El Avión De Madera Que Cruzó El Atlántico... Y Luego Fue Quemado

The genius of the flying saucer: it crossed the Atlantic with Spanish engines and died forgotten. In 1933, a wooden and plywood airplane took off from Saint Louis, Senegal, and fourteen hours and twenty-seven minutes later landed in Natal, Brazil, becoming the first land-based aircraft in history to cross the South Atlantic. It was piloted by Jean Mermoz. It had been designed by a young man from the Vendée region named René Cusinet, the son of a schoolteacher, who as a child spent hours watching swallows fly. And it was powered by three Hispano-Suiza engines, engineered in Barcelona by Marc Birkigt, given free of charge to an unknown man who had neither a factory nor money. This documentary traces the complete history of the Cusinet Seventy Rainbow: the night Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget and the crowd broke through the barriers, the first plane banned by the Air Ministry that flew anyway and crashed, killing two men, the city-wide fundraising effort that financed what the State had prohibited, the Meudon fire that destroyed two planes in a single night, the tunnels dug inside the wings to repair engines mid-flight over the ocean, the double crossing of the South Atlantic, the fifteen thousand people who invaded the Le Bourget airfield, the erasure of the builder's name from the fuselage, the official report that declared the aircraft fit for burning, the Natal runway that stopped the machine that had conquered the ocean, the Southern Cross seaplane that the ministry preferred for safety reasons and which swallowed Mermoz over its very waters, the exile in Brazil, the marriage to Mermoz's widow, the seaplanes that no one bought, the ninety-and-ninety flying saucer Six wings that fascinated Paris Match and Popular Science, the last unanswered letter and the unique piece that the fire spared.