Project Midnight Ghost

The Search for History’s Most Important Missing Airplane

TIGHAR’s investigation into the disappearance of the French flight which nearly beat Lindbergh’s across the Atlantic takes its name from a quote by the Lone Eagle himself who described the lost aviators as having “vanished like midnight ghosts.” On May 8, 1927, WWI heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli took off from LeBourget Field near Paris aboard their biplane l’Oiseau Blanc (the White Bird) bound nonstop for New York. Had they succeeded, the subsequent course of aviation history would have been very different. Instead, a frantic but fruitless search for the missing flyers dominated the headlines until Lindbergh’s takeoff just twelve days later. The French tragedy set the stage for the American triumph.

Although it was ultimately presumed that Nungesser and Coli had crashed into the ocean, numerous and conflicting witness reports fueled widespread speculation that the flight had actually reached North America. Attempts to track down all the sources and witnesses petered out, however, and finally the searches were abandoned.