Update on "La recherche de l'Oiseau Blanc" - Feb 2011.

Our last discoveries in the NARA archives in Washington DC confirm our hypothesis : Nungesser & Coli’s aeroplane, L’Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird) has crossed the Atlantic on May 8th & 9th 1927 and crashed very near Saint Pierre & Miquelon, the French islands near Newfoundland, around noon on May 9th 1927.

We have collected several clues, and have found in October and November 2010 coast guards’ telegrams and log books, which leave no doubt that pieces of the plane have been found and rescued a few weeks after the wreck along the coast of Saint Pierre and down to Boston, drifted by the Labrador stream.

Erik Lindbergh himself has acknowledged these discoveries and sent us a very nice e-mail.

We therefore propose to our National authorities to name Saint Pierre & Miquelon airport (« Pointe Blanche » airport) after our two heroes, and baptise it « Nungesser&Coli Airport ». We would ask Erik Lindbergh to the official ceremony, as his grand father’s first question when he landed at Le Bourget Airport in 1927 was “Do we have any news from Nungesser & Coli”?

What comes next :

We have started to work with the CNES, French Public organisation for Space research, who are interested as they need to perform tests for their ASM-SWARM programme, and our research can help with these tests.

The CNES operate an ATL2 aircraft, equipped with an aerial magnetometer ; if we could use this instead of the one we have used until now, which is set on a boat, we would accelerate the research from 5 kts to 100 kts. The ATLs are at the moment on a mission in North Africa, but we may have the opportunity to use them at the end of August.

We need to raise funds to finance this operation. But we are helped in this by the media impact, which is very important in France and abroad.