Francis Bernard (born 1940) is a French engineer. In the 1970s, he initiated CAD/CAM developments at Dassault Aviation. They led to CATIA 3D, which was made available worldwide after he co-founded Dassault Systèmes in 1981.
Early life and education
Francis Bernard was born in Hanoi in 1940, still part of French Indochina, today Vietnam. His father was an engineer in the coalmines of northern Vietnam. He attended primary school in Haiphong and Dalat. In 1952, his family returned to France and settled in Paris. He joined the Janson-de-Sailly high school, following the course of preparatory classes before being accepted at Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (Supaero), a French university specialising in aerospace engineering, in 1965.
After his military service, he joined Dassault Aviation's technical division headed by Jean Cabrière, and within it the Advanced Design Department headed by Pierre Bohn in charge of aerodynamics, flight quality and performance optimisation. He specialised in theoretical aerodynamics and quickly got involved in software development of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programs.
Professional career
From GEOVA to DRAPO: beginnings of CAD at Dassault Aviation (1967-1981)
Bernard's career began developing calculation tools for aerodynamic optimization. Several military aircraft programmes were then underway, including the Alpha Jet, or the Mirage III successors and the civilian aircraft programs Mercure or Falcon. Heading a 5 to 6 people team, Francis Bernard developed three-dimensional CAD tools to define wind tunnel models with improved accuracy, as well as numerical control programs for machining structural parts. GEOVA (Génération et Exploitation par Ordinateur des Volumes d’Avions, meaning Computer aided Generation and Operation of Aircraft Volumes) was an integration of various software tools around a single database. The main objective was to prevent software developments diverging by structuring them around their common data.
For a decade, from 1967 to 1977, he developed GEOVA, a comprehensive set of 3D CAD applications. GEOVA evolved to benefit from many computer technological innovations, such as interactive graphics terminals replacing alphanumeric terminals tools, and to interface with the computer numerical control (CNC) machines. As for the other aircraft manufacturers, these were internal developments defined according to very specific and urgent requirements. The level of integration tended to be low. This was the time of mainframes and punched cards, requiring a high level of software applications expertise. User friendliness was not feasible yet. Design offices had to submit calculation works to Bernard's team, which was responsible for both software development and operation.
Birth of CATIA
While 3D gave excellent results for wind tunnel models or surface optimization, 2D remained the key modeling practice in design offices where dozens of drawing boards were aligned in large open spaces. In the 1970s, the CAD offers available on the market were mainly aimed at draftsmen. In 1974, Dassault Aviation purchased licences for CADAM ('Computer Augmented Design And Manufacturing'), Lockheed's interactive drawing application, aimed at replacing drawing boards. Francis Bernard developed interfaces between GEOVA and CADAM as well as 2.5D improvements on CADAM. The latter aimed at modeling and machining wing ribs and fuselage frames on 5-axis CNC machines (incidentally, these functions were also later sold to CADAM Inc). DRAPO (Définition et Réalisation d’Avions par Ordinateur - computer-aided aircraft definition and realisation) was the acronym given to this integration of GEOVA 3D and CADAM 2.5D.
In 1977, facing the integration problems inevitably created by constant needs of new applications, but also facing the rapid improvement of computer user-friendliness, Bernard conceived a complete rewriting of GEOVA. With the agreement of his management, Jean Cabrière and Pierre Bohn, he started designing a new architecture encompassing the whole set of functions as well as interactive graphical interfaces addressing non-computer specialists. This was the beginning of CATI (Computer-Aided Tridimensionnal Interactive application) that in a few years became CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application).