#JEAN MERMOZ ARGENTINA SERIES#

“He had been forced down more than once…. “Pioneering thus, Mermoz had cleared the desert, the mountains, the night, and the sea,” Saint-Exupéry wrote.

Mermoz flew 1,900 miles in 19.5 hours, and landed in the Natal harbor the next morning. 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….” In Wind, Sand and Stars, published in 1940, fellow Aéropostale pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight.

#JEAN MERMOZ ARGENTINA SERIES#

As night fell, they flew into a series of waterspouts that rose into stormy clouds. Louis, Senegal, with a navigator, a radio operator, and a load of mail. Mermoz, in a new Latécoère 28 float-equipped monoplane, took off on May 12 from St. In early 1930, Aéropostale looked to bridge the Atlantic. And in July 1929, with the acquisition of Potez 25 open-cockpit biplanes that had a much higher ceiling than the Laté 25, Mermoz and Henry Guillaumet opened a scheduled route between Buenos Aires and Santiago. In effect, they dove off the mountain, and Mermoz pointed the nose straight down, hoping to gain flying speed. He and Collenot strapped themselves in, and Mermoz got the airplane rolling down the path. After determining that they could not hike out, Mermoz cleared a crude path to the edge of the precipice and removed from the aircraft anything that wasn’t bolted down. With mechanic Alexandre Collenot, Mermoz set out in a Latécoère 25 monoplane and found an updraft that carried them through a mountain pass, but a downdraft smashed the aircraft onto a plateau at 12,000 feet. Mermoz next tackled shortening the Argentina-to-Chile route pilots had to make a thousand-mile detour to get around the Andes. After he showed the way, mail delivery was no longer restricted to daylight-only operations. He made Aéropostale’s first South American night flight in April 1928 from Natal in Brazil to Buenos Aires in Argentina, along a route unmarked by any sort of beacon. In 1927, Lignes Aeriennes Latécoère became Compagnie Général Aéropostale, and Mermoz took charge of the South American routes. Other hazards: the hostile Sahara, impenetrable Andes, and 150-mph winds that roiled over the southern Argentine coast. Mermoz was lucky-five Latécoère pilots were killed by Moors. He was captured by nomadic Moors and held prisoner until a ransom was paid-a common practice and one of the many torments on the Latécoère airmail routes, which linked Toulouse to Barcelona, Casablanca, and Dakar. In 1926, Mermoz had engine trouble over the Mauritanian desert and made an emergency landing. Three years later, he signed up as a pilot with Lignes Aeriennes Latécoère, and set out to attain the goal of aircraft designer for Pierre Latécoère: to create an airmail line linking Europe with Africa and South America. In January 1921, on his third try, Jean Mermoz got his pilot’s license.

I wrote an extensive article on the life of “France’s Lindbergh,” and to view that article please click here Jean Mermoz however, for today I want you to view an article from the Smithsonian titled “10 Great Pilots.” I hope that you enjoy the brief details presented and you will possibly have time, later in the weekend, to do some research on your own so that you, as Paul Harvey would say, will know the rest of the story. Jean Mermoz, who was born in France in 1901, is a national hero in France as well as being nicknamed “France’s Lindbergh” by the press. Argentina considers Jean Mermoz the “Father of Argentine Aviation,” as well as a national hero, and this is the focus of the blog today. This week we are going to revisit aviation in South America and specifically Argentina. I hope the week was good for you and you will have some time off over the weekend to relax and unwind. Robert Novells’ Third Dimension Blog January 20, 2017

Jean mermoz argentina