Plane of 'Little Prince' author identified
PARIS -- It was one of French aviation's enduring mysteries: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the pilot and author of the beloved tale "The Little Prince," took off on a World War II spy mission for the Allies and was never seen again.
After 60 years, officials have confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed Lightning P-38, found in the Mediterranean not far from the rugged cliffs of Provence, belonged to Saint-Exupery, Air Force Captain Frederic Solano said yesterday.
In France, the discovery is akin to solving the mystery of where Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the Pacific in 1937.
"This was our holy grail," said Philippe Castellano, president of an association of aviation buffs who helped authorities identify the debris. "We never even imagined this."
It was a stunning revelation: Teams have been searching up and down the coast for decades, and many believed the plane was probably too far out to sea to be recovered.
Clues to the crash started coming together in 1998, when a bracelet bearing Saint-Exupery's name turned up in a fisherman's net near Marseille.
The discovery jogged the memory of a local scuba diver, who first saw the plane debris nestled in the ocean bed in the 1980s. The plane, smashed into hundreds of pieces, lies 100 to 300 feet below the surface, less than 3 miles from the coast between Marseille and Cassis.A piece of the puzzle remains unanswered: the cause of the crash. The debris has so far yielded no clues.
