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Posted by B Darnell on Wed Apr 07, 2004 05:09:23 PM

In reply top P-38 of Saint-Exupery posted by N Musante on Wed Apr 07, 2004 03:40:00 PM



The French Government has confirmed today that airplane parts found in the Mediterranean belonged to a flight piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, one of France's most beloved authors.



The discovery sheds some light on Saint-Exupery's mysterious disappearance almost 60 years ago.

The author of The Little Prince vanished during the Second World War while flying a secret mission for the Allies over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944.

But in May 2000 a professional diver discovered the remains of a Lockheed Lightning P38 plane scattered on the seabed in 70m (230ft) of water off Marseilles.

Fishermen had brought to the surface a bracelet inscribed "Saint-Ex" in the same area two years earlier.

A state ban on further dives in the area delayed further searches until October 2003, when a salvage team recovered pieces of the aircraft's landing gear and engine for researchers at the French culture ministry.

One of the pieces bore a manufacturer's number that the researchers finally confirmed today as belonging to Saint-Exupery's plane.

Pierre Becker, the head of Geocean, one of the engineering companies involved in the salvage, said: "I had tears in my eyes when I saw the number."

Saint-Exupery was 44 when he flew out of his base on Corsica in good weather to photograph parts of southern France in preparation for the Allied landings there, but was never seen again.

He was a veteran pilot who helped establish Latin America's Aeropostale air delivery service in the late 1920s.

Repeated searches of the coast failed to turn up the aircraft, leaving the author's disappearance shrouded in mystery.

France has long speculated as to his fate. Theories have ranged from hostile gunfire to mechanical problems and even suicide.

Philippe Castellano, a diver and aviation expert, said the discovery was a dream for historians, even if it did not explain why the plane came down.

"There was no bent propeller, no bullet holes ... Looking at the pieces, we are thinking of a hypothesis of a near-vertical dive at high speed. But that's just a guess," he said.

But Patrick Granjean, the head of the culture ministry department that announced the find, struck a more pessimistic note, saying: "We don't know why ? we probably never will."

Saint Exupery was an aristocratic adventurer whose life and books turned him into one of the country's biggest heroes.

The Little Prince is a tale about an interstellar-travelling little boy who recounts his experiences to an aviator he meets in the Sahara Desert.

The book, first published in New York in English in 1943 and since translated into more than 100 languages, is one of the best-selling books after the Bible and Das Kapital by Karl Marx.

Times Online

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