The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  Despite his positive outlook, Lancaster, as the autumn progressed, proved unable to find work. The scandal attached to his name made employment difficult enough, but this difficulty was compounded by the Depression’s continued effect on the world of aviation. His only happiness came from his frequent calls on Jessie in Oxford Terrace.

  “I didn’t have the same feelings for him at all, but I would have done anything to help him,” Jessie recalled later. “There was no question of partnering up then, though. He would still have liked to, but I was through. There was no future for us. I was very fond of him but the romance had gone.” But at least one person did not believe this to be true. One winter night Lancaster arrived to take her to a dance, for which they were both dressed in evening clothes. As she stepped outside her door, Jessie was slapped hard in the face by someone who darted out of the shadows and then dashed quickly away. Lancaster sprinted after the assailant in pursuit. When he returned panting a few minutes later, he shamefacedly told Jessie that the attacker had been Kiki.

  By January or February 1933 Lancaster had come to accept that his employment opportunities were nonexistent, and that the taint of his murder trial would not wash easily away. He could think of only one way to transform his fortunes: by setting another world’s record for flying. As he cast around for options, he focused on the record recently set by Amy Mollison, who in November had flown from London to South Africa in four days, six hours, and fifty-four minutes. This was ten hours faster than the previous record setter: Mollison’s own husband, Jim.

  Lancaster’s father, now seventy-three years old and frail, and his invalid mother agreed to finance Lancaster’s journey, even though paying for his costly defense in Miami had depleted most of their savings. Lancaster chose as his aircraft an Avro Avian that his old acquaintance renowned Australian flier Charles Kingsford Smith had recently used for an aborted journey from Australia to England. Named the Southern Cross Minor, the plane, for which Lancaster paid seven hundred pounds, differed from the Red Rose in that it was a single-seater with a powerful Gipsy II four-cylinder in-line engine. The 120-horsepower Gipsy II, with its 1,600-mile range, was one of the most popular engine models of the interwar period. The Southern Cross Minor’s only downside was its ninety-five-mile-per-hour cruising speed, which was twenty miles slower than Amy Mollison’s Puss Moth aircraft. This difference in speed added to the pressure on Lancaster: to beat Mollison’s record, he would have to go almost entirely without sleep on his journey.

  Jessie helped Lancaster map the route, but her collaboration ended there. Years later, she remembered that, during this period, Lancaster looked “absolutely haggard. I saw him standing there with hollow eyes and cheeks. He looked like a death head. He looked exhausted before he started and I remember thinking, ‘He’s not going to make it.’ ” The last time she saw Lancaster was when he came to visit her one night just before his journey. Lancaster asked if he could take her watch along as a memento, but Jessie declined on the grounds that the watch face was far too small for him to read while he was flying. He needed a much larger watch, she told him. Resignedly, Lancaster agreed. He waved farewell and walked back out into the night.

  Lancaster, on his own, gathered the Southern Cross Minor from the Cheshire Airfields, acquired the necessary permits, and gave a hundred pounds to the Trans-Saharienne Company to help fund the search costs if he went missing during his trip. Lancaster’s father took out insurance on the plane.

  In the first week of April, with only days until his flight, Lancaster took Kiki and his daughters, Pat and Nina Ann, out to eat. He also had his lawyer draw up a will naming Jessie as the sole beneficiary of his meager £170 estate—with the excuse that Jessie, like his parents, had spent much of her own money paying for his trial defense. Lancaster’s only asset was the insurance policy on his life. On April 8, he hopped a train from London to Manchester, where he had stored the Southern Cross Minor. The next day Lancaster flew to Lympne, Kent, where the civil airfield was a popular destination for attempted record-breaking flights. His parents met him at the nearby Grand Hotel.

  On Monday, April 9, 1933, Lancaster held a press conference at the Grand Hotel in which he announced his goal of breaking Amy Mollison’s record. “I am going ‘all out’ on this flight,” he declared. Despite predictions of inclement weather along his intended route, he had faith in the Southern Cross Minor’s capabilities. “I can’t wait for the months that must elapse before conditions are good,” Lancaster told reporters. He also gave heartfelt thanks for his parents’ faith and financial investment in him, saying that his mother and father believed, as he did, that he would “be able to make the world forget” the murder trial in Miami. There was thus no attempt to downplay his motivation for the journey.

