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The Quoddy Tides newspaper -- Eastport, Maine
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May 8, 2015
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Mystery of White Bird’s flight still unsolved
by Karen Holmes

 

   Eighty-eight years ago, on the afternoon of May 9, 1927, Cooper resident Harold Vining was surprised when he heard a loud engine overhead and just glimpsed an airplane before it vanished in a dense fog. The engine could be heard for only a while as the plane headed inland to the west and away from him. He thought seeing a plane was very unusual. Days later he realized he might have been one of the last witnesses to see L'Oiseau Blanc, the White Bird, a French white biplane that was attempting the first transatlantic crossing 12 days before Charles Lindbergh's famous flight. Lindbergh had almost abandoned his flight aboard the Spirit of St. Louis when news reached the United States about the White Bird's flight. The White Bird, though, never reached its destination, and Lindbergh resumed his plan, landing in Paris on May 21, 1927, at the same airfield L'Oiseau Blanc had departed from on May 8.
     Vining recounted his sighting many times over the years. He was interviewed in 1989 for an episode of a popular television show "Unsolved Mysteries," which told the tragic story of the disappearance of L'Oiseau Blanc. It remains one of the great mysteries of aviation, although it is little known or remembered by people today. The white biplane must have crashed somewhere along its planned flight path. The two men flying the aircraft were never heard from again.
      In 1919 a prize of $25,000 was offered by Raymond Orteig of France to any pilot or pilots who completed a nonstop transatlantic flight between Paris and New York City. There had been tremendous advances in aviation since World War I. The Orteig prize reinforced the idea that aviation was progress. Pilots from all over the world attempted record-breaking flights in order to get the prize. From September 1926 to May 20, 1927, 16 fliers -- 10 American, four French, one Norwegian and one Russian -- tried to win the Orteig prize. Six fliers died and several more were badly injured when their planes crashed.
      Two Frenchmen, Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli, decided they would try to win the prize. Nungesser was a daredevil French World War I ace who had shot down 45 enemy planes. Coli gained fame after the war as a competent navigator during some non‑stop, record-breaking flights across the Mediterranean Sea. Their biplane had double wings that stretched 48 feet and was refitted to make the long flight across the Atlantic and to land safely on water. The biplane was painted a bright white that could be easily seen from a distance. Vertical blue, white and red stripes, representing the French tricolors, were painted on the tail. On the morning of May 8, 1927, a crowd of hundreds of people came to watch the takeoff near Paris. Four French planes escorted L'Oiseau Blanc until it began to fly over the English Channel. There was no radio on board. The only safety equipment for the pilots were two watertight yellow flying suits and the flashing light under the fuselage of the biplane. There was no life raft.
     Nungesser and Coli had provided a flight plan in a telegram they sent to world news media. They would land in New York Harbor 36 hours after they took off, stopping between the Statue of Liberty and the French Pier 57 on Monday, May 9, around 2 p.m. They would fly over southern Ireland and then fly almost exactly along the 54th parallel across the Atlantic to Newfoundland. A turn southward would take them over the coastlines of Canada and the United States.
It is now known that Nungesser and Coli flew into unexpectedly strong headwinds, which would have lowered the biplane's speed from 100 mph to about 70 mph. As the L'Oiseau Blanc approached the southern end of Newfoundland late on the evening of May 8, they would have flown into thick cloud cover and precipitation. It is possible Nungesser and Coli then decided to fly a longer distance to get out of the storm. But the course change would have caused more fuel consumption than originally planned.
     In the early morning hours of May 9 a woman looked up from her yard in southern Newfoundland and saw a white biplane. She said that smoke was streaming from its engine. This was actually not smoke but condensation rising from the hot engine as the biplane passed through the cool Newfoundland fog. The other dozen sightings of L'Oiseau Blanc from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy show the biplane was on a straight line and southwest course. This should have allowed entrance into American airspace just north of Perry. At the time there was unusually heavy fog all along the Maine coastline and for some miles inland. Nungesser and Coli would have had little or no visibility.
     People waited during the afternoon and evening hours of May 9 in New York City, hoping to greet the two pilots and help celebrate their success, but L'Oiseau Blanc never arrived. Ironically, the French newspaper La Presse headlined Nungesser and Coli had landed successfully in New York Harbor on the evening of May 9. They had to retract this false and embarrassing story. Fishing boats, ocean liners, cargo ships, private and military planes searched the coastal waters along Newfoundland, New England and New York during the next several months. Nothing was found.
     The focus then changed to a land search. Five reports of a very low flying plane in the late afternoon of May 9 came from coastal Downeast Maine. All the reports came one after another and form a straight line on a map. One of the reports was Harold Vining's. A man about 25 miles north of Cooper, Anson Berry of East Machias, said he heard and saw a plane around the same time when he was fishing in the south end of Round Lake. He listened as it continued north. He provided the last reported sighting. If it was the biplane L'Oiseau Blanc, Nungesser and Coli would have flown over mostly uninhabited areas with thick forests, vast bogs and numerous ponds and lakes. There are other reports late in the afternoon of May 9 from people hearing a plane further south over Casco Bay. One report came from the lighthouse keeper at Sequin Island.
     Since 1927 many groups and individuals have tried to find the remains of L'Oiseau Blanc and its pilots. An article in Yankee magazine by Gunnar Hansen influenced Richard Gillespie and the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) to conduct ground searches in Maine in the mid 1980s. TIGHAR still maintains Project Midnight Ghost, dedicated to finding L'Oiseau Blanc. Writer Clive Cussler and his National Underwater Marine Association searched the Round Lake area in the late 1980s and 1990s. They used magnetometers and side‑scanning sonar on Round Lake and two nearby lakes. Strangely enough, nine psychics from different locations had contacted Cussler saying L'Oiseau Blanc had crashed on the southern slope of the Round Lake hills. But nothing was found. Perhaps Clive Cussler was correct when he suggested in 1998 that L'Oiseau Blanc might have plunged very deeply into a bog.      This would make the plane almost impossible to find.
      There are so many intriguing stories about this mystery, but there are more theories than answers. During the early morning of May 9, 1927, a boat loaded with bootleg rum was anchored near some islands of Newfoundland. Some of the crew during the early 1930s stated in an interview that they heard a motor overhead. They were alarmed because they thought it might have been a plane with U.S. Treasury agents spying on them. When they arrived ashore they would be arrested for their illegal cargo, so they fired their guns skyward and heard a resulting loud bang. A fisherman nearby said he heard the gunshots and the bang. All were afraid to say anything until years later when Prohibition was over.
     It is easier for people to remember the success of Charles Lindbergh, who lived many years after his triumph in 1927. But some still remember Nungesser and Coli, who failed. Even today pilots of planes and ships drop flowers and wreaths in the Atlantic off Newfoundland to honor Nungesser and Coli.
      If it can be proven that they crashed and died on mainland Canada or the United States, they could be truly honored and remembered as the first pilots to have successfully made a flight across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to America. Probably Lindbergh would have wanted that, too. Almost immediately after landing in France on May 21, 1927, he called the mother of Nungesser and offered his support. A short time later during a speech to the Aero Club de France, he declared that the flight of Nungesser and Coli was a far more dangerous flight than his and no one should give up hope of finding what he considered "a gallant pair."

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