A Soaring Spirit

By THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS

Christian Marty was a fighter. The drive that pushed him to the top of the piloting profession also made him an avid sportsman who would hang glide over volcano craters, ski the most difficult slaloms and who, in 1982, became the first Frenchman ever to windsurf across the Atlantic. "In everything he did, he always wanted to prove to himself that he was as good as the best," says Claude Bouvier-Muller, 71, a retired Air France pilot and a close friend. "Yet he never bragged. It was a personal challenge."

Marty, 54, was a 32-year Air France veteran who had flown the Boeing 747 and the airline's Airbus planes before entering the company's elite corps of Concorde pilots last year. As a pilot, recalls Bouvier-Muller, Marty was "extremely conscientious. If he lost control of his plane, it's because it couldn't be controlled. He was not one to give up even in the toughest situations. He had a stronger survival instinct than most people--perhaps because of his sporting activities."

Trim and fit at 5 ft. 8 in., Marty was always testing his physical endurance. On stopovers between flights he would go hiking, water skiing, or rock climbing, or head into the hills on the mountain bike that he carried in the cargo hold.

For all his love of demanding and dangerous sports, however, Marty was no daredevil. "Just like his piloting, he prepared all his projects in the most meticulous way," says Bouvier-Muller. "When he started talking to me about crossing the Atlantic on a sailboard, I thought he was nuts. Then I realized he had thought out every facet of the problem and that he was dead serious about doing it."

Marty's windsurf from Dakar, Senegal, to French Guiana took 37 days. He refused even to allow his support boat to tow him while he slept: "I didn't want to gain a single mile unless my wrists and arms felt it," he later told a magazine interviewer. "For me, freedom is being able to choose my own challenges. I am not afraid of losing, because there are honorable defeats." Among them, surely, his defeat last week.

--By Thomas Sancton/Paris