__NOTOC__ The Latécoère 25 was a French airliner built in 1925 for use on Latécoère's own airline and its subsidiaries. Essentially a refined version of the

Latécoère 17 __NOTOC__ The Latécoère 17 was a French airliner built in 1923 for use on Lignes Aériennes Latécoère, Latécoère's own airline routes between France and Morocco. The prototype was designated the Latécoère 14, reusing the number of an u ...

with an enlarged wingspan, it supplanted that type in production and then in service.

Operational history

As Lignes Aériennes Latécoère increasingly shifted its emphasis from carrying passengers to carrying airmail, the Latécoère 25 found its definitive role as a mail plane, and was widely used in establishing the line's South American services. Airlines which operated the type included

Aeroposta Argentina :''This article contains machine-translated text from the Spanish Wikipedia article Aeroposta Argentina S.A. You can help by improving this Spanish to English translation.'' Aeroposta Argentina S.A. was an early pioneering airline in Argentina ...

. Like the Latécoère 17, it was a conventional parasol-wing monoplane with enclosed seating for passengers and an open cockpit for the pilot. One Latécoère 25 was involved in a celebrated incident when it made a forced landing high in the Andes. Hitherto, flights between

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

and

Santiago Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

made a detour to avoid the mountains. On 2 March 1929, while searching for a safe route across the range, a Latécoère 25 piloted by Jean Mermoz was caught in a

downdraught In meteorology, an updraft is a small-scale current of rising air, often within a cloud. Overview Localized regions of warm or cool air will exhibit vertical movement. A mass of warm air will typically be less dense than the surrounding region ...

and forced down onto a plateau just across at an altitude of . With his mechanic

Alexandre Collenot Alexandre may refer to: * Alexandre (given name) * Alexandre (surname) * Alexandre (film) See also * Alexander * Xano (disambiguation) Xano is the name of: * Xano, a Portuguese hypocoristic of the name " Alexandre (disambiguation)" * Idálio ...

and passenger, Count

Henry de La Vaulx Henry de La Vaulx (1870–1930), was a balloonist, author, and cofounder of major French and international aeronautical associations. Biography He was born in Bierville, France on April 2, 1870. From March 1896 to May 1897 he stayed with nativ ...

, Mermoz spent the next four days repairing and lightening the aircraft and making a clear path from it to the edge of the precipice. He then rolled it off the edge, diving to attain airspeed, and successfully reached Santiago.

Survivors

The only surviving example of a Latécoère 25 is preserved in the ''

Museo Nacional de Aeronáutica de Argentina The National Aeronautics Museum "Brigadier Edmundo Civati Bernasconi" ( es, Museo Nacional de Aeronáutica) is an Argentine museum located in the city of Morón, Buenos Aires. Established in 1960, the museum is dedicated to the history of aviati ...

'' in Morón. It wears the markings of

Variants

;Latécoère 25 ;Latécoère 25-2R: production aircraft

Specifications (Laté 25)

References

External links