AUGUSTA, Maine -- A group that has searched Maine woods for several years for a French biplane missing since 1927 said Friday they plan another try by April 15.
Richard Gillespie, head of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, said by telephone from his home in Wilmington, Del., the group plans to return to a site hear Machias that yielded some material last year that could be from the plane.
The plane, l'Oiseau Blanc, or White Bird, disappeared in May 1927 while attempting the first non-stop flight between Paris and New York. Its two French fliers, Francois Coli and Charles Nungesser, disappeared with the plane.
The two were trying to capture the same $25,000 prize claimed a few weeks later by Charles Lindbergh.
Gillespie and wife Patricia Thrasher and many members of TIGHAR are convinced that the White Bird successfully crossed the Atlantic through extremely bad weather that used up too much fuel. They believe the plane made it over coastal Maine but then ran out of gas and crashed.
Last year, Gillespie said a hunter led the searchers to a spot in the woods that contained some metal fragments. He said the group found some man-made material in the ground and also found iron content in the soil that University of Maine officials said was the remains of man-made metal.
The searchers also found a strip of man-made, non-metal material that Gillespie said could have been used to secure the wing material to the wing struts of White Bird.
'We don't know what it is to this day despite having had it analyzed,' Gillespie said. 'It measures 1 centimeter in width and a half-centimeter in thickness and its length was over 10 feet. The material matches the description of material that was used in the wing construction of airplanes in the 1920s.'
'If it is from White Bird, it could be the material that was used to affix the wing fabric to the wing spars,' he said.
Attention was first drawn to the Machias area by reports that a resident, Anson Berry, had heard an airplane engine and then a crash on May 9, 1927, in the Round Lake area.
TIGHAR is a non-profit group of about 400 people. The members travel the world in search of historically significant aircraft.
