The Caudron G.3 was a single engine biplane designed and built by the Caudron brothers in 1913, it was to answer the need of the French Military Aeronautic which requested a reconnaissance and training aircraft. In august 1914, when the war broke out, the Caudron G.3 was one of the 4 types of French aircrafts sent on the battlefields within the squadron C-II. As it has proven its solidity its reliability, it quickly showed it was an excellent aircraft for its mission and the French Army passed a command to get more of those aircrafts. If the Caudron brothers get two new factories at Lyon and at Issigny-Les-Moulineaux, some others societies did built the Caudron G.3 without having to pay the building liscence as the Caudron brothers refused to hinder the production of aircrafts useful to the defense of their country. The Caudron G.3 was, by the same occasion, also built under liscence in the UK at 233 exemples, in Italy at 166, the laters were different of the others by the presence of a radial engine instead of the rotary Le Rhône C engine, 6 in Finland and at 2 450 exemples in France whose 1 423 were built by the Caudron factories.

Judged outdated and too vulnerable, the French Military Aeronautic withdrawn the G.3 from the first line to send them to their training role, the Italian Air Service did withdrawn their in 1917 while few British owned G.3 were equipped with machine guns and very light bombs.

After the war, the Caudron G.3 in service in the French Military Aeronautic will be sold for the civilian purpose from 1919 and the first exploits with these aircraft arrive quickly, on the early 1919 Jules Védrines, a former worker who began as mechanic on the Gnôme engines before to become a reconnaissance pilot during the Great War and the flight instructor of Georges Guynemer, landed his Caudron G.3 on the 25m of the roof of the Galeries Lafayette, in the middle of Paris, that was 4 months before he was killed in the crash of his commercial aircraft on the line Paris-Roma.

Two years later, it's the turn of a woman to conquer the Hall of Fames on board of a G.3 as, on March 1921, Adrienne Bolland, in visit in Argentina to promote the Caudorn aircrafts, decided to cross the Andes after she has been challenged by the Argentinean press. It's the 1st April 1921 that Adrienne Bolland took off from Buenos Aires with the conviction that she will be killed during her attempt as she has no navigation devices and no map. And yet, struggling with the second highest mountains in the world in very hard conditions, flying at the edge of the ceiling limit of her aircraft, she arrived at a fork, one of the paths seemed easier while the other seemed nearly impossible to pass through, she chose the seconde path and, 4h45 after she took off from Buenos Aires, the little woman on board of her Caudron G.3 was landing at Mendoza, Chili, and then became the first ever person who crossed the Andes with an aircraft. Highly welcomed by the population and by the authorities, only the French ambassador in Chili was absent as he thought that it was an April fools.

A bit later in the same year, in jully, the Swiss pilot François Durafour landed his Caudron G.3 on the summit of the 3rd highest mountain of the Alpes, the Dôme du goûter, located at 4 304m of altitude.



This exemple, the F-AZMB, is a replica built in 1991 from the original plans by the Amicale Jean-Baptiste Salis located on the airfield of Cerny-La Ferté Alais with the help of Roland Payen, the man who invented the Delta aircraft design in 1935. The aircraft flew from 1991 to 2009, when it was grounded for modifications on the controls, before to take back the skies in 2015.

I would suggest you to watch this old video certainely taken before 2009 of the F-AZMB flying with the Blériot XI F-AZPG.