Biography | Guillaume Faury — The First Day He Ran Eurocopter at Marignane

The board vote was in Amsterdam. The job was on the apron at Marseille Provence. On 12 March 2013 the EADS board accepted Lutz Bertling's resignation as chief executive of Eurocopter, effective 30 April. The same statement named Guillaume Faury as his successor from 1 May 2013. Faury came back from Peugeot, where he had sat on the managing board and run research and development. He already knew the hangars. From 1998 to 2008 he had been chief engineer on the EC225 and EC725, then head of heavy-helicopter flight test, then executive vice-president for commercial programmes and for research. The registered office of the helicopter company is the international airport at Marignane. Industry directories place the plant near 43.4213 north, 5.2183 east. On 8 January 2014, a Wednesday, the Eurocopter name gave way to Airbus Helicopters as EADS itself became the Airbus Group. Faury was already in the chair when the signs changed. The following years included the grounding of the H225 after the April 2016 accident off Bergen. Thirteen people died. The North Sea fleet stayed down for about fifteen months. That episode belongs to the safety record of the type, not to a second pin. He left Marignane in early 2018 for the commercial-aircraft presidency in Toulouse. The public face of this site is the airport fence and the published address. It is not a tour of the assembly halls. Photo: Michel Rémon and Associés, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Xavier Lejeune for the European Commission, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.