One hot afiernoon in April1931, a Stearman C3B biplane, its fuel tanks overflowing and cockpit crammed with two weeks' food and water, struggled into the air from the French Foreign Legion airstrip at Colomb-Bechar, Algeria. The plane glowed in the sunlight, with golden wings and scarlet fuselage, and bright American flags painted on its golden tail―a good move, since rebellious North African nomads sometimes fired at French military aircraft. Leveling off at 500 feet, it headed south toward the Legion outpost at Gao, on the Niger River, 1,300 miles straight across the Sahara Desert. To Richard Halliburton, in the front cockpit, the Sahara appeared "a burned crust of gravel without a dip or a crack...the horizon a straight line." The navigation chart was also featureless. Since magnetic compasses tended to be inaccurate over such distances, pilot Moye Stephens was following the military motor track―a ghostly trace on the stony surface below them, covered in places by drifting sand. At only 500 feet, heat and blowing sand stung their searching eyes. Several times they lost the faint track, then had to climb to 5,000 feet and circle until they again detected it.
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