In around two weeks, on the 15th of June, it will be 90 years since John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic.
The generalities of the story will, I'm sure, be quite well known to regulars on this forum. Mine is a somewhat truncated account but nonetheless it does contain some 2,500 words. For those who elect to plough through it, I hope you find it worthwhile. Having in 2007 travelled to the area on the west coast of Ireland where Alcock and Brown made their landfall, I will also include some photographs I took of a terrain that they mistook for a smooth green field, but one, alas, which turned out to be quite unsuitable for a landing.
In 1913, Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, put up a prize of £10,000 for the first successful crossing on the Atlantic. The competition, officially known as The Daily Mail Atlantic Prize, was suspended for the duration of the war but was reinstated in 1918.
There were several conditions but perhaps the key points were that the flight could be from "... any point in the United States, Canada, or Newfoundland to any point in Great Britain or Ireland, in 72 consecutive hours. The flight may be made either way across the Atlantic." Realistically, such a flight would have been impossible for pre-war aircraft but, as ever, war tends to accelerate technology and by 1918, many people were seeing a non-stop Transatlantic flight as quite achievable.
John Alcock was born in Manchester in 1892. He learnt to fly at Brooklands (See... one of two motor racing connections in this story!) before the war in a Sunbeam-engined Maurice Farman pusher aircraft, first soloing in 1912.
During the war, he flew with the Royal Naval Air Service and in September 1917 crash landed his Handley Page O/100 bomber near Suvla Bay on the Gallipoli peninsula following an engine failure. He was taken prisoner by the Turks and spent the duration under lock and key! Even then, he had developed an ambition to fly across the Atlantic. After he was demobilised, he returned to Brooklands looking for a job. Very fortunately for him, Vickers had their eye on Northcliffe's prize and John Alcock managed to get himself selected as the pilot of their entry, a modified Vickers Vimy.
The basic specs of the Vimy, as modified for the Transatlantic flight, were:
Wingspan: 67 ft 2 in.
Length: 43 ft 7 in.
Engines: 2 x Rolls-Royce Eagle Mk V111 each producing 360 horsepower.
Fuel capacity: 865 Imperial gallons - close to double the original capacity.
The aircraft was built and modified for the flight at the Vickers Brooklands works, the second motor racing connection!
Such a fuel load made the aircraft 1,000 pounds overweight, but Vickers were confidant that the Vimy could not only take off with this payload but also remain aloft sufficiently long to make the crossing.
At the point that Alcock had been appointed, Vickers did not have a navigator for the flight. This situation rectified itself when Arthur Whitten Brown appeared at Vickers, looking for work as an engineer. Brown was interviewed by Maxwell Muller, the Works Manager, who happened to mention navigation during the interview. Brown was fully conversant with aerial navigation, having studied it while recovering from an air crash as a German Prisoner of war. He had been flying as an aerial observer with the RFC and the crash has caused permanent injuries to his left leg. He was soon appointed as navigator and immediately got on very well with Alcock.
Brown was born in 1886 to American parents and grew up not far from Alcock in Manchester. In 1914, he relinquished his United States citizenship and joined the British Army.
Northcliffe's £10,000 prize was augmented in April 1919 to the extent of a further £3,000 with a private offer of £1,000 from a Mr. Lawrence Philips and 2,000 guineas from the proprietors of State Express Cigarette. Alcock and Brown were a late entry, there being, initially, five other contenders.
Newfoundland was, unsurprisingly, selected by all as the hopping off point but, again unsurprisingly at that time, there were no strips available, so a mad scramble ensued to secure a patch of land big enough for competing aircraft to be both assembled and take off from.
Alcock and Brown arrived in St. John's on May 13 and immediately set about finding a place where they could put their Vimy together. Since they were the last crew to arrive, this was very problematical. The aircraft arrived on May 26 in five large crates, and at least a location for assembly had been secured, albeit under rather sad circumstances.
On May 18, another crew, Freddie Rayneham and CW Fairfax Morgan, had attempted a take-off in their single-engined Martinsyde from a field they had secured at Quidi Vidi lake, half a mile from St. John's. Anxious to catch Harry Hawker (there's another story!), Rayneham had taken off in a stiff cross-wind and with the resultant lack of lift, had crashed after initially lifting off. Rayneham walked away but Morgan was carted off to hospital. That evening Rayneham offered Quidi Vidi to John Alcock.
The area provided very difficult access for the five crates, however their local drayman Lester was up to the task, but only after some fences had been removed, a few buildings damaged and a bridge partly dismantled and rebuilt! Rayneham's tent hangar was not big enough to house the Vimy so it was assembled in the open with canvas screens erected to offer some basic protection from the elements. Unfortunately, the makeshift strip at Quidi Vidi was nowhere near long enough for the fully laden Vimy to take off from. Once again, the redoubtable Lester came to the rescue, suggesting a nearby field he knew of. It was just 300 yards long, barely sufficient for the Vimy, and it required a lot of work clearing boulders, felling trees and filling in a ditch. One advantage was that it had fairly clear land beyond which they used to extend to the available ground run to 500 yards. A small army of people pitched in, including Brown with his gammy leg. It was ready on June 8 and Alcock named it Lester Field.
On June 9, the Vimy was flown from Quidi Vidi to Lester Field with a thimble fuel of fuel on board. There then followed a frustrating period of stormy weather which raised tensions; things were made no easier by the discovery that the fuel they had brought from Britain had become contaminated. Fortunately, Max Muller arrived from Vickers arrived just in time with a fresh supply.
The weather was still blustery on the 14th but they decided to take off notwithstanding. Still, ill luck pursued them. The wind direction dictated that the aircraft be moved on the ground across the field and during the process, a fuel line was crushed, causing another hour's delay.
They finally took off at 4.13pm GMT on Saturday June 