  The next morning, April 10, Lancaster arrived at the airfield before dawn. He wore a windbreaker over flying overalls and a thick bright scarf around his neck. By way of luggage he carried his flying goggles, a light hat to protect his head from the subtropical South African sun, and the maps on which he’d marked his path. Airfield workers had filled the Southern Cross Minor with one hundred gallons of fuel, enough for about eighteen hours of travel. The plane also carried, in accordance with French regulations, a two-gallon drum of water.

  Lancaster planned to spend his first day flying from Lympne to the city of Oran in northwest Algeria, a 1,125-mile journey over France, the Spanish coast, and the Mediterranean. But from the Lympne control tower that morning he learned that twenty-mile-per-hour headwinds would dog him the whole way, severely slowing his speed and raising the possibility that he would need to refuel along the way. Given the disadvantages he already faced in outdoing Mollison’s travel time, the situation warranted serious consideration. But Lancaster refused to be deterred.

  Along with weather and speed, the journey was fraught with more personal complications. As Ralph Barker points out, Lancaster “had done no flying at all for almost exactly twelve months, and for three of those months he had been confined to a cell eight feet by ten.” Lancaster also knew the pain, both emotional and financial, he had caused his parents, and he was desperate to prove their faith in him justified. His stress and desperation were compounded by the relentless pace he would have to keep: to beat Mollison’s record, Lancaster would need to squeeze seventy-two hours of flight time into four and a half days, with almost all of his ground time allocated for servicing and refueling his plane. Even the healthiest, most mentally stable individual might break under that regimen, and Lancaster was already a near-wreck. But he was betting his entire future on this journey, and he accepted the inherent risks. He had already announced that this would be his final attempt to rehabilitate his flying career. On the other side lay permanent failure and disgrace.

  Only Lancaster’s mother and father, an old RAF compatriot named K. K. Brown, and a few airfield officials gathered to see him off at Lympne in the heavy morning mist. To the officials, Lancaster seemed like a gaunt, anxious shadow of the hale, good-humored pilot they had once known. “I owe this chance to come back to my father and mother,” he told the small group, “and for the old folks’ sake alone I hope to win through.” Still, he added, “I want to make it clear that I am attempting this flight at my own risk. I don’t expect any efforts to be made to find me if I’m reported missing.” But he knew this latter statement carried no weight. He also knew that, in the event of a forced landing, pilots believed in sticking close to their downed aircraft.

  Lancaster’s mother made a brief speech before he departed. “I have every confidence in my boy,” she said. “My prayers are for him to win through. I want the world to forget the Miami tragedy and to remember that my boy joined up during the war at the age of seventeen and was a wartime airman. That is why his father and I have bought this plane and we know he will win through.”

  For sustenance Lancaster carried a little beef extract and a thermos each of coffee and water, along with a pack of chicken sandwiches his mother had prepared. Just before he ste
pped up into the cockpit, his mother gave him a kiss goodbye and handed him a bar of chocolate. At 5:38 a.m., with the morning light still dim, Lancaster taxied the Southern Cross Minor down the runway, quickly achieving liftoff. Before long the plane was swallowed by the murky sky.

  Lancaster touched down briefly at Le Havre in France and then headed for the eastern Pyrenees, but the driving headwinds were draining his fuel faster than expected. Recognizing he would now need to refuel before crossing the Mediterranean, Lancaster aimed for Barcelona instead, though this change in plans would cost valuable time he could little afford to spare. A British pilot who encountered him at the Barcelona airfield observed how stressed and harried he seemed. When Lancaster finally reached Algeria at 9 p.m., he was running four and a half hours behind Mollison’s record. At Oran he encountered further headaches involving servicing, refueling, and insurance issues, such that he wasn’t able to depart until 3 a.m. Now he was six and a half hours behind schedule. The date was Wednesday, April 12.

