Compagnie générale de navigation aérienne
Courrier de nuit par avion
ToulouseCasablancaDakarNatalSantiago
Service hebdomadaire — départs de Toulouse le jeudi — saison 1931
Projection azimutale hémisphère de vol la nuit balaie la carte
La ligne
Five étapes carry the mail from the Garonne to the Pacific. Scroll them slowly: the globe turns to each leg, the course draws itself in dashes, and the courier flies it — waypoint by waypoint — while the wireless log keeps time below the map.
Étape I La descente d’Espagne
Out of Toulouse before the birds, south over a Spain still asleep. The Pyrenees pass in the dark like a rumour of mountains; day breaks over the sea at Alicante. By late afternoon the Strait — and Africa opens under the wings.
Étape II La côte des sables
The desert leg. Nineteen hours along a coast with three lights and a thousand kilometres of nothing between them. Juby refuels by lantern, Port-Étienne by starlight. Pilots fly it with two ears — one for the engine, one for the silence.
Étape III L’Atlantique Sud
At Dakar the mail changes wings. The seaplane Austral takes the hold at three in the morning and climbs out over the swell: twenty-one hours of open ocean, held on course by sextant, dead reckoning and the radio’s thin thread. Landfall at Natal, where the palms begin.
Étape IV La côte du Brésil
The Brazilian coast runs south like an uncoiling rope — Recife in the first heat, Rio at sundown with the Sugarloaf black against the bay, then the long lagoons and the mouth of the Plate. The mail lands at Buenos Aires with sand from two continents still in the hold.
Étape V La Cordillère
The last wall. At Mendoza the mail waits for the mountain’s permission; when the wind allows, the Potez climbs to five thousand nine hundred metres, where the propeller bites at thin air and the Andes stand close enough to touch. Then Chile arrives all at once, green and vertical — Santiago by early afternoon.
Horaires & tarifs
One departure a week, held to the minute. The Compagnie flies at night so that commerce may answer by return of post — a season’s schedule, printed for the counter at 12 quai de la Daurade.
Équipage
The Compagnie employs eleven pilots, four radio operators and thirty-one mechanics between Toulouse and Santiago. The register below is posted, as required, with hours flown to 1 April 1931.
Chef pilote · la Cordillère
6 140 h
Has crossed the Andes one hundred and eleven times, and claims to know the passes by the sound of their winds.
Pilote · ligne du désert
4 890 h
Twice down in the Rio de Oro; both times walked out with the mailbags on his back. Keeps the flight diary printed below.
Capitaine d’hydravion · Atlantique Sud
3 760 h
Nineteen ocean crossings in the Austral. Calls the swell “the second sky” and navigates both without complaint.
Pilote · côte du Brésil
2 980 h
Learned Recife’s squalls by flying into them, and then — the Compagnie is pleased to record — learned to go around.
Pilote · escale de Natal
2 315 h
Flies the palm coast by lighthouse and memory. Has never once been late for the ocean mail, which does not wait.
Radiotélégraphiste · Toulouse
9 400 h d’écoute
Reads the line’s weather in dots and dashes before it happens. The pilots say his silence is the loudest thing on the band.
Escales
Every trunk that travels the line wears its labels. Collect all five.
Journal de nuit
Jean Malvaux, pilote — nuit du 16 au 17 avril 1931, au-dessus du Rio de Oro
Twenty-three forty. The moon went down an hour ago and the desert has given up its colour the way the sea gives up a drowned thing — slowly, and without protest. Below me there is nothing I could call a landmark: a coast drawn once in chalk and half erased, a surf line phosphorescent where it breaks. I fly by the compass, the altimeter, and a certain amount of faith.
The engine is my whole geography. While it runs, there is a France of the air stretched thin along this coast — Agadir behind me, Juby ahead, each with its keeper and its ring of flares. When it coughs, the empire shrinks to the size of my cockpit.
At five to one, Juby’s beacon rose out of the sand haze, orange as a struck match. The sergeant signalled the wind with a lantern: north-north-east, fresh. I put down between the flares, and while they filled the tanks I stood a moment on the sand. Cold stars. The fort asleep. Somewhere inland, a dog.
In the hold I carry one hundred and forty kilos of letters. Contracts, remittances, photographs of children a season older, and — the postmaster at Toulouse tells me — a pressed flower for a man in Buenos Aires who waits at the harbor every mail day. None of it is mine, and all of it is. That is the whole trade: we carry what people cannot say in person, faster than their doubt can travel.
One o’clock. Engine full and even. Villa Cisneros next — four hundred kilometres of dark, and letters enough to light the way.
— J. Malvaux