Last year, I wrote about a baby named Airlene who was born on an airplane in 1929.
Many of my sources explicitly stated that Airlene was the first baby to be born aboard an airplane. I hadn’t seen any contradictory evidence at the time, so I assumed this was correct.
Just the other day, though, I spotted an article about a French baby that was born on an airplane in the summer of 1922 — seven years earlier.
The article stated that Mme. Georges Breyer of Lyons “was at a remote seashore resort in Southern Italy when she felt her hour had come,” so she chartered an airplane for Naples. When the plane was “40 miles south of that city, 6,000 feet over the Mediterranean, she gave birth to the child.”
It also noted that the baby would be christened Guynemer (pronounced gheen-mehr, roughly), in honor of Georges Guynemer — the French fighter pilot who shot down more than 50 German planes during World War I. (He was killed in combat in 1917.)
I wasn’t able to find any extra information on the Breyer family, but, if this story is true, then the world’s first airplane baby was Guynemer Breyer, not Airlene Evans.
It also makes me wonder…how many other babies were named after the French flying ace?
According to the records I’ve seen, close to a dozen babies born in France in the 1910s and ’20s were given the name Guynemer. Some examples…
- Guynemer Marceau Alphonse Morel (b. 1918)
- Guynemer Henri Lacroix (b. 1918)
- Guynemer Henri Ulysse Hottin (b. 1918)
- Guynemer Louis Cancouet (b. 1920)
- Hubert Guynemer Francois (b. 1922)
- Guynemer Andre Esperance Louvin (b. 1923)
A later example, Guynemer Lindbergh Nungesser Bienfait (born in Normandy in 1937), was named after not one but three famous aviators: Georges Guynemer, Charles Lindbergh, and Charles Nungesser.
Babies were also named Guynemer in other countries, such as Canada and the United States (e.g., Guynemer Wilson Anderson, born in Louisiana in 1918).
Sources:
- “Boy Born in an Airplane 6000 Feet Above the Sea.” Providence News 1 Jul. 1922: 1.
- Georges Guynemer – Wikipedia
- FamilySearch.org
Image: Adapted from L’aviateur Guynemer près d’une automobile Sigma (public domain)
[Latest update: Sept. 2025]