Adrien Bosc - Constellation

The Vienna Philharmonic had been terribly affected by the war. As early as 1935, the pervasive anti-Semitism was contaminating even the arts. Three days before the premiere of Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman , Stefan Zweig’s name was removed from the publicity posters as the libretto’s author. In 1938, Wilhelm Jerger, a member of the SS, was named head of the Philharmonic. Nazification decimated the orchestra’s roster of musicians, six Jewish musicians were killed, and ten others were deported to the death camps.

Margarête carefully collected Ginette’s EMI recordings, the Brahms and Sibelius concertos, Debussy’s Sonata, Ravel’s Tzigane , Suk’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano , and the opus 25 Poème by Chausson. The vinyl records played in constant rotation on her phonograph, until the microgrooves of her 78 rpm’s were worn. Margarête’s fascination shaded into obsession. Hearing that Ginette Neveu intended to play a series of concerts, she rushed to the Philharmonic to be sure of getting a ticket for every performance. Transported for seven evenings by the violinist’s Stradivarius, she was fortunate enough on leaving the last recital to meet her, talk to her. She felt it was the start of a friendship, Ginette had given her her Paris address, they could write back and forth.

On the evening of October 31, 1949, Margarête starts to read that day’s Die Presse . On page four, she finds an article about the distant tragedy in the Azores. She takes down the photograph of Ginette Neveu, cuts the page from the newspaper, and writes in pencil along the bottom, “Ich bin verzweifelt …” (I am in despair). She goes to the kitchen, takes the hose from the gas heater, clamps her teeth around it, and pushes the button. She is discovered on November 1, stretched out, clutching the photograph and the article. Newspapers around the world carry the story. To the casualty list was added the name of the woman henceforth known as “the forty-ninth victim of the Constellation.”

Off Lisbon, the flight crew of F-BAZO, the shadow plane, starts keeping a record of its manual radio compass readings. Everything is scrupulously noted — reception of radio beacons in the area, interference from the ground transmitter in Portugal, exchanges with the control tower in the Azores. By the end of the investigation, they will have to understand the reasons for the deviation of Constellation F-BAZN — almost fifty-five miles from its intended position. An analysis of the airplane’s wreckage has already exonerated the manufacturer. The flight re-creation is an attempt to explore the only plausible trail remaining, namely conditions on the approach to the archipelago. Without a black box, piloting errors can’t be verified. It is therefore crucial for the experts to analyze the flight’s every detail between Lisbon and Santa Maria.

Over the Atlantic, a few hundred miles from Portugal, a first and still minor incident comes to the attention of the investigating commission. The aircraft is unable to receive signal BB7 from Santana Airport. There is interference between two signals: the radio beacon from the Azores, which the navigators are unable to receive, and the signal from Seville, Spain, which, though hundreds of miles away, they receive perfectly, five out of five. The detail is important. At this stage in the flight, the opposite should be occurring, and the distant signal from land should be growing fainter as they draw away. The anomaly persists for the remainder of the flight. At 9:53 p.m., Seville is still at five out of five, the signal only weakening slightly at 10:22 p.m. The crossing of the radio waves throws the plane off course, sending it several dozen miles to the north, just as happened to the fatal flight on October 27. When the signal from São Miguel finally comes in at a strength of two out of five, an hour and a half before arrival time, it suddenly disappears off the radar for seven minutes, at the very moment when the Air France inspectors are flying over Algarvia Peak, the site of the crash … Faulty functioning of the radio beacon due to interference from the Seville transmitter now seems the likeliest cause of the accident. The pilot’s last words, “I have the field in sight!” remain a mystery. What airfield was he looking at? At that moment, a few seconds before crashing, how could he have seen anything that looked like a landing strip with runway lights?

The weather conditions on São Miguel on the night of October 27, unlike those on Santa Maria Island, were particularly bad. Approaching the archipelago, the pilots, as we remember, were surprised at not finding the clear skies described by the control tower at Santa Maria a few minutes earlier. The pilot, bringing the plane in for a landing after traversing a dense layer of clouds, must have been fooled by the refracted lights of the village of Provoação at the foot of the mountain, only recently wired for electricity. The neighboring glow would have been something like an aurora borealis. The weather was heavy, the pilot, led into error by the reduced visibility, took the nimbus of light scattered in the summit area for a landing strip. There was a vanishing chance that the aircraft’s altitude would correspond with the height of the summit — another few dozen meters and the Constellation would have sailed clear. “God does not play dice,” the saying goes, but on the night of October 27 to 28, Constellation F-BAZN scored a Yahtzee.

On July 26, 1950, the investigating commission delivers its report to the Transportation Ministry. Here are its conclusions:

While unable to exclude entirely the possibility of a map-reading error, the commission believes that BAZN’s faulty navigation was due to the sudden failure at the end of the flight, unsuspected by the crew, of certain aspects of its radio direction finding reception, either an abnormal propagation of radio waves or the faulty functioning of its equipment. This cause was exacerbated by overconfidence, resulting from favorable atmospheric conditions in the arrival zone, conditions that led the captain not to verify his radio bearings as he would have done in worse weather. A visual confusion in the darkness was a final result .

Constellation F-BAZO fulfilled its mission, rejoined Air France’s Paris-Saigon circuit. Coincidence of dates, again and always, it was sold in 1971 to the Macon Estate and junked on a certain October 27.

Walk along the Hudson, in autumn, dead leaves carpet the walkway, the splotches of red and orange make for slippery footing; reflected, the winter sun shatters, fine slivers at the edges of your eyesight, you lower your head, hands in the pockets of a heavy coat, belted at the waist, a naked tree planted on the promenade; in spring, the shells on the water, their rhythms alternating, recede on lengthening wakes; its lawn invaded, the riverbank becomes a recreational boat basin, and in the sweltering heat of an American summer the children dash into the water while the community looks on. Simone Hennessy has taken the habit of setting off alone every Sunday on a blazed walk from Livingston Manor to Waterfront Park, a peaceful prairie carved out vertically above the Hudson River. Two hours stolen from her schedule, two hours she has negotiated, leaving her daughters, Eileen and Bridget, with their father, to go for a little spin, as she liked to say. At the farthest point, the railway station, where the weekday ritual of scurrying white collar workers — their newspaper tucked under one arm, leaving behind suburbia, their wives and children, for New York City, its offices and secretaries — gave way to an urban desert, there she would sit, on the same bench in front of the railway platform. She scribbled in a little notebook, always in French, not to-do lists, but stray thoughts, seasonal haikus, her journal, which she never reread, confined to a present made of general truths. They had moved to the United States twelve years ago, leaving behind Old Europe and their two big families, the Hennessys and the Broches, brought happily together through them. Patrick started his architectural firm in Manhattan, and they spent the prewar years in Washington Square, migrating after the birth of their eldest, Bridget, to Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester County, an entirely respectable suburb an hour by train from the business district. An important site during the American Revolution as an encampment for General Washington’s army, Dobbs Ferry now had a following among bankers and advertising executives. When the war ended, Patrick embarked on a series of profitable real estate ventures, snapping up old neo-Gothic residences that had once belonged to aristocrats and turning them into luxury apartments. His last coup was the purchase of 155 Beacon Hill Drive, a sumptuous late-nineteenth-century mansion straight out of The Magnificent Ambersons , whose interior might easily hold entwined staircases harboring in their shadowy recesses the concealed face of George Minafer. Patrick kept its exterior intact, subdivided the space inside, and called the whole thing “Castle Apartments.”