Plane Wreck of the Author of "Prince" Is Discovered

April 7, 2004
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

MARSEILLE, France, Wednesday, April 7 - A French underwater
salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane of
Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry, author of "The Little Prince,"
six decades after his disappearance, government researchers
said Wednesday.

The pieces of the Lockheed Lightning P38 aircraft, which
vanished July 31, 1944 during a wartime reconnaissance
mission, were found off the coast of the Mediterranean city
of Marseille, the Culture Ministry's Department of
Subaquatic and Submarine Archaeological Research said.

The discovery is a galvanizing moment for France, which had
long speculated as to the fate of Saint-Exup?ry, an
aristocratic adventurer whose life and books turned him
into one of the country's biggest heroes.

"The Little Prince," his edifying tale about a little
interstellar traveler who recounts his experiences to an
aviator he meets in the Sahara, brought him posthumous
international fame. The book, first published in New York
in English in 1943 and since translated into more than 100
languages, is one of the best-selling titles on the planet,
after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital.

Saint-Exup?ry, a veteran pilot who helped establish Latin
America's Aeropostale air delivery service in the late
1920's, went missing shortly after flying from his base on
the French island of Corsica in good weather to photograph
parts of southern France in preparation for the Allied
landings there.

The pilot, then 44, never returned, and, until recently, it
was not known whether his plane went down in the
mountainous back country on the mainland, or somewhere in
the Mediterranean Sea in between. In May 2000, a French
professional diver found the remains of a P38 plane in 230
feet of water off Marseille - in the same area that a
fisherman two years earlier had brought to the surface a
bracelet inscribed "Saint-Ex."

"The zone containing the pieces was very large, one
kilometer long and 400 meters wide," said the diver, Luc
Vanrell.

Another diver who is also an amateur aviation expert,
Philippe Castellano, said the combination of the bracelet
and his information on the 42 P38-model planes that had
gone down in southern France convinced him "it could only
have been Saint-Ex's plane." But a state ban on further
dives in the area delayed searches until October 2003, when
a contracted salvage team recovered the pieces from the
aircraft for the Culture Ministry's researchers.

One of them bore a manufacturer's number, 2734, that
researchers finally confirmed corresponded to the military
number given to Saint-Exupery's plane - 42-68223.

The head of the Culture Ministry department that announced
the news, Patrick Granjean, said it was now formally
established that the author's plane had gone down off
Marseille. But, he added: "We don't know why. We probably
never will."

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