Also known as the Laté 28, the airplane could be equipped with fixed landing gear or pontoons for water operations. The airplane’s serial number is reported as both “Nº 909” and “Nº 919.” It was a large, single-engine, high-wing monoplane with an enclosed cabin. The airplane flown by Mermoz, Dabry and Gimié was a Latécoère 28-3, registration F-AJNQ, built by Société Industrielle d’Aviation Latécoère at Toulouse, France. Wind, Sand and Stars, by Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger comte de Saint Exupéry, translated by Lewis Galantière, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, Chapter 1 at Pages 16–17. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built and then night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up and when, and hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom. Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, ² off Africa. (le Figaro)Īntoine Saint Exupéry, a fellow Aéropostale pilot, described a portion of Mermoz’s transatlantic flight in Wind, Sand and Stars:Īnd yet we have all known flights when of a sudden, each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality when, only a couple of hours from port, we have felt ourselves more distant from it than we should feel if we were in India when there was a premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return. (Left to right) Jean Dabry, Jean Mermoz and Léopold Gimié. This was the first non-stop flight to cross the South Atlantic. Centennial of Flight Commission reported that the flight took 19 hours, 35 minutes. Sources very from as few as 17 hours to as many as 21 hours, 24 minutes. The actual duration of the flight is difficult to determine. The airplane was equipped with radios that could be used to triangulate their position using nine land stations and several ships along their course.Ī contemporary United Press wire service news report stated that they arrived at Natal at 6:15 a.m., local time. Mermoz, Dabry, Gimié, left for Natal at 10:56 a.m., local.”) Gimié was an expert in radio-navigation. Mermoz, Dabry, Gimié, partis pour Natal à 10 h. Gimié transmitted a radio message: “19º Frame-A.J.N.Q. Natal was approximately 2,000 miles away. The aviators flew southwest across the South Atlantic Ocean. The crew had named the airplane Comte de la Vaulx, after an early French aeronaut and the founder of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Their airplane, a pontoon-equipped Latécoère 28-3, was carrying 122 kilograms (269 pounds) of mail and fuel for 30 hours of flight. Latécoère 28-3 F-AJNQ at Saint-Louis du Sénégal, May 1930, with Gimié, Mermoz and Dabry (Keystone)ġ2–: In an effort to connect the North African and South American air mail routes, Jean Mermoz, the chief pilot of Compagnie générale aéropostale, along with co-pilot and navigator Jean Dabry, and radio navigator Léopold Martial Émile Gimié, departed Saint-Louis, on the western coast of Senegal, French West Africa, enroute to Natal, Brazil.
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