... White Bird to have reached Round Lake and reasonable to expect it
to have passed that way, and if Berry really did hear an airplane, then
it may well have been the White Bird.
But the thread of
evidence is admittedly thin; and it must begin in Newfoundland. How likely
were the 16 sightings there to have been of the White Bird? First is the
problem of time. Nungesser and Coli had expected to reach Newfoundland
at about 2 a.m.; the sightings were more than seven hours later. One American
aviator, himself planning a transatlantic flight at the time, thought
their time calculations, based on Alcock and Brown’s 1919 flight, were
in error to begin with. Adding the factor of the headwind they encountered,
he concluded the time of the Newfoundland sightings was reasonable.
What lends credence
to the sightings is that, though officials sought information throughout
Newfoundland, only persons in a line from Old Perlican to St. Lawrence
reported hearing or seeing anything. And an airplane flying a course from
Old Perlican to New York would have passed close enough to each of these
locations to be heard or seen.
But why would this
plane then have passed over Round Lake, which is west of this course?
If, at Nova Scotia’s southwest coast, Coli decided it best to cross the
Bay of Fundy by the shortest route before proceeding again to the southwest,
the turn would have taken the plane toward Round lake, 5 miles inland
from the Maine coast.
Round Lake is approximately
1700 miles from Harbour Grace, a flight of six and a half to seven hours
for the White Bird. The Harbour Grace plane would then have reached Round
Lake between 4 and 4:30 p.m., 15 minutes either side of the time the White
Bird was expected to run out of fuel. (Berry’s time estimate was uncertain.
He described it only as “late afternoon.”)
But if an airplane
did crash near Round Lake, why has no one come upon it by now? First,
because any sign of the wreckage that might at the time have been visible
from the air would long since have been obscured. And because of the heavy
undergrowth, few persons ever walk through there.
In the more than
50 years since the crash, perhaps the only surviving identifiable remnant
of the wood and cloth White Bird would now be the engine. And, if the
plane did hit a marsh, it could be completely submerged.
Did Nungesser and
Coli, though tragically short of their goal, succeed in making the first
east-to-west transatlantic flight? Do the remains of the White Bird lie
somewhere west of Round Lake, Maine? Some evidence suggests they may.
Perhaps someday a searcher will come upon the White Bird’s rusted engine;
and with that discovery will be solved one of the longest standing, most
puzzling mysteries in aviation history. |