PARIS—Right after his historic, 33-hour trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Charles Lindbergh asked whether there was news of French aviator Charles Nungesser.

Mr. Nungesser, an adventurer and World War I ace, was Mr. Lindbergh's great rival in the race to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in one direction or the other. He had set off with a navigator from Paris for New York just two weeks before Mr. Lindbergh's flight. But his biplane—called L'Oiseau Blanc, or White Bird—never arrived in New York, and for...