1936, Air France launches passenger flights to Dakar.
Three years after its creation in 1933, Air France was expanding more than ever before. To the South, it was continuing the "Aeropostale" adventure, an ambitious project for a route from Toulouse to Santiago de Chile. Opened in 1929, the route passed through Dakar, a strategic airport facing the South Atlantic. Until then, the stopover in Senegal had been limited to postal services.
In May 1936, a weekly passenger service was launched from Paris. For the magazine Les Ailes, journalist André Frachet made the trip in July. He left on Saturday night by sleeper train for Toulouse, from where the Dewoitine 333 Cassiopée, and its 10 passenger seats, took off on Sunday at 6:30 am. "From then on it was a continuous wonder" ... Barcelona, Alicante, then Casablanca at 2 pm. The D333 Antares took over, with its better-soundproofed cabin and its seven extendable seats. He landed at twilight "at the fortified aerodrome in Villa Cisneros, on the camp of a tribe of nomadic Moors”. After having dinner in a corner of the hangar, he took off for Dakar, where he landed in the middle of the night. The trip had lasted about thirty hours from Paris! It now takes 5 hours and 40 minutes to connect the two cities with a direct flight by Boeing 777.
Meanwhile, Dakar has established itself as an emblematic stopover for Air France, the one which welcomed, on 21 January 1976, the first commercial Concorde flight from Paris-Charles de Gaulle.
