The Lost Pilot

Winston Groom: On August 25, 1927, pilot Paul Redfern took off in a single-engine monoplane from Sea Island, Georgia, bound for Rio de Janeiro, hoping to capitalize on Charles Lindbergh's recent success in making aviation history.

Instead he flew into a mystery that has spanned most of the last century and into this one, and however commendable his quest was, Redfern seemed to have less in common with Lindbergh than he did with "Wrong Way" Corrigan—the aviator who famously took off from New York headed for California, and instead wound up in Ireland.

Redfern's adventure was extremely ambitious, not the least because Rio de Janeiro is a thousand miles farther from the United States than Lindbergh's Paris, which brought its own set of problems—namely, how to carry that much more gasoline, when Lindbergh himself had chewed the very edges off his charts to save a few kilograms of fuel weight.

Aviation at the time was barely out of its infancy, which began in 1903 when the Wright Brothers' self-propelled airplane first lifted off the sands near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The First World War gave flying a large boost, but by the nineteen twenties it was still mostly a novelty, with few standards and self-taught daredevils barnstorming at county fairs, charging to take people for rides, and flying stunts such as wing walking, pulling banners, and making nuisances of themselves over cattle pastures.