One Summer: America, 1927 Read Online Free PDF Page A

prestige. Nungesser and Coli gladly joined the enterprise as navigators. They called their plane L’Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird) and painted it white so that it would be easier to find if it came down in the sea.
    Starting in Paris was a piece of patriotic vanity that many were certain would prove their undoing. It would mean flying into prevailing winds that would slow their speed and cut their fuel efficiency dramatically. The engine was a water-cooled Lorraine-Dietrich, the same make Pinedo had used to fly to Australia, so it had a pedigree, but it was not an engine built with long ocean crossings in mind. In any case, they could carry no more than about forty hours’ worth of fuel, which left them almost no margin for error. Nungesser seemed to know that what they were doing was probably not possible. As he moved around his plane on May 8 he smiled weakly at well-wishers and seemed distracted. To boost his alertness he accepted an intravenous injection of caffeine, which cannot have done his nerves any good.
    Coli by contrast appeared entirely relaxed, but he agreed with Nungesser that the plane was overloaded and should be lightened. They decided to discard most of their rations, as well as their life jackets and an inflatable dinghy. If forced down, they would have nothing to aid their survival but a contraption for distilling seawater, a length of fishing line and a hook, and a small, curious assortment of food: three cans of tuna fish and one of sardines, a dozen bananas, a kilo of sugar, a flask of hot coffee, and brandy. Even after unloading supplies, their plane weighed almost eleven thousand pounds. It had never taken off with that much weight before.
    When preparations were complete, Coli and his wife embraced, then he and Nungesser waved to their well-wishers and clambered aboard. It was 5:15 a.m. when they assumed their takeoff position. The runwayat Le Bourget was two miles long, and they would need nearly all of it. The plane crossed the grass expanse with fearful sluggishness at first, but slowly it gathered speed. After some time it lifted briefly, but came down again and bouncily proceeded another three hundred yards before finally, agonizingly, and barely getting airborne. The chief engineer, who had run along beside the plane much of the way, fell to his knees and wept. Just taking off was a unique triumph. No plane in the Atlantic race had done even that before now. The crowd roared its approval. L’Oiseau Blanc climbed with painful slowness into the milky haze of the western sky and set a course for the English Channel. One hour and twenty-seven minutes later, at 6:48 a.m., Nungesser and Coli reached the chalky sea cliffs of Normandy at Étretat. A squadron of four escort planes tipped their wings in salute and peeled away, and L’Oiseau Blanc flew off alone in the direction of the British Isles and the cold Atlantic beyond.
    All France waited breathlessly.
    The following day came the joyous news that the two airmen had made it. “Nungesser est arrivê,” the Parisian newspaper L’Intransigeant announced excitedly (so excitedly that it put a circumflex rather than an acute accent on arrivé ). A rival publication, Paris Presse , quoted Nungesser’s first words to the American people upon landing. According to this report, Nungesser had made a smooth and stylish landing in New York Harbor and brought the plane to a halt before the Statue of Liberty (also from France, as the paper proudly noted). Once ashore the two aviators were greeted by a deliriously impressed and jubilant city and showered with ticker tape as they paraded up Fifth Avenue.
    In Paris, the happy news all but stopped the city. Bells rang out. Strangers weepily embraced. Crowds gathered around anyone who had a newspaper. Levasseur sent a telegram of congratulations. At Coli’s mother’s home in Marseille, champagne was broken out. “I knew my boy would do it because he told me he would,” Coli’s mother said, tears of joy