The History of Aeropostale
 
 
Guillaumet
as told by Saint Exupéry
 
"As soon as it hit, I let go of the controls and clung to the seat so I wouldn't get pitched out. I was shaken so hard that the straps on my harness bit into my shoulders and strained to bursting point. The windshield was so iced up that I lost the horizon and rolled down, twisting around like a furling flag, from 20,000 to 10,000 feet. At 10,00 feet, I caught sight of a dark, horizontal mass and managed to pull the plane back. I recognized it as a stretch of water that I knew, the Laguna Diamante. (...) I flew around it at an altitude of about a hundred feet for two hours, when I finally ran out of fuel. On landing, the plane rolled over and when I got out the storm was so fierce that it knocked me off my feet. I struggled to get up, but it knocked me down again. When it finally let up, I started walking. And I didn't stop for five days and four nights.

Plane flown by Guillaumet
 
 
"When you slipped, you had to get up fast to avoid freezing. The cold was so intense that it seemed to be turning you into stone second by second, and if you rested a minute too long after a fall, the muscles you needed to get up would die. You had to fight temptation. 'In the snow,' they'd told me, 'you lose all instinct of self-preservation. After two, three, four hours of walking, all you want to do is sleep.' And that was what I wanted to do. But I said to myself: if my wife thinks I'm alive, she thinks I'm walking. And my friends think I'm walking. They all believe in me. And if I'm not walking, I don't deserve that."

 
Breguet 14 in the Andes
 
 
"…But what was left of you, Guillaumet? We found you all right, but burnt out, shrivelled and shrunken like a little old woman. The same evening, I took you back to Mendoza, where they covered you with white sheets as if they were some sort of soothing ointment. But that did not heal you. Your aching body weighed you down and however you tossed and turned you could not get it to rest and sleep. It had not forgotten the rocks and the snow; it still bore their marks. I watched your blackened face, swollen and bruised like some battered, over-ripe fruit. You were ugly and miserable. You had lost the use of the fine tools of your trade. Your hands stayed numb and when you sat on the edge of your bed to breathe your frozen feet hung down like dead weights. Your journey was not over, you were still gasping for breath and when you turned to your pillow in search of peace, you could no longer hold back the flood of images swelling up inside your head."

 

 

Saint-Exupéry and Guillaumet

 
 
Jean Mermoz
 
The epic of the Atlantic
The main obstacle was still the 2,000 miles of ocean, a seemingly unending non-stop flight. Yet the South Atlantic had already been flown across eight times. As early as 1922, a Portuguese crew made the flight with stops in Cap Verde and Saint Paul islands, and the exploit was repeated by Spanish flyers in 1926, then by Italians and another Portuguese crew in 1927. In October 1927, Frenchmen Dieudonné Costes and Joseph Le Brix made the first non-stop crossing of the South Atlantic, flying a Breguet 19 powered with a 600 hp Hispano-Suza engine from Saint Louis in Senegal to Natal in Brazil. But these crossings remained little more than sporting achievements, isolated acts of courage that some paid with their lives — de Saint Roman, Mouneyrès and Petit in 1927. Aéropostale wanted to go beyond that and set up a regular service flying all the way from Paris to Buenos Aires. Surface transport was still used on the Dakar to Natal leg of the journey; which was covered by launches **STEVE :"AVISO" in four days from March 1928 on, but for a group inspired by the spirit of Aéropostale, this last barrier had to go. And on May 12, 1930, Mermoz, Dabry and Gimié opened the way with the first airmail flight between the two continents."

 

 
** Laté 28 flown by Mermoz
 


 
"When we took off from the Senegal River on May 12, our Latécoère 28 seaplane, powered by a 560 hp Hispano-Suza engine, was carrying 2,600 litres of fuel and weighed five and a half tons. Like me, our navigator Dabry and our radio operator Gimié, who both deserve my sincerest praise, were not really worried about the trip. We were used to keeping to fixed timetables, flying by day and by night whatever the weather, and being in the air was natural for us. Which is why we did not feel any special emotions or fears as we turned away over Saint Louis. It was an ordinary flight for us. But I loved the sound of the engine and I had never been so happy."

 

 
Jean Mermoz
 
 
"An hour out of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, Gimié picked up the radio in Natal, our destination. Ahead of me, I could see a rocky cliff gradually rising up from the horizon, and this sight of land after the vast expanses of the ocean was breathtaking. It was an extraordinary moment, the climax of our expedition. I gave a yell and Dabry and Gimié scrambled up to join me. I said nothing. "Sao Roque," said Dabry, identifying the cape ahead. We felt very close as we savoured our victory and the companionship that was also part of it. Soon we were flying over Natal and I nosed down towards the Aeropostale base on the Rio Potingui, flying a wide arc to line up for an easy landing on the water close to the riverboats. At 9:15 p.m. we delivered the mail for Natal that we had picked up in Senegal, and which had reached there from Toulouse in 24 hours, relayed in by Beauregard, then Elmer, then Guerrero.
Three quarters of an hour after we arrived, Vanier left Natal with the mail for Rio de Janeiro, where Reyne took over for the flight to Buenos Aires, then handing over to Guillaumet for the last leg of the journey from there to Santiago de Chile. All told, the first airmail service between Toulouse and Santiago to fly across the South Atlantic took 108 hours and 40 minutes, including 20 hours and 40 minutes for stopovers. The distance covered was well over 8,000 miles."
 
 
Conclusion — the end of an age
 
The age of inventors, pioneers and heroes drew to a close as technicians, big manufacturers and organizers took over. In almost no time, the aviation industry covered the world with landing strips, airports, control towers and access roads, as well as a host of other facilities for sales, security and other services to meet its varied and often highly specialized needs. Uncertainty and adventure have given way to order and method. But as Saint Exupéry said: "Airmail services opened up air routes just as Roman roads opened up routes on land."