The aircraft was built without any assistance from the government, but an initial order of 20 was placed by the Ground French Forces (the French Armée de l'Air was founded in 1933), and it was one of the aircraft that relaunched Marcel Bloch in the aeronautical construction industry.
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The MB.80 made its first flight at the beginning of summer 1932 in Villacoublay, piloted by Zacharie Heu.
Robert Bloch | Ernest Bloch | Bloch | Ernst Bloch | Iwan Bloch | Joshua Bloch | Maurice Bloch | Marcel Bloch | Marc Bloch | Lucienne Bloch | Felix Bloch | Carl Bloch | Bloch wave | Bloch sphere | Andreas Bloch | Thomas Bloch | Rolf Bloch Hansen | Jules Bloch | Emanuel Hirsch Bloch | David Bloch-Blumenfeld | Chaim Yitzchak Bloch Hacohen | Bloch's theorem | Arthur Bloch |
It was an all-metal, twin-engine, low-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear, and armed with three flexible machine guns, one each in the nose, dorsal turret, and ventral gondola.
A design team at the former Bloch factory at Courbevoie (which had recently become part of the nationalised SNCASO), led by Henri Deplante, proposed the MB.170, a twin-engined, low-winged cantilever monoplane.
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The MB.174 will also be remembered as the aircraft flown by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince during the campaign.
Defensive armament was a 7.5 mm Darne machine gun in the nose and a ventral bath, while a 20 mm cannon was fitted in a powered dorsal mounting.
In 1936/7 the Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques de l'Ouest opened an aircraft factory adjacent to the airfield, initially building MB.210 bombers, followed by M.S.406 fighters and LeO 45 bombers.
After the fall of France, like many other Polish pilots he did not surrender and took a Bloch MB.152 across the Mediterranean to Algeria, from where he went to Casablanca in Morocco and via Gibraltar to Great Britain, arriving on 17 July.