Charles Lindbergh Won the Prize, but Did His Rival Get There First?

WSJ ^ | 06 Sept 2011 | SEBASTIAN MOFFETT

[Palter]

A Countryman Tries to Unravel the Unsolved Mystery of Charles Nungesser's Last Flight

PARIS—Right after his historic, 33-hour trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Charles Lindbergh asked whether there was news of French aviator Charles Nungesser.

Mr. Nungesser, an adventurer and World War I ace, was Mr. Lindbergh's great rival in the race to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in one direction or the other. He had set off with a navigator from Paris for New York just two weeks before Mr. Lindbergh's flight. But his biplane—called L'Oiseau Blanc, or White Bird—never arrived in New York, and for decades it was assumed that it had crashed in an Atlantic storm.

Eighty-four years later, Bernard Decré, a French aviation enthusiast, is on his own quest—to rewrite history. He has come to a different conclusion: The Oiseau Blanc probably flew over Newfoundland, before crash-landing off the coast of Canada.

Last year, Mr. Decré discovered a 1927 U.S. Coast Guard telegram that reported sighting parts of the plane three months after the flight.

"My heart started pounding," Mr. Decré, 71, remembers.

So Mr. Nungesser and navigator François Coli might have been the first men to fly nonstop to North America from Continental Europe. Messrs. Nungesser and Coli would then have held the world flight distance record, if only for 12 days and under tragic circumstances.

The race was triggered when New York hotelier Raymond Orteig in 1919 offered a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight between New York and Paris. In the ensuing years, a number of fliers made it across in other ways—via Ireland, or by refueling at sea—but the nonstop, continent-to-continent challenge was different. "There was an incredible competition to drive the birth of commercial aviation," says Eric Lindbergh, the aviator's grandson.

[Lancey Howard]

So, who won the prize for being first to make the trip from the top of the Empire State Building to the ground?

[Cowman]

Given the chance, I'd love to sit down and have a beer with him. I bet he's a character.

I liked his method of strategy development in looking for the "Twin Sisters" cannons.

He tried to replicate the conditions of the legend by getting drunk and hiding something in the woods -- then he went back when sober to determine how far the actual was from the perceived.

He couldn't find the test item either

[SunkenCiv]

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Note: this topic is dated 9/06/2011. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. Thanks Palter. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.