The Daring Love Story of Nadine Vaujour: The French Woman Who Learned to Fly a Helicopter to Break Her Husband out of Prison

Aug 29, 2024
5 min read

Updated: Jun 26

Helicopter rescue scene with a man climbing aboard; collage includes headline about Nadine Vaujour breaking her husband out of prison.

On a bright Paris morning in May 1986, a helicopter dropped out of the sky and hovered over the roof of one of France's toughest prisons. At the controls was a woman who, eighteen months earlier, had never touched a flight stick in her life. Her name was Nadine Vaujour, and she was there to get her husband out.

It worked. For a few months, anyway. What followed reads less like a fairytale ending and more like a story France still argues about: a love affair built on crime, a shootout that nearly killed a man, and a marriage that didn't survive what came next.

A Marriage Built Behind Bars

Michel Vaujour wasn't a casual offender. By the time he met Nadine, he'd already been in and out of French prisons since he was a teenager, and he'd escaped custody more than once before, including a memorable 1979 stunt where he bluffed his way out of a courtroom holding a fake gun made from soap and shoe polish.

He and Nadine married while he was inside, in 1979, and the couple had a daughter, Betty, who was born during one of Nadine's own short prison stays. Nadine had her own brushes with the law too, including time linked to an attack on an armoured car near Tours, a detail you won't find in most of the breathless retellings of this story. For more on how French courtrooms and prisons became stages for real drama in this era, see the Nantes courthouse hostage crisis of 1985, which unfolded just a year before Nadine took to the skies.

By 1985, Michel was sentenced to roughly eighteen years for armed robbery and attempted murder of a police officer. He wasn't planning on serving it.

Learning to Fly, Under a Fake Name

This is where the story actually gets interesting, because most retellings skip straight to the helicopter. The plan took roughly three years to put together. Starting around 1983, Nadine enrolled in flying lessons in Annecy under her maiden name, quietly building up flight hours with no one any the wiser.

Person in red reaches for a helicopter on a rooftop. Crowd watches from a distance. Sunny day, red brick roof, dramatic scene.

By the months before the escape, she'd switched tactics again, renting helicopters twice a month from a company outside Paris under the alias Lena Rigon, paying in cash every time at roughly 2,200 francs an hour. The owner later admitted, with some embarrassment, that a woman who showed up like clockwork and always paid cash should probably have raised a flag sooner than it did.

Inside La Sante prison, Michel had been quietly scouting the building with a fellow inmate, Pierre Hernandez, who was awaiting trial on armed robbery charges. Their first plan involved the helicopter landing on the roof, but a closer look showed there simply wasn't room for a helicopter to set down and take off again. So they adapted: Michel would have to climb out while the aircraft hovered.

Painted Nectarines and a Rooftop Sprint

On the morning of 26th May 1986, at around 10:30am, Nadine lifted off and flew straight over central Paris toward La Sante, ignoring the radio operators frantically trying to wave her off. She brought the helicopter to a hover above one of the cell blocks.

Inside, things were chaotic for a different reason. Guards were getting reports that two inmates were running around the rooftop area armed with grenades. In reality, Michel and Pierre were holding nectarines from the prison cafeteria, painted green to look like explosives. It worked. With the threat of grenades on the roof and an unidentified helicopter overhead, not a single guard fired a shot as the two men jogged across the rooftop.

Michel grabbed a rope ladder dropped from the helicopter and hauled himself aboard. Pierre Hernandez, for reasons that have never fully been explained, lost his nerve at the last second and surrendered to the guards instead of climbing up. Nadine flew her husband a short distance to a sports field in southern Paris, where they landed, jumped into a waiting car, and vanished.

It's a similar bit of theatre to the one John Dillinger pulled off with a carved wooden gun decades earlier in Indiana: convince the people with the real weapons that you have one too, and they'll hesitate just long enough.

Helicopter on a rooftop near tall chimneys, with a person holding on to the building edge. Urban setting, clear sky, with industrial vibes.

On the Run, and the Shootout Nobody Talks About

The escape made headlines around the world within hours. French police openly called the pair a real-life Bonnie and Clyde and admitted the couple had probably had years to prepare a hideout, which made tracking them down far harder than usual.

They weren't found for months. Then, in September 1986, Michel did what Michel apparently couldn't help doing: he tried to rob another bank. The job went wrong, and Michel ended up in a shootout with police. He was shot in the head and fell into a coma.

He survived, but he came out of it partially paralysed. The day after the shooting, on 27th September 1986, police tracked Nadine down to a safe house in southwest France and arrested her. The romantic getaway was over.

Helicopter hovering above tiled roof, person in red dangling from it, barbed wire in foreground. Blue sky, chimney present, intense action.

The escape was reported all over the world. French newspapers lauded the sheer nerve of Nadine’s actions. However, the triumph was short-lived.

What Happened to Them Afterward

Nadine was charged over her role in the escape and served prison time of her own, though by most accounts she was released relatively early. Michel, once he'd recovered enough to stand trial, was returned to a maximum-security prison to finish his original sentence, this time with significant injuries from the shooting.

Remarkably, that wasn't the end of his escape attempts. He tried once more, with the help of a law student named Jamila who later became his second wife after he and Nadine separated. That final attempt, his sixth overall, was the only one that failed outright.

Man stands in a courtroom with two uniformed guards beside him. Background features wooden paneling. The mood appears serious.

Michel was eventually granted early release in 2003, after 27 years behind bars, reportedly the largest sentence suspension in French legal history at the time. He later wrote about his life and his recovery from the shooting, much as fellow escape artist Henri Charriere did decades earlier after his own legendary break from the supposedly inescapable Devil's Island.

Nadine, for her part, largely withdrew from public life after her release. She published a memoir, Et vint un helicoptere, in 1991, giving her own account of the years of planning and the fallout that followed, but has rarely spoken publicly since.

Jackie Chan's parents pulled off a similar kind of reinvention, his father a former Nationalist spy, his mother an ex-Shanghai gambler, both eventually ending up as embassy staff in Canberra, Australia.

Why This Story Still Gets Told

France has a genuinely strange track record with helicopter prison breaks, with at least eleven attempts recorded over the years, more than almost anywhere else in the world. Nadine's wasn't even the first: in 1981, two inmates escaped a different French prison the same way. Decades later, fellow countryman Jacques Mesrine would cement France's reputation for criminals who treated prison walls as a personal inconvenience rather than an obstacle.

What sets Nadine's story apart isn't really the helicopter. It's the three years of patient, methodical planning that came before it, and the fact that the daring escape itself wasn't even the part of the story with the highest stakes. That came four months later, in a gunfight that very nearly killed the man she'd risked everything to free.