She had held a pilot’s licence for thirteen months and had forty hours of flying in her logbook, total. The aeroplane was a wood-and-fabric trainer with an eighty-horsepower rotary engine and a service ceiling of about 4,300 metres. Aconcagua, off to her right, is 6,962 metres high.

Adrienne Bolland took off from Mendoza at half past seven on the morning of 1 April 1921 with no oxygen, no maps, no windscreen, newspaper stuffed inside her flying suit, a dagger in case of condors and a revolver to set fire to the wreck as a distress signal.

She had been told which way to turn by a woman she had never met before, who had been sent by a medium.

Two Months of Lessons

Her father, a writer and guidebook editor, died of a stroke when she was thirteen, and the family money went with him. She lost what was left of her own at a racetrack. Then she went flying.

She started at the Caudron school at Le Crotoy on the Bay of Somme on 18 November 1919 and had her certificate by 26 January 1920, with pilot’s licence number 17569 following on 6 February — the fifteenth French woman ever licensed, and the first to qualify after the war. Two months of lessons.

In March, René Caudron hired her as a ferry pilot on a three-year contract, the first woman he had employed to do it. When she asked him for an aircraft of her own, his answer was to name a price in stunts: do a loop and you shall have it.

On 25 August 1920 she flew the English Channel from France, the first woman to do it in that direction. Harriet Quimby had gone the other way in 1912.

Nobody Sends a Trainer Over the Andes

She sailed for Buenos Aires with two dismantled Caudron G.3s in crates and a Caudron mechanic, René Duperrier, and reached Mendoza on 20 March 1921. The town had been flattened by an earthquake three months earlier.

Everyone who had crossed the Andes by air before her had been a military pilot with three hundred to six hundred horsepower, and they had all crossed further south, where the range drops to around 3,500 metres. Bolland picked the direct line: Mendoza, Uspallata, the Christ of the Andes statue on the frontier, Las Cuevas, Santiago. The railway and telegraph corridor. Straight past Aconcagua.

She cabled Caudron asking for something with more power. The reply is the shortest and least helpful telegram in aviation history.

Duperrier doubled the fuel tank, giving her nine hours. The pass at the Christ statue is at 4,080 metres. She reckoned she would need to be at about 4,200. The aeroplane was published as topping out around 4,300.

The Lake Shaped Like an Oyster

Before she left Buenos Aires, a young woman she did not know came to see her. A factory worker, Breton father and Basque mother, or the other way round — Bolland could never remember — speaking hesitant French.

The woman told her that at a certain point she would be at the bottom of a valley turning right. There would be a lake. She would recognise it because it had the shape and the colour of an oyster. She would want to turn right. She must not. The mountains that way were higher than she could climb. She should go left, where she would see a mountain shaped like an upturned chair back.

Bolland only learned afterwards that the woman had been sent by a medium.

Two things need saying plainly about this story. It rests entirely on Bolland’s own account, and she did not tell it publicly until the late 1940s or early 1950s, for fear of being discredited. No contemporary source records it.

And it is the moment the whole flight turned on.

Turning left put her against a rock face, and the orographic lift off it carried the Caudron up and over. That part is straightforward physics, and she described it accurately.

Three Hours, No Oxygen

Accounts of the duration vary between roughly three hours and four and a quarter, the longer figure including three twenty-minute periods when she was making no headway at all against the wind.

She wore silk pyjamas, a cotton flying suit, and newspaper packed under a leather jacket. Her fingers were wrapped in greaseproof paper. There was no oxygen equipment at all.

She landed at Lo Espejo, the Chilean military flying school outside Santiago, in the middle of three flags laid out on the field — Argentine, Chilean and French — with the propeller stopped. The crowd shouted about the precision of it. Her face was so swollen that her eyes had disappeared, and smeared with blood from vessels burst by the cold and the altitude. A nurse extracted clots from her nose and ears.

Then came the best moment in the whole story, which she also told against herself. There was a knock at the bathroom door.

He is usually described in English as the consul. Her own account says the Minister — France’s senior diplomat in Chile. Either way, he had missed the arrival because he had assumed the whole thing was an April Fool. The Chilean press had been running it as a joke for three weeks.

The President of Chile received her afterwards, at his own suggestion, in her pyjamas.

Adrienne Bolland describing the crossing herself, from the collection of the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace at Le Bourget.

212 Loops, and Seven Crashes

On 27 May 1924 at Orly she flew 212 consecutive loops in 72 minutes, breaking her own women’s record of 98. She had been going for Alfred Fronval’s men’s record of 962 and stopped when the aircraft — a Caudron C.27 — gave up on her. In September that year she tied with all ten of her male competitors in an eighteen-flight, 2,100-kilometre race around France.

She was also, repeatedly, sabotaged. French sources record that her aircraft were tampered with more than once — early on by people who found her abrasive, later because of her openly left-wing politics — and that she survived seven crashes that could have killed her. One in 1930 involved an engine failure on a passenger’s first flight, telegraph wires and a landing on a shed roof, from which both women walked away.

Her own explanation of the contrast between the woman in the aeroplane and the woman on the ground is the best thing she ever said about herself.

Radio Operator, Donnery

She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1924, in belated recognition of the Andes. She supported Louise Weiss and the suffragists, backed the Spanish Republic, helped recruit pilots for André Malraux’s escadrille España from 1936, and was close to the Air Minister Pierre Cot and to Jean Moulin.

In 1930 she married a fellow aviator, Ernest Vinchon. In 1940 the two of them chose deliberately to stay at Donnery in the Loiret, on the boundary between the free and occupied zones, and joined the Gaullist CND-Castille network. He was a P1 agent in Paris. She was a P2 agent at Donnery, working as a radio operator and reconnoitring fields suitable for clandestine landings and parachute drops. He ended the Occupation in Fresnes prison and came out with pleurisy.

She received the Médaille de la Résistance by decree of 31 March 1947, and was promoted Officier of the Légion d’honneur the same year.

She also mentored the next generation: she introduced Maryse Bastié to Caudron, and gave Hélène Boucher her first flight.

In 1971, on the fiftieth anniversary, Air France flew her back to South America. She told a journalist that the flight itself no longer interested her.

Air France’s centenary film on the crossing.

Sources: Adrienne Bolland, “La Traversée de la Cordillère des Andes” and “Souvenirs irrévérencieux”, Revue Icare; Marc Branchu for Air France; French Wikipedia citing the Arcueil civil register, Le Temps and L’Aéronautique; The New York Times, 1924 and 1930; Service historique de la Défense; Mémoire des Hommes.