1.White Plane
World War I French ace Charles Nungesser and French war hero Francois Coli (on May 8, 1927 )
set to fly from LeBourget Field near Paris, nonstop for New York (the first fly across the Atlantic Ocean nonstop) in a biplane.The aircraft was a Levasseur PL-8, an open-cockpit biplane, powered by a 450 horsepower Lorraine-Dietrich 12 cylinder engine, with a detachable undercarriage and a watertight fuselage that could float on water.
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.
About a week later, Lindbergh, flying solo, successfully crossed from west to east, and was given an immense hero's welcome by the French, even as they mourned Nungesser and Coli.
2.Lady Southern Cross
Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, aka "Smithy" (the pilot of the first trans-Pacific flight from the United States to Australia) and his co-pilot John Thomas Pethybridge set to fly (on November 8, 1935) from Allahabad, India, to Singapore. They were last spotted at 1:30 AM, over the city of Rangoon, Burma.The aircraft was a Lockheed Altair monoplane, named Lady Southern Cross, and registered G-ADUS.
After being reported overdue in Singapore, the search immediately begun.In late November of 1935, the driver of a Siamese train reported that he had seen a plane crash in flames on a mountainside near Setul, on the border between Siam (now Thailand) and the federated Malay states (now Malaysia).In May of 1937, some 18 months after disappearance, the plane's starboard landing gear strut, still with its inflated tire, was picked up by Burmese fishermen on the shore of Aye Island - off the south coast of Burma, about 140 miles south-east of Rangoon. That piece is now on display at the Powerhouse Museum of Sydney, Australia.However, no further evidence or trace of the plane was found.
3.Amelia Earheart
Amelia Earhart and Frederick J. Noonan set to fly on July 2, 1937 around the world.The reason of the flight was to set out to be the first person to circle the globe by air close to the equator.The plane was a twin-engined Lockheed Model 10E Special "Electra" with added fuel tanks.
President Roosevelt authorized a search of 9 naval ships and 66 aircraft at an estimated cost of over $4 million. On July 18 the search was abandoned by ships in the Howland area. George Putnam (her husband) continued to seek help in the search, but by October he too abandoned all hope of finding them alive. Perhaps no other missing person in history has had as many theories and sighting as Earhart has. Among them are:
a)Amelia was on a spy mission authorized by President Roosevelt and was captured.
b)She purposely dove her plane into the Pacific
c)She was captured by the Japanese and forced to broadcast to American GI's as "Tokyo Rose" during WWII
d)She lived for years on an island in the South Pacific with a native fisherman
e)In 1961 it was thought that the bones of Amelia and Noonan had been found on Saipan, but they turned out to be those of Saipan natives.
f)The TV series Star Trek "Voyager" had an episode in which Earhart (and Fred Noonan) had been kidnapped and placed on a planet many light years away and worshiped as one of the "37s," a group of 20th Century humans who were placed in suspended animation on the planet.
4.Sigismund Levanevsky
Sigismund Levanevsky, pilot, adventurer, and awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union" ("the Soviet Lindbergh") and five other crew members set to fly on August 12, 1937 (Moscow Time: August 13th, 1937, at 17:58) from Moscow to New York City, with stops in Fairbanks and Chicago.The reason for flight was to prove a commercially-viable transpolar flight route between Asia and North America.The aircraft was a four-engine Soviet-made Bolkhovitinov-A bomber, with the tail number H-209.
Radio operators on the ground received Levanevsky's last radio message when the plane was 300 miles past the North Pole, headed for Alaska.
Prior to loss of radio contact, the flight crew reported loss of power in their outer starboard engine.On August 16, the Russian government contacted explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, and asked for his assistance in the search & rescue operation. His search team covered an area larger than the state of Montana, to no avail, through mid September flying over 10,000 miles crisscrossing the Arctic. The searchers assumed Levanevsky’s aircraft crashed into the Arctic Ocean and sunk to the bottom.A member of the search crew was Jimmy Mattern, who had in 1933, been rescued by Levanevsky when Mattern's Lockheed Vega crashed in Siberia during a solo circumnavigation attempt.
In March 1999, Dennis Thurston of the Minerals Management Service in Anchorage noticed an unusual shape on a sonar image of the sea floor during an ARCO pre-drilling survey. In the shallows of Camden Bay, between Prudhoe Bay and Kaktovik, was something shaped like a 60-foot cigar. Thurston thought the cigar looked like the fuselage of an airplane. Thurston traveled to Fairbanks for a conference in early May and showed the oddity to David Stone, a professor emeritus at the Geophysical Institute who had searched for the Levanevsky plane years before. "When David saw the image, he immediately said 'Levanevsky!'" Thurston said. "I knew I was in trouble."
A year later, a submarine search of the site, however, was unable to find any trace of an airplane.
5.Andrew Carnegie Whitfield
Andrew Carnegie Whitfield - a nephew of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie set to fly in the morning of April 17th, 1938 from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, New York, to the nearby town of Brentwood, New York.The aircraft was a silver and red Taylor Cub plane.
He is believed to be crashed near Norwalk Island, New York / Atlantic Ocean.A thorough search of the ocean surrounding Long Island was conducted and turned up no signs of plane wreckage.
Nassau county police obtained an order from the U. S. Department ofCommerce, a week after the disappearance, to search every private, public and abandoned hangar on Long Island, covering the 100 mile stretch between Roosevelt Field, where he took off, to Montauk point, at the extreme tip of the island - the first of its kind.
Whitfield took off with only ten gallons of gas and there was a strong wind toward the sea at the time of the flight. It was considered possible, but unlikely, that he was blown to sea.
After Andrew's disappearance was discovered, an investigation discovered that, on the same day he vanished, he had checked into a hotel in Garden City on Long Island under an alias he occasionally employed: "Albert C. White." Hotel records indicated that Whitfield/White had paid $4 in advance for the room and never checked out. When the hotel room was searched, it was discovered that his personal belongings, clothing, cuff links engraved with his initials, two life insurance policies, and several stock and bond certificates made out in Andrew's and Elizabeth's names, were all left behind in the hotel room.
Phone records also indicated that he had called his home while his family was out looking for him, and a telephone operator reported that she heard him say over the phone, "Well, I am going to carry out my plan."
After this information was uncovered, police theorized that Whitfield had committed suicide by deliberately flying his plane into the Atlantic Ocean--although no evidence to verify this theory has been found. At the time of Whitfield's disappearance, there was no evidence that he was having personal or business problems.
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