The Aviation Historian — January 2018

62 THE AVIATION HISTORIAN Issue No 22

Skyraiders were supplied to Gabon by the
French government. The three pilots of the GPG,
accompanied by an AdA pilot, took receipt of
the beefy propeller-driven fighter-bombers in
Châteaudun in northern France and, accompanied
by a Nord Noratlas for the maintenance team,
completed a 28hr delivery flight to the Gabonese
capital, Libreville, during February 9–18, 1976.
The flight routed through Istres (southern
France), Agadir (Morocco), Dakar (Senegal),
Ouagadougou (Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso),
Lomé (Togo) and Douala (Cameroon).

Skyraiders in Chad
With the expansion of its fleet of aircraft, the
GPG recruited a new pilot, Joe Lapeyre, another
former AdA pilot with some 3,000 flying hours
on the Magister, which included a stint in the
AdA’s Patrouille de France formation aerobatic
display team. Lapeyre was also current on the
T-6. Sadly, Jacques Laforêt died on Christmas Day
1976, in circumstances unrelated to the squadron.
In June 1977 Omar Bongo decided to send two

of the GPG’s Skyraiders to assist Chadian forces

in their struggle against FROLINAT (Front de

Libération Nationale du Tchad) rebel forces. On

June 25 the Skyraiders, piloted by Borne and

Gras, took off from Libreville for N’Djamena, the

Chadian capital. The following day they joined

their former AdA colleagues Pierre Grosjean and

Michel Fayolle, who were flying on a two-year

contract (July 1976 to June 1978) for the Escadrille

Nationale Tchadienne (ENT — Chadian National

Squadron), in Faya-Largeau in northern Chad.

At the beginning of July 1977 FROLINAT went

on the offensive. The military post at Zouar in the

north-west of the country had to be evacuated

in advance of the rebel forces arriving, and a

reconnaissance mission was undertaken by an

ENT Douglas C-47 with Col Jean-Louis Delayen

(French advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of

the Chadian Armed Forces) aboard, to follow the

progress of Goukouni Oueddei’s rebel troops.

A column of armed vehicles was spotted on

the way to Zouar, resulting in the immediate

evacuation of Faya-Largeau several days before

Two of the GPG’s three Fouga Magisters

during a training flight. Note the different-

coloured pennants beneath the front cockpit

canopies. The GPG’s Magisters were all retired

in 1990 and were acquired by the Congolese

government in 1998 for planned diamond-mine

protection duties. They remained dismantled

and were last noted as being in storage at

Lubumbashi in south-eastern Congo in 2005.

Douglas AD-4N Skyraider BuAer No 126956 (c/n 7756), coded “45” in GPG service and

registered TR-KMP, was one of the first batch delivered to Gabon, in February 1976. After a

period in France as F-AZDQ, it went to the USA, where it is displayed at the USS Alabama

Museum in Mobile, Alabama. Artwork by PATRICE GAUBERT © 2018