unfathomable, to explain that this regular descent of the Germanwings flight is nothing short of chance, that the A320 is one of the most reliable airliners in the world, that the cockpits have become impregnable fortresses and that his ass hurts from sitting. “Twenty-one hours live in two days, I couldn't take it anymore. I said that at the end of an intervention, it seems that it went live! Laugh out loud. His companion is the bedroom. She criticizes him for rushing as soon as there is a camera. He admits: "It's a bit true." Admit the flaw: “It has to heal itself.” Specifies that he has not scheduled any sessions with the shrink. A cathodic presence also justified by his personal experience. During a Paris-Dakar flight, a passenger rushes to the joysticks. Several of them join in to bring him under control and, in the general confusion, the suicidal loses consciousness and dies.

But it's true that the media, Feldzer loves it. He likes to show himself, the pleasure of explaining. And this need to always do more, to prove that it is not worse than another “and that you are going to see what you are going to see”. A swagger thrown at the forehead of the well-born that serves as a motto for a lifetime.

His father, an immigrant from kyiv, was shot by the Germans in 1944, six months after his birth. When the war was over, the mother left Haute-Loire and went to Paris. It's lean cow time. The three brothers, sons of resistance fighters who died in combat, become wards of the nation. “The complete horror. In primary, I was dressed by the town hall. The cape, the shoes, you were immediately recognized as the poor guy who gets an orange for Christmas. Pity sucks." This original shame was its fuel. Since then, Feldzer has been in constant competition. Behind the trunk man specialist in aerial derailments hides an adventurer with a thousand "parentheses of life", a teacher who restores what was given to him.

Because he was lucky. He remembers when he was 17, when a man grabbed him by the collar and led him to an atypical school that transformed those with no baccalaureate into engineers. Until then, Feldzer meticulously sabotaged his schooling: “My books, I sold them at the start of the school year, you see the kind!” He preferred the sidewalk, went to fight against the Clichy gang.

Nothing happens normally with Feldzer. The last year, the Estaca, his engineering school, is in financial difficulties and threatens to close. We happen to be in 1968, “the time is for self-management”. As a student, he made the rounds of industrialists and bought the school, which still exists. He is even the vice-president.

After graduating, he set off to create a holiday village in Tunisia for Unef, the student union. Peace and love period, “the hair until then, the Tanned, what”. He returned after two years to realize his dream: to become an aviator like his uncle, a fighter pilot in the Normandie-Niemen squadron, a French unit which fought alongside the Soviets against the Germans. "He was my hero, he introduced me to all the aces of the last war, it worked."

Gérard Feldzer joined an aviation school via a new alternative route. And begins his career in Algeria. He remembers this son of a legionnaire who piloted strangely. “He ended up admitting to me that he had bought his license in Brazzaville.” He teaches him some tricks… and the mercenary becomes an instructor. “But he died on the plane. He crashed with his student somewhere between Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville. He laughs, without cynicism.

We could listen to him for hours telling his daredevil stories. “He's an eccentric driver, with a real poetic dimension,” says his friend Nicolas Hulot. The ecologist encounters him as Feldzer flies “craft that normally would never have left the ground.” Precisely, the animator of Ushuaïa is looking for this kind of UFO. Gérard Feldzer finds them, creates them for him. Together, in 1993, they attempted to cross the Atlantic on a pedal airship. The case ends in the ocean, off Cape Verde. “We weren't well prepared,” admits the pilot. A beginning of black series for Hulot, which will later be part of the passengers of the Paris-Dakar flight. He was in the cockpit.

Falls, broken limbs, failures, Feldzer has known them. But he never stops. "Gérard has a thousand ideas a second, but only realizes one a day," laughs Hulot. “It's a mix of professional pilot, Geo Trouvetou and Professor Tournesol, continues the astronaut Jean-François Clervoy. As soon as he has an idea, he creates an association. He is the world record holder for the creation of associations!”

In the 1980s, he proposed to young people from the Cité des 4000, in La Courneuve, to build an airplane and fly with it. Apart from a few hazards, a murder in the band, "the cops who arrive and have their car stolen", it works. The airplane takes off. "You live wonderful moments when sharing is understood, accepted."

Jean-François Clervoy admires the energy that his friend devotes “to wanting to make the world a better place”. His taste for the media would be a way, he thinks, of maintaining a notoriety which allows him to finance his ideas. » Like his NGO Zebunet, which offers microcredit to Vietnamese and African farmers.

From his barge, moored at La Concorde opposite the National Assembly, Gérard Feldzer phosphorus. CarWatt is for transforming an old Clio into an electric car. FitnessWatt recovers the energy spent on an exercise bike. HamsterWatt is the same with hamsters. Nicolas Hulot says that he is a "factory all on his own that goes all over the place". He is also a child with an entrepreneurial soul and crazy ideas that take shape.

In 7 dates

February 10, 1944 Birth in Aurec-sur-Loire (Haute-Loire). 1974 Pilot at Air France. 1984 World record for speed and fuel consumption in an amateur aircraft with Alain Souchon. 1985 Astronaut candidate. 1995 President of the Aéro-club de France. 2005 Director of the Air Museum. 2010 Ile-de-France Regional Councilor (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts).