Well, not completely. They still don't know why Saint-Exupery's plane went down, but now they know where.

Which reminds me. I thought that there had been an expedition launched a couple years ago to go look for Amelia Earhart's Electra, after seeing what may have been wreckage offshore from a satellite image. Does anyone know the status?

The discovery of Saint Exupery's plane is actually not that surprising when one considers the amazing advances made in undersea exploration in the past two decades. New sonar and new robots have had a major impact on locating objects under the ocean. It used to be quite hard to find even large ships. But now much smaller objects such as aircraft are being found. I imagine that this is due to some kind of synergistic effect--the sonar can locate smaller objects at better resolution, and the robots make it cheaper to go down and look at them. The discovery of Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule demonstrated that a few years ago and there have been other discoveries since, like the Japanese midget sub off the coast of Hawaii (found by a manned submersible, but located with an advanced sonar).

I would guess that another synergistic effect is the demonstration proof--once private/public groups know that this can be done and done for less money than expensive expeditions of the past, they are able to fund the searches. The search for Grissom's capsule, for instance, did not require as much money as the search for the Titanic or the Bismarck. (Another possible contributor is the availability of cheap Russian hardware.)

As for Earhart, I seem to remember that the satellite photo did not pan out. There have been a number of intriguing leads about her plane that have just gone nowhere. Although I don't know for sure, I suspect that this is one of the more frustrating mysteries for researchers--they keep getting what look like good leads and then they have no success (as opposed to not getting good leads at all). Of course, with all of these popular mysteries there are also a lot of charlatans who get a lot of publicity about their search but are actually amateurs.

One ship I'd like to see someone find is the old Navy collier USS Cyclops, lost in 1918 during a storm with over 300 people aboard. This has long been part of the "Bermuda Triangle" mythology. The reality is that the cargo was badly loaded on the ship and probably caused her to flex in heavy seas and break in two. For awhile, the US Navy used to test sonar systems by having its ships look for the Cyclops, but they never found her. I believe that the Cyclops remains the largest non-wartime loss of life for the US Navy.

I would guess that another synergistic effect is the demonstration proof--once private/public groups know that this can be done and done for less money than expensive expeditions of the past, they are able to fund the searches. The search for Grissom's capsule, for instance, did not require as much money as the search for the Titanic or the Bismarck. (Another possible contributor is the availability of cheap Russian hardware.)

Yes, an interesting (and I think likely) model for the future of space exploration, both manned and unmanned.

"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."

No surprise his plane crashed if this was his design philosophy. An engineering design with no parts left to take away has no redundancy. it's a brittle design likely to suffer catastrophic failure for even a small, point failure. What I've always strived for, and what is generally accepted as good design practice is redundant systems and features such that more than one simple failure is needed to bring the system to a crashing halt.

blog treatment

"No surprise his plane crashed if this was his design philosophy."

He was flying an American P-38 Lightning.

I hadn't heard about a satellite picture producing any evidence. Last I knew, the group TIGHAR had some inconclusive but compelling evidence from Nikumaroro island that they were trying to corroborate (I think they have it right, for whatever it's worth).

The TIGHAR web site has lots of information about searches for the Earhart wreckage on the island pictured in the satellite image.
http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Bulletins/ArchivedBulletins.html

There was a very good column about Saint-Exupery in the New York Times on Sunday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/opinion/11SCHI.html

It is by a woman who wrote a biography of him. She raises the possibility that he may have killed himself. She also says that he was not a very good pilot.

"Having waged a campaign to talk his way back into active service, he was piloting a plane into which he did not fit and which he could not comfortably fly. He was unable to communicate with the control tower in English. The operation of hydraulic brakes defied him. Routinely he confused feet and meters."

"The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overaged, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. "I don't give a damn if you die for France or not," Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupéry, "but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes."