For nearly 100 years, the fate of L’Oiseau Blanc — The White Bird — has lingered as one of aviation’s great unanswered questions.
Did Charles Nungesser and François Coli vanish into the Atlantic?
Or did they make it all the way to North America…only to crash land at the very end?
In this final chapter of my Miles Ahead series, we arrive at the place where the evidence leads us: A remote, windswept pond in Newfoundland.
And for the first time, the case feels solvable.
In 1992, aviation investigator Ric Gillespie waded into Gull Pond with a metal detector—and pulled something extraordinary from the silt: A rusted fragment of metal.
Not remarkable at first glance. But what was on it was. It was a black, oily residue that turned out to be partially burned castor oil—a lubricant used in European aircraft engines of that era, but not in American ones.
That detail matters, because it suggests this wasn’t just any wreckage. It may have been part of the engine of the White Bird itself.
And it was found in exactly the same place where locals had reported airplane wreckage decades earlier.
Over the years, Gillespie and his team returned again and again—eight expeditions in total—using increasingly sophisticated tools to search the pond.
And yet, the results were frustratingly sparse. Two small artifacts which certainly could have been part of the engine. The rest of the aircraft was made of fabric and wood so there's no hope any of that has survived. Whatever remains of the aircraft is almost certainly buried beneath feet of silt.
The search is further complicated by the fact that the rocks there formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago are highly magnetic forwarding efforts to search with a metal detector.
It may be a shallow pond, but the muck is very deep.You can’t just scan from above.You have to get down into the mud—within a foot or two of the target—with handheld detection tools designed to cut through the geological interference.
It is slow, methodical, unforgiving work, but it is doable.
It’s logistics.
Getting to Gull Pond is no small feat.
Remote terrain
Unpredictable weather
Helicopter access at roughly $2,400 per hour
Days lost waiting out wind and rain
The solution? A small team living on site—cold, wet, and uncomfortable—but able to work continuously when conditions allow. That’s how you solve a mystery like this
Ric Gillespie put it to me in simple terms: It’s importnt to solve this mystery not because it will rewrite Lindbergh’s place in history—it won’t.
But because Nungesser and Coli were courageous pioneers who took the same risk and they deserve to have their story finished.
We are now approaching a defining moment.
May 2027 marks the 100th anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight.
Before that date, there is a real opportunity to return to Newfoundland—with the right tools, the right team, and a camera rolling—to finally answer the question: Did the White Bird make it across the Atlantic? Where did those brave aviators perish?
To do that, we need to raise roughly $100,000 to mount a serious expedition in the spring of 2026.
If we succeed, we won’t just solve a mystery. We’ll close one of the most important open chapters in aviation history.
If you’ve followed this series—if this story has pulled you in the way it has pulled me in—consider helping us take the next step. Hit the donate button here: https://tighar.org
Every contribution brings us closer to the truth.
And who knows, the next time I tell this story, it may not be a mystery anymore.
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