A Report

| 1898-1908 | 1909-1918 | 1919-1928 | 1929-1938 | 1939-1948 |
| 1949-1958 | 1959-1968 | 1969-1978 | 1979-1988 | 1989-1998 |

The age of great races and breaking records. In 1919, Alcock and Brown cross the Atlantic for the first time, taking off from Newfoundland and landing in Ireland. In 1921, Adrienne Bolland crosses the Andes. But the most important achievement is Charles Lindbergh's solo trans-Atlantic flight. On May 26, 1927, the young aviator takes off from New York in Spirit of Saint Louis, landing at Le Bourget airfield near Paris 33 hours and 30 minutes later. Eighteen days earlier, the Frenchmen Nungesser and Coli had disappeared attempting the same trip in the opposite direction. The same year, boomtown Hollywood awards the first Oscar to Wings, a stirring epic about the early days of aviation and the first talkie comes out.

ADRIENNE BOLLAND was a test pilot for Caudron, the French aircraft maker, which thought that having a young woman fly its new G3 would be a good way of showing how easy it was to handle the plane, which looked like a rattletrap but was actually flexible and sturdy. It was April 1, 1921. Adrienne was hunched over the controls in the tiny, bathtub-like cockpit of the G3 as an icy wind tossed the frail-looking plane about as if it were a toy.

She was flying too high above the Andes. Her nose and mouth were full of blood. Bitter cold burned her hands and feet. Her vision was burned. She felt dizzy and could hardly breathe in the rarefied atmosphere two-and-a-half miles above the earth.

Adrienne was lost in the high-altitude wilderness. At times the plane was sucked down, and she gripped the throttle with all her might. The wings flapped and trembled, and the Caudron soared into the sky. After ten hellish minutes, Adrienne spotted an oyster-shaped lake below. She had no idea where she was. Shortly before her departure, a Brazilian woman who had read about the pilot in the papers walked into her hotel room. She left Adrienne a few medals and a piece of advice: "When you-re lost up there, you'll fly over an oyster-shaped lake. There'll be a valley to your right, which will look like the right way. It's not. Make a left toward a wall of solid rock that looks insurmountable".

Spitting blood, Adrienne turned left and headed straight toward the wall. She quickly discovered that when wind hits a mountain it is deflected skyward in the same way that the water in a stream flies into the air when it hits rocks in the rapids. She flew headlong into the blade of the wind, coming close to the wall. The wind lifted the Caudron and carried it up, climbing the sheer rock face until a breach opened behind a peak.

Adrienne steered the plane into the pass and suddenly found herself flying above peaceful valleys, with the Pacific straight ahead. In Santiago, Adrienne was feted like no woman before her. But the French consul was not there. He though this business about a woman aviator who had conquered the Andes was an April Fool's joke.

The People of Limoux, France, couldn't believe it. In March 1912, just one week before they were going to elect a deputy, a new candidate suddenly dropped from the sky: an aviator named Jules Vedrines. A native of Saint-Denis who received his pilot's license in 1910, Vedrines had won the Paris-Madrid air race in 1911 before setting a speed record by being the first to surpass 62 miles per hour. He had decided to run for deputy so that the world of aviation would have a voice in Parliament. In the end, he lost by a few hundred votes to a well-known local industrialist, but Vedrines kept of flying. In 1913, he flew from Paris to Cario in 10 stages. During World War I, he was charged with special missions, and in 1919 he again demonstrated his prowess by landing on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette department store. Three months later, on April 21, 1919, he crashed during a Paris-Rome flight.

Rene Fonck, World War I ace flier, had failed in his attempt to fly from New York to Paris, and Nungesser and Coli had disappeared when they tried the same route in the other direction. It took a 25-year-old American, Charles Lindbergh, to accomplish the feat. When he landed his Spirit of Saint Louis at Le Bourget Airport in Paris on May 21, 1927, after 33 hours and 30 minutes in the air, he was greeted by a delirious crowd. He had just written a new chapter in the history of aviation, following up on Orville and Wilbur Wright's flight in 1903 and the Frenchman Louis Bleriot's crossing of the English Channel in 1909. In 1930, Lindbergh was at Curtiss Field on Long Island to welcome Frenchmen Costes and Bellonte, the first to fly from Paris to New York.

THE ROARING TWENTIES come to a crashing end as the Great Depression begins. Jean Mermoz flies a Late 28, the Comte de la Vaulx, from Senegal to Natal, with Dabry and Giimie in the cockpit. Guillaumet adds superhuman courage to the Aeropostale legend. Women flyers - Jean Battern, Helene Boucher, Jacqueline Cochran and Amelia.

Earhart-make their mark. Aviation enters adulthood. Airlines spring up and, since there is strength in numbers, in 1933 all the French companies join forces to found Air France. For a while it seems that seaplanes are going to replace other aircraft. War draws near as, in the words of Saint-Exupery, "aircraft with wheels" triumph. On December 7, 1936, Mermoz disappears over the ocean.

LE GRAND BACLON is not just an inexpensive, rather old-fashioned hotel in the heart to Toulouse. It also witnessed one of the twentieth century's greatest adventures, France's Aeropostale air mail service. Latecoere, Mermoz, Saint-Exupery, Guillaumet, Vachet, Daurat-all the pioneering aviators stayed at the hotel because of its proximity to the Toulouse-Montaudran airfield. Among their achievements were the flight from Toulouse to Barcelona in two hours and twenty minutes on December 25, 1918; Toulouse-Alicante-Casablanca two months later; and the first air mail service between France and Morocco in 1919, and between Casablanca and Dakar in 1925. In March 1929, Jean Mermoz flew from Buenos Aires to Santiago over the Andes. A year later, on May 12, 1930, he made the first successful flight over the South Atlantic in a seaplane.

