Shrouded in mystery
A month earlier — because France finally gave up the unpopular “pool” — the Laté-300 Croix-du-Sud flew from Dakar to Natal. It provides the
postal service with the unique improved Arc-en-Ciel. Then will come the Blériot-5190 Santos-Dumont and the Centaure land four-engine.
The French are faster; the more regular Germans. But the danger is still there:the breakdown, the wind, the sea. The German Tornado disappears; a few days later, in February 1935, the City of Buenos Aires. Ten months later, it will be the Southern Cross with, alas! Mermoz.
Cruel losses, but the line continues. And the North Atlantic? The game is tougher, of course. The Germans are also using floating bases which are old cargo ships transformed for their new mission, with a catapult at the front and at the rear. a huge crane. In France, Blériot recommends permanently installing artificial islands in the middle of the ocean.
Lindbergh - he now chairs the technical committee of Pan American Airways - believes in giant seaplanes. It was they, in fact, who, on July 7, 1937, made a double crossing of the Atlantic. An American Clipper flies from Newfoundland to Ireland, while a British Caledonia does the reverse. Each of them carries mailbags. The French, for their part, built a giant seaplane, a Latécoère, the Lieu tenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris, which, from December 1935, explored the southern route through the Azores.
But these are still only experimental trips. At that time. the only passengers to cross the North Atlantic were those of the large German airship Hindenburg, which made twenty non-stop trips from Frankfurt to Lakehurst. He took various routes. One of them went up very far north, to Greenland. In this area, passengers and crew could see, caught in the drifting ice, the wreckage of a terrestrial apparatus. Names came to their lips. Was it the plane of Nungesser, Hamilton and Michin, or others that had shown the way, then disappeared, shrouded in mystery?