Two French aviators had done it, it seemed
writes
Scott Sayare in the New York Times
— accomplished the first, near-unthinkable flight between Paris and New
York, and on May 10, 1927, newspapers across France proclaimed “the triumph of French wings” and a “golden age of French aviation.”
“Nungesser and Coli have succeeded,”
declared La Presse,
going so far as to detail their sea landing in New York Harbor and the
“cheers that rose up from the ships that surrounded them.”
Those heady first reports proved false. Charles Nungesser, a daredevil
aristocrat and top French flying ace, and François Coli, a one-eyed
mariner and former infantryman, had not arrived in New York. Their
hulking single-engine biplane, L’Oiseau Blanc, or The White Bird, was
never recovered.
They had vanished “like midnight ghosts,” wrote Charles Lindbergh, the
American who only days later reached Paris from New York. The Frenchmen
were thought to have gone down in the English Channel, or perhaps over
the Atlantic, or somewhere between Newfoundland and Maine.
Their disappearance, considered one of aviation’s great mysteries, has inspired decades of hypothesizing.
A growing body of evidence, however, suggests that the aviators crashed
off the tiny St.-Pierre, a craggy outcrop of lichenous rock and boxy,
brightly colored houses about 10 miles from Newfoundland. It is a theory
championed by Bernard Decré, an obsessive and excitable French
septuagenarian who has committed the past five years to a full-time
search for L’Oiseau Blanc.