All the Aeropostale pilots and mechanics stayed at Le Grand Balcon. Jean Brousse has owned the hotel since 1955 and welcomes visitors from throughout the world who have made the pilgrimage to this historic site. He points to old posters, portraits of the heros and photographs of their planes, and never tires of telling anecdotes about them. He learned everything from two elderly, unmarried sisters, Adeline and Francoise Marquez, and one of their friends, who once pampered the pilots and listened to their stories. The spinsters, who were real sticklers on principles, told about the pilots carrying their girlfriends up to their rooms piggy-back so that an extra pair of footsteps wouldn't be heard. Or about when one of them found Saint-Exupery asleep in the bathtub, a look floating on the water. During long evenings in the cozy sitting room, the pilots told them tales about being attached by nomads in the Mauritanian desert, the unexpected delights of Cape Juby and colorful Dakar and Brazil.

The days of historic Montaudran airfield may be numbered, but present-day Toulouse is more than ever the hub of France's aeronautics industry. The huge Air France hangar where the prototypes of the Caravelle and the Concorde - the pride of Aerospatiale - were bult still stands on a 988-acre tract of land between Blagnac, Saint-Martin-du-Touch and Colomiers. The Airbus plant is a bustling hive of activity where 3,000 people are expected to joint the 8,500 employees from all over Europe, including nearly 3,000 engineers, who are getting ready to build the world's largest passenger plane - the 660-seat A3XX.

Toulouse has a close relationship with the surrounding farmland, so it seems an unlikely home of Europe's aeronautics industry. Yves Marc, who writes about air transportation in the local daily La Depeche, explains that, "everyone is Toulouse, from its youngest citizens on up, is steeped in this passion from birth. As for me, I believe in the history of the early pioneers who made history here." Jean Brousse, owner of Le Grand Balcon, says, "Nowadays people are interested in the history of those adventures and what they offered this city. But believe me, for years nobody even knew they stayed at my place, much less that they traveled to the four corners of the globe."

AMELIA EARTHART "we are on the line of position 156-137," the voice barks. "Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north-south." It is 8:44 am local time on July 2, 1937, somewhere off Howland Island in the Pacific. This was the last time that Amelia Earhart's voice was heard. The flight around the world aboard the twin engine Lockheed-Electra was to be the pinnacle of a brilliant career. In 1928, Earhart became famous as the first woman passenger to have crossed the Atlantic-albeit only as "baggage" as she put it-one year after Charles Lindbergh's historic flight. (She was called "Lady Lindy" due to an uncanny resemblance, nickname she never liked.) Fours years later, however, on May 20 and 21, she piloted her own plane across the North Atlantic, from Harbor Grace in Newfoundland to Culmore, Ireland. For the next few years, she dreamed of circling the globe. Others had accomplished this before, but none had flown as close to theequator as she would, a trip of over 29,000 miles in all. Her husband, the publisher and aviation buff George Palmer Putman helped organize the flight. Against her judgment, Putman insisted she fly with Fred Noonan - a former Pan Am pilot who, althought a skilled navigator, had been fired for drinking. The radio system was limited and the Howland stop somewhat shaky. Much was left to luck - which stayed with them for the first 18 legs, but failed them during the penultimate one. Her final wish must have been granted: "When I go," she once said, "I would like to go in my plane. Quickly."

Earhart was one of the many early women pilots determined to fly alongside their male counterparts. One domain, however, remained out of reach; despite their flight records and performances, women pilots did not become a common sight on commercial airlines until well into the 1970s.

Helene Boucher was not the first woman to fly, but she became a symbol for those who came later. Female pilots were competitive, but they also helped each other out. Boucher's meeting with Maryse Hilsz at Le Bourget in 1930 convinced her to become a professional pilot. Between 1931 and 1934, she collected records and admiration from such luminaries as Mermoz and Saint-Exupery. She just kept going faster until November 30, 1934, when her Caudron Rafale shattered in a forest.

From the time he won his pilot's license in 1921 till his death on December 9, 1936, Jean Mermoz was one of the greats. His many airborne feats - flying over deserts and mountains, night flying, crossing the Andes, the first mail flight across the South Atlantic were lionized by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in his Wind, Sand and Stars. The last words heard from Mermoz were "Let's cut the right rear engine," before his Croix-du-Sud went down in the South Atlantic.

The "D" stands for Douglas, the "C" for Commercial and the "3" for the third in a series of aircraft developed by Donald W Douglas, who, after working for the military, transformed civilian transport. Popular enthusiasm had been excited by Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, and the new American airlines were flighting it out for passengers, but they lacked the right planes. In 1931, Boeing brought out the revolutionary Model 247, but sold it exclusively to United, so TWA turned to Douglas, who came up with the three DCs. The revolution in air transport truly began with the DC-3 inaugurated on December 17, 1935.

| 1898-1908 | 1909-1918 | 1919-1928 | 1929-1938 | 1939-1948 |
| 1949-1958 | 1959-1968 | 1969-1978 | 1979-1988 | 1989-1998 |