When our airport needed a name, Henry Potez was the obvious choice. Thanks to him, our region’s aeronautical adventure began on 1 July 1922 when the foundation stone for the Méaulte factory was laid. In under two years, 25,000 square meters of workshops had been built, as well as an airfield with three runways, and in 1930 the industrial site and its 3,000 employees became the world’s leading production center – a meteoric rise. Today, the Airbus Atlantic production unit in Méaulte employs nearly 2,000 people on a 47-hectare site. We owe it to this brilliant, visionary humanist that we are at the heart of an aero pole center of excellence. Henry Potez who collaborated with Marcel Dassault at one stage, spent more than fifty years writing the history of aeronautics, where his name remains synonymous with innovation. Faced with the economic and environmental challenges that lie ahead, the people of our region, both in public and private, have been inspired by their history, and all of them have an energy and a sense of vision and innovation forever ingrained in their genes.