This series in four episodes of the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Sunday” (Twitter, #1:15 p.m.), signed Marie-Pierre Farkas, Clément Voyer, Anthony Santoro and Christophe de Martino, returns to one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation: the disappearance of the White Bird, the biplane of wood, canvas and metal in which the two French aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli wanted to connect without stopover Paris to New York in less than forty hours…
On May 8, 1927, the two aces of the First World War took off from Le Bourget airport to attempt the first aerial crossing of the North Atlantic in the context of the 1920s: aeronautics felt their wings growing in a competition between French and American pilots. We will never see Nungesser and François Coli again. What have they become ? Did they crash into the Channel some time after takeoff? Were they struck down in the middle of the ocean? Did the plane crash somewhere on the American continent?
A disappearance unresolved for nearly a century
After they take off, everyone wants to know how the crossing is going. Daily newspapers display the latest news on their front windows. They are rare, even non-existent, since their flight over England and Ireland. Nungesser’s mother tells herself not to worry, that they have chosen a route that few boats take. It’s normal that we haven’t seen them…
In the meantime, Charles Lindbergh was finally the first pilot to link New York to Paris non-stop between May 20 and 21, 1927… The press continued to worry about the fate of Nungesser and Coli for several weeks. And then, time gradually erased their memory. There remains the mystery of this unresolved disappearance for nearly a century…
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