A man and wings

Description

A fighter pilot shot down on the banks of the Marne on May 30, 1918 in a state where "he will not spend the night", he owed his survival to the presence of his braided cap placed on his stomach between his inert hands. Captain Roper, paralyzed, falls back on the Right and at 28, having recovered the use of his legs, becomes Aeronautical Advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which brings him ”among
ministers, diplomats, generals, admirals "from all countries to be" charged alone with defending the future of France in a field where its pioneers had left it on a pedestal, hence its ex-allies were going to try to bring it down ”. Member of the Aeronautics Commission of the Peace Conference, he conceived the twelve fundamental principles which should govern international air navigation, constituting the foundations of the Convention relating to the regulation of air navigation signed in Paris on October 13, 1919 and entered into in force in July 1922. It was then at the age of 31, he was elected Secretary General of the International Commission for Air Navigation, a position he held during the twenty-five years of existence of this body. In November 1944, the United States, advocating a new international order putting an end to the duality of regimes resulting from the Paris (1919) and Havana (1923) conventions, organized the Chicago conference where Albert Roper was
invited in a “personal and consultative” capacity… The conference will produce an agreement fixing the seat of the new organization in Canada, with Albert Roper as the first Secretary General. ICAO was born. This biography traces the exceptional fate of this extraordinary pioneer of aviation, who will go through the two world wars and succeed in imposing his main idea: to regulate international civil aviation.