  Lancaster flew across the Atlas Mountains in pitch darkness, lighting matches along the way to check his route. When the sun rose he could see the Trans-Saharan Motor Track beneath him. Following the motor track south, Lancaster spotted, shortly before 8:30 a.m., the airfield at Adrar, Algeria. Though he had initially planned to refuel at the town of Reggane, one hundred miles to the south, Lancaster again changed plans, and filled his tanks at Adrar. By 9:15 a.m. he was back in the air, with his next stop planned for Gao, Mali, a commercial center on the Niger River, eight hundred miles away. He would continue following the motor track’s pyramid-shaped beacons along the way.

  This latter plan was soon rendered moot by a punishing sandstorm that swirled over the region. As Lancaster struggled to locate the narrow line of the motor track below, he mistakenly veered off course toward the south-central Algerian town of Aoulef. Though he spent a fleeting ten minutes on the ground there, the wasted flying time meant that he would have to soon stop for additional fuel. At 1 p.m. the Southern Cross Minor touched down in Reggane, where Lancaster was greeted by a man named Borel, head of the town’s Trans-Saharienne Company outpost.

  Borel could see the profound weariness etched into Lancaster’s face and sense the worry and aggravation that lay like an almost physical weight on his body. Concerned about Lancaster’s ability to fly in such a state, Borel convinced him to sleep while his plane was being refueled. Perhaps by the time Lancaster woke up the sandstorm would have subsided. Lancaster reluctantly agreed, but he instructed Borel to rouse him in three hours. Borel offered food, but Lancaster declined it.

  When Borel woke Lancaster in the late afternoon, the sandstorm was still blowing at full strength. Lancaster could not pilot in these conditions, Borel argued; his visibility would be nil. A dismayed Lancaster duly waited for the storm to die down, but as the minutes turned into hours, his already frayed patience appeared to snap. He must have known the jig was nearly up: he was already ten hours behind schedule, making it almost impossible for him to top Amy Mollison’s record. But from Lancaster’s perspective, any risk must have been worth taking. If he didn’t succeed, he would be broke, his future prospects nonexistent. All hope of ending up with Jessie would be dashed. Perhaps, in this reckless state, death seemed a better option than failure.

  The sandstorm had just started to abate when Lancaster informed Borel that he was leaving for Gao. This provoked another argument. Unless Lancaster waited for the moon to rise, Borel protested, the motor track, which ran to Gao, would be invisible in the evening darkness. But Lancaster would not be dissuaded.

  Borel handed Lancaster a flashlight and matches. “We’ll give you twenty-four hours,” he told the exhausted aviator. “If we don’t hear anything of you from Gao by tomorrow evening we’ll send a convoy along the track. If you can burn something to light a beacon they’ll see you.”

  At 6:30 p.m., the Southern Cross Minor again took flight. To those on the ground, the takeoff appeared markedly wobbly, as if Lancaster was too fatigued to keep the plane on a steady course. He also headed off in the wrong direction at first, before realizing his error and turning the plane around. Soon the Avro Avian vanished into the twilight. It was the last anybody ever saw of Captain William Lancaster.

  Lancaster had planned to follow the narrow Trans-Saharan Motor Track heading due south, but within an hour the pitch-black night had swallowed his vision. He remained calm, thinking that his compass would guide him accurately even if he could not actually see the road below. An hour later he hit the five-hundred-mile-long expanse of desert called the “Land of Thirst,” which even local nomads feared to cross.

  Fifteen minutes later the Southern Cross Minor’s engine gave a strange hiccup, then spluttered and died out. Helpless in the dark, Lancaster tried to guide the plane down gently, but it crashed hard into the desert sand and flipped on its back. When Lancaster regained consciousness, he was suspended upside-down in the cockpit. He had no idea how long he had been out. He had deep cuts on his forehead and nose, and his eyes were filled with dried blood. Eventually he was able to force them open. Checking his rations, he figured he had a week’s supply of water at most.

  At 6 a.m. the next morning the French authorities at Gao reported that Lancaster was three and a half hours overdue. Delays were common for fliers—Lancaster might have stopped to rest or to wait until daylight for greater visibility—but as the day continued, the wireless chatter between the French military stations on the Niger River increased, until at 6 p.m. Borel dispatched the first search truck from Reggane. The vehicle would trace the motor track southward; in the morning another truck would be sent down the route from Gao.

  Jessie received word that Lancaster had gone missing from her contacts at the Daily Express that same afternoon. She’d been following Lancaster’s journey with apprehension, uncomfortably aware that his record-setting plans were likely to fail. The unplanned stop at Barcelona alone seemed to Jessie to render Lancaster’s hopes moot. Now she waited anxiously for news that Lancaster had been found alive, his plane forced down somewhere not far off from his expected route.

  After two full days had passed, Jessie could wait impotently no more. She headed to Fleet Street to meet with the editor of the Sunday Express, who agreed to help spread the word that Jessie required financial and material assistance to mount a rescue flight, which she would pilot herself. Most importantly, she needed a capable long-range aircraft. But as she consulted with other pilots, no one could think of any workable planes in the country capable of flying the necessary distances that were not currently in use. Jessie was racked with worry. “I had a dreadful dream last night that he was lying in the desert and crying for food and water,” she told a reporter. “I live with hopes that he is safe with natives in some village. I cannot bear to think that he is out there alone.”

  Frantic but stymied, Jessie returned to London to seek out other options. But even as she did so, the newspapers published an interview with Lancaster’s father: “It is not our wish that anyone who doesn’t know the terrible flying conditions of the Sahara Desert should go out there to try to find our son,” Edward Lancaster declared. “It would be a futile attempt and very much against our wishes. Everything that can possibly be done is being done.” Lancaster Sr. was in regular contact with the Trans-Saharienne Company, who had informed him that an airplane would soon be joining in the hunt for his son.

  For several days French vehicles and airplanes traversed the region, but no signs of Lancaster or his aircraft were found. By April 23, the authorities were ready to call off their efforts. One of the French pilots who had led the search issued a statement: “When Captain Lancaster was ready to resume his flight there was no moon and a strong northwest wind was blowing. M. Borel, the head of the Trans-Saharienne Company at Reggane, told him it was madness to take off when he would not be able to see the day beacons on the motor-track, and when he had no lighting on his instrument board for steering a compass course. Captain Lancaster made a very bad take-off, and
that was the last seen of him.” Perhaps, the pilot suggested, Lancaster, flying low, had unwittingly crashed into a sand dune.

  “Captain Lancaster’s father is now a tragic figure,” The New York Times reported the next day, “haunting Fleet Street offices for news of his son, although the French air authorities have practically lost hope, believing he crashed in a sandstorm.” But Lancaster’s parents harbored no false expectations. “I did not want him to go on this last flight,” Maud Lancaster told reporters, “but he was promised a job if he succeeded. That is why I let him go. I could not bear to see him unhappy because he could not get work.” At an event the following month honoring Lancaster’s memory, his mother, a robust believer in the afterlife, announced that she had been communicating with his spirit. Her husband concurred. “I do not now believe that my son is alive,” Edward Lancaster said. “Indeed, I know he is not. Messages have come to us from the other side. He did not suffer; that is a great relief to his mother and to me. Sooner or later we shall know everything. He and his machine will be discovered. . . . I have been assured that he will be found.”

  Edward Lancaster’s prediction would come true, but not for another twenty-nine years.

  23

  THIS PERIOD OF AGONY

  On February 11, 1962, three large trucks belonging to a French Camel Corps platoon, the “White Squadron,” wound their way across the desolate plains of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria. Off to the east the Hoggar Mountains marked the edges of a vast plateau, while far to the west a vast, arid expanse of sandstone deposits angled progressively downward. This was the notorious Tanezrouft region, the Sahara’s barren core, a landscape devoid of water, vegetation, and landmarks.

  The White Squadron had embarked on its journey two days earlier and three hundred miles to the north. The platoon conducted regular reconnaissance missions through the Tanezrouft, though uncovering anything of note in the desiccated expanses of the region proved an elusive goal. After veering off the Trans-Saharan Motor Track at Bordj Pérez for the uncharted territory of the so-called Land of Thirst, they encountered little more than the occasional ancient tomb and a particular type of chalky soil that even their reinforced army vehicles found treacherous to cross.