However, the old pilot still being around after eight missions is quite a feat when there is one chance in three of coming back at all. "I'm the last survivor and that certainly gives a strange feeling. I thought that would happen to the very old only : loosing all his friends on the way." he wrote.
He recalls Mermoz and Guillaumet, both vanished. The first in 1936 with "La croix du Sud" in the middle of the Atlantic, the other in 1940 during the battle of France. Guillaumet, who achieved a hundred times the impossible by making as many crossings of the Andes cordilliereas with dubious aircraft.
Mermoz used to say "For us, pilots, dying in our bed would be an accident."
Pierre Georges Latecoere suffered a long illness untill this day of August 1943 when he reached his end. Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont just died in a bed, but in a scruffy hotel in Rio de Janeiro, last February. he ended washed-up after heading the Aeropostale empire. One of the greatest adventures of the century. Silently, Saint-Exupery remembers...

Henceforth, Saint-Ex is too old for piloting. He knows that, this mission completed, he'll he banned from flying again. He's guessing it, he feels it. Duriez help him into his thick, silk heating suit and then he gets into an overall with pockets for essential treasures like maps, pencils, food rations, notebook, foreign money.

Duriez drives him in the old squadron jeep to the field.
He wants to give him a colt gun. But he says no. He's not afraid and nothing will happen anyway. The other doesn't insist and slides the plexiglass cockpit over the pilot's head.
He spends another ten minutes checking everything in the blazing sun. A last cigarette, some extenuating puffs and then the engins spit gusts of gaz..
The aircraft registered 223, starts its mission over the Alps. It's 8:45. Thereafter nothing. At 15:00 nobody knows what happened to captain Antoine de Saint-Exupery. this time the death-dodging man doesn't reappear. Seconds and hours pass like in a chapter of one of his famoust novels :

*******

COMMODORIO RIVADAVIA doesn't hear a thing anymore, but thousand kilometers away and twenty minutes later, Bahia Blanca catches a second message.
"-descending... Entering clouds".
followed by two words of an oscure text arriving at the post of Trelew :
"-See nothing..."
That's shortwave. You catch it in one place, but not in another. And then, for no reason, there's the tipping point.
This crew without known whereabouts has seemingly left the space and time of the living, and the radios seemingly register the blank pages written by ghosts.
Have they run out of fuel or does the pilot seize his last chance : an emergency landing without crashing ?
the voice from bahia Blanca orders Trelew :
"-Ask him"

The radio post looks like a laboratory with nickel, copper, gauges and a network of conductors. The night watch operators in white coats are silently bent over a semblance of an experiment. With their dainty fingers they touch the controls and search the magnetic sky like dowsers of a gold-lode.
-"No answer ?
- No answer !"
Perhaps they are going to pick up a sound that might be a sign of life. If the aircraft and its board lights climb towards the stars they could possibly hear the chant of that bright spot.
secunds pass. They really flow like blood. Are they still flying ? Every second reduce the chance. That's why the passing time looks like destructive.
If it takes twenty centuries to reduce a temple to dust, slowly eroding the granite, the effects of that time span are packed in each second, threatening a crew.
Every second takes something away. Fabien's voice, Fabien's laughter, his smile. The silence is gaining ground. An increasingly deep silence, falling on this crew with the weight of a sea. Then somebody notices : "one hour forty. Last drop of fuel ; it's impossible that they are still flying.

And Peace sets...

A taste of bitterness and insipidity surges to the lips, like the end of a journey. Something comes to an unknown end, something rather disgusting. And among the copper veins one feels the same gloominess that hangs in closing factories. All this equipment seems burdensome, useless and with no purpose : a weight of dead branches.
All that's left, is waiting for dawn.
In several hours all of Argentine will emerge in day light and all these people living there like on a shore with a net that closes, ... tightens slowly, and noboby knows what the catch will be.

*******

Peace sets also on the Bastia Borgo base. the pilots continue waiting, you never know. But the anxiety is mounting, the shadows get longer, night is falling shrouding everything.
Hours pass, hope is vanishing, the heavy silence of certainty. A pilot remembers :
"About ten in the evening, without a single word spoken, we went slowly to the mess. On the table dinner was waiting, cold. We sat down and we continued eating.
At the end of the meal, the eldest said :
"tomorrow morning, you take care of the mission of captain Saint-Exupery". Nothing else. Like a chapter of "Vol de nuit".

Nobody has ever known what happened to the writer of "Le petit Prince". In those hard days, he enjoyed his relatives admiring his card tricks. "Talk to me, make me enjoy living. I look happy doing these tricks, but I can't do them for myself and a terrible cold overwhelms my heart."
July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupery achieved his prettiest card trick : he vanished without the slightest trace.