About Bernard Leroy

Following the death of my parents I found myself at the end of WW2 at the age of 14 working as a ploughman behind two horses. Four years later I joined the French Air Forces for five years. In 1953 I joined the French Civil Aviation Administration and was in charge of the engineering maintenance of the Saigon Regional Control Centre, a very busy centre as the war was going on. Three years later the service was transferred to the Vietnamese Administration. At that time the SITA Management had in mind to operate, in Iran and in the newly independent countries of Indochina, the air/ground and ground to ground telecommunications on behalf of the local administration, in the same way as Aerosiam was doing in Thailand. For that reason I was seconded to Air France and sub-seconded to SITA in order to provide the technical support to the local SITA Representative based at Saigon. These projects did not materialise for the simple reason that the countries concerned, at least in Indochina, were expecting to obtain equipment free from US Aid, Colombo Plan and other sources instead of having a third party operating on their behalf. Some years later I ended as SITA Representative for Thailand, Laos and Cambodia and soon after took control of some centres in the Pacific while opening Sri Lanka and Burma. During these years in Bangkok I got experience dealing with local PTTs which were quite tough in those days, and competing with Aerosiam I understood airlines business and what these airlines were expecting from us. I was then appointed DR and in 1970 transferred to Hong Kong. Not long after this move I resigned from the French Civil Aviation and became a SITA staff. While based at Hong Kong and later Singapore, aiming at providing all the needs of airlines operating in the area, mostly the rapidly growing local airlines, I prepared projects, negotiated with local administrations and implemented SITA services in more than 30 Asia and Pacific countries.