MERMOZ Jean (1901-1936) aviateur.

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  4. Lot n° 190 
Lot n° 190
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Estimation :
4000 - 5000 EUR
MERMOZ Jean (1901-1936) aviateur.
AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIT, [late 1934?]; 16 pages in-4 in pencil, with erasures and corrections (the beginning is missing). Important exposé on the development of the South American line and the crossing of the Atlantic for the postal service and for passengers, with a parallel between the airplane and the seaplane, and the account of his crossings. For Mermoz, "the airplane and the seaplane each have their place in the future of commercial transatlantic air crossings: The airplane from a purely postal point of view The seaplane from a purely passenger point of view". First of all, it is necessary to consider "the postal question on the South American line [...] It is the only one likely to make this line live economically in spite of all the reductions of subsidies to be envisaged", the problem of the passengers passing to the second plan. "However, to transport mail, large tonnage and comfort are useless and superfluous elements. It is necessary to tend simply unceasingly towards the highest speed for a use of power and an economic limited tonnage", whereas for the passengers "the greatest safety, the large tonnage and comfort" are essential. "The mail plane should never lose time. It is constantly going against the clock, passing through stopovers at all hours of the day and night, always tending to gain on a more or less well defined schedule. The pilot who travels with his radio and the mail has the right to risk more, in all professional conscience and in full knowledge of his duty with complete freedom of mind". For the passengers, on the contrary, the security is primordial, and costly in personnel and infrastructures. For him, "the needs of a postal line operation are often incompatible with that of a transport line", and he does not believe, on the France-South America line, in mixed solutions "which diminish the respective value of the two operating formulas, by sacrificing one for the benefit of the other"... It is necessary to adopt the airplane (and to put aside the seaplane) for the postal service, first of all for the speed, "fundamental base of the regular transatlantic postal crossings" .... Blind pilotage with instruments represents a considerable progress and its possibilities are certainly immense, especially in fog, low ceilings and even in a great number of European storm systems [...], but there are times in which I will not engage in blind pilotage and at night". As for the weather disturbances over the South Atlantic, they can be very dangerous, not to mention the "famous doldrums", especially during the monsoon. "For my part, I had the opportunity to meet them twice between Natal and St. Paul's Rock in the area of Fernando de Noronha Island. The first time during the day, it was not a succession of relatively spaced squalls like those of the potau-noir but a real cyclonic system with a front of tornado barring the road from East to West on an inappreciable distance because too extended, with clouds stuck to the water with by places some waterspouts sufficiently characteristic by their shape not to recognize them as extremely dangerous. The sea was dismantled and seemed to rise as if sucked in. To pass over it, we would have had to reach at least five thousand meters to find the calm. Changing my route and driving for a good twenty minutes towards the East, on the edge of this front without cracks, I finally found a vague exit that seemed clearer and committed myself there. In two successive surges, the fully committed aircraft descended to the water. It barely righted itself under the desperate effort of the controls. At the same time we entered a real mass of water which seemed to collapse. For a quarter of an hour, propelled by the gusts of wind in a real deluge, a few meters from a stormy sea, Dabry, Gimié, Collenot (and me) found the minutes long... Then little by little everything calmed down in a very dense rain like that of tornado tails. Gimié was able to pass the fateful T.V.B. ". Mermoz tells of another disturbance that forced him, after several attempts, to return to land, not without difficulty, in Natal. He is not sure that he would have succeeded in getting out of it by dark night and by flying without visibility. It is thus better, not to run to the disaster because of the important atmospheric disturbances, to carry the effort on the transatlantic flights of day. With a cruising speed of 300 km per hour, "we will go from Port-Etienne to Porto-Praïa in 3 hours; from Porto-Praïa to Noronha in 7 hours; from Noronha to Natal in 1 hour and 20 minutes; from Dakar to Noronha in 8 hours and 45 minutes; from Dakar to Natal in 10 hours. I think that here is the real security. It is better to spend 10 hours on the water and during the day than to stay there twenty or twenty-three hours"... Merm
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