L'Oiseau Blanc (English: The White Bird[note 1]) was a French Levasseur PL.8 biplane that disappeared in 1927 during an attempt to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight between Paris and New York City to compete for the Orteig Prize.

[5] François Coli, age 45, was a World War I veteran and recipient of the French Legion of Honor, who had been making record-breaking flights around the Mediterranean Sea.

[6] Tarascon was badly burned and relinquished his place as pilot to 35-year-old Charles Nungesser, a highly experienced flying ace with over 40 victories, third highest among the French.

Based on the Levasseur PL.4 developed for the Aéronavale to operate from the French aircraft carrier Béarn,[9] the PL.8 was a conventional, single-bay, wood and fabric-covered biplane that carried a crew of two in a side-by-side, open cockpit.

Apart from small floats attached directly to the undersides of the lower wing, the main units of the fixed, tailskid undercarriage could be jettisoned on takeoff, in order to reduce the aircraft's weight.

[12][16] Their PL.8-01 weighed 5,000 kg (11,000 lb) on takeoff, extremely heavy for a single-engined aircraft, barely clearing a line of trees at the end of the field.

[17] Gathering an escort of French fighter aircraft, Nungesser and Coli turned back as planned, and at low altitude, immediately jettisoned the main undercarriage.

[2] The intended flight path was a great circle route, which would have taken them across the English Channel, over the southwestern part of England and Ireland, across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, then south over Nova Scotia, to Boston, and finally to a water landing in New York.

[17] A sighting was made by the commanding officer of the British submarine HMS H50, who recorded the note in his log, that he observed a biplane at 300 m altitude, 20 nautical miles southwest of the tip of Needles on the Isle of Wight.

[21] In France, the public was scandalized by the newspapers such as La Presse, which had printed false reports about the aircraft's arrival, and outrage was generated against the companies involved, with demonstrations in the streets.

[7] Twelve days after Nungesser and Coli's departure, Charles Lindbergh, flying solo in the Spirit of Saint Louis, took off from New York on his own famous journey.

[27] There were many rumors concerning the aircraft's disappearance, including a theory that the aviators had been shot down by rum-runners aboard the rum boat Amistad[28] as well as the belief that Nungesser and Coli were living with indigenous peoples in Canada.

[2] Stories emerged in 1948 from reports that caribou hunters and fur trappers had found aircraft wreckage in Great Gull Pond in Newfoundland.

[29] Gunnar Hansen's article "The Unfinished Flight of the White Bird" in the June 1980 issue of Yankee renewed popular interest in L'Oiseau Blanc.

[24] He described Anson Berry (d. 1936), a hermit living near Machias, Maine, who heard a sputtering aircraft fly over his isolated camp at Round Lake late in the afternoon of 9 May 1927.

[31] Hansen and others researched the mystery during the 1980s and located multiple witnesses who reported memories of the aircraft in a line from Nova Scotia down to eastern Maine.

[5][18] In 1989, the NBC television series Unsolved Mysteries advanced the theory that the two aviators made it across the ocean but crashed and perished in the woods of Maine.

[12] Clive Cussler and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) organization also attempted to solve the mystery, searching for the aircraft in Maine and in Newfoundland.

[12][29] In 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that an unofficial French team was focusing on theories that the aircraft crashed off the coast of Canada after flying over Newfoundland.

When Lindbergh did succeed with his own flight across the Atlantic, the international attention on his achievement was possibly enhanced because of the disappearance of L'Oiseau Blanc just days earlier.

In 1928, the Ontario Surveyor General named a number of lakes in the northwest of the province to honour aviators who had perished during 1927, mainly in attempting oceanic flights.

[41] In the opening montage of the 2005 film Sahara, based on Cussler's novel, a French newspaper article is displayed reporting a fictional story of NUMA finding the aircraft.

[42] And in the 2018 novel Chance to Break[43] by Owen Prell, the protagonist muses about the fate of the French aviators and compares them to valiant athletes who are defeated in the arena of sports.