AERONAUTICS: Last Flight

At 3:30 a. m. one day last week Lightkeeper William Faulkner heard a crash far out in Cobequid Bay, Nova Scotia. Then came a noise like an explosion and cries for help. Faulkner ran out to the beach, roused neighboring fishermen. In the darkness they could see nothing; but again came the anguished shouts from the bay. The tide was out. For two miles from the beach stretched a sea of soft red mud on which no man could walk. For two hours the shouts could be heard while the watchers waited for the tide to rise. Just as a boat was floated, the shouts died away. For an hour the rescue party searched the bay, then had to run for shore lest the outrunning tide leave them stranded on the treacherous mud. There was no sign of man or craft. But by that time the boatsmen knew what they were searching for—the ship-to-shore mail plane of the liner Bremen. . . .

It was the last flight of the season for the Bremen plane and Pilot Fritz Simon & Mechanic Rudolph Wagenknecht would make it remembered through the winter. Their rival brothers, the plane crew of the Europa, had made a record last month by landing the mail in New York 28 hr. ahead of the steamer (TIME, Sept. 21). The Bremen’s mail should be there 30 hr. ahead of time. The catapult on the Bremen’s sundeck whirred; the plane shot into the sky 1,300 mi. northeast of Ambrose Lightship and flew on into rain, fog & headwind. At dark she alighted for a moment on Glace Bay Harbor to check position with a fishing boat; at 9 p. m. she put down on Sydney Harbor with ten minutes’ fuel supply in her tanks; at midnight, refueled, she flew on again in the darkness. . . .

On the third day Pilot Louis Leigh of Maritime Airways Co. of Sydney flew his seaplane low over the muddy waters of Cobequid Bay, sighted the wreckage of the mail plane floating bottom-side-up. On the fifth day he spotted the body of Pilot Simon, red with Cobequid mud. One hand clutched a monocle. There was a fresh cut on the head. Physicians declared that Pilot Simon had died of exposure only a few hours before his body was found.