L.Opdyke French Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer)
Deleted by request of (c)Schiffer Publishing
At the end of 1912 Roger Sommer gave up his business, and Sanchez-Besa bought back his shops and those of Train, at Mourmelon. Some time earlier Sommer had left to Leon Bathiat, his chief testpilot, the rights to Sommer's monoplane, to which Bathiat made some useful improvements. Bathiat then joined Sanchez-Besa to form a new firm, Bathiat-Sanchez.
The first machine from the new combination was introduced at the end of the spring of 1913 and was developed directly from the third Sanchez-Besa, but with equal-span wings, a rudder extension above the elevators, and tail-booms joined at the tail. The floats were large and flat and turned up at the nose. A rotary engine was mounted at the rear of the nacelle and through a chain drove a pusher propeller. Rugere tested it on the Seine, apparently with little success, since a few months later the firm produced a new seaplane for the Paris-Deauville race and the meet at Deauville at the end of August 1913. But this machine was nothing more than the 1912 Voisin military biplane pusher fitted with a large flat pontoon float and wing-tip floats: it was known as the "13.5 meters" and became the Type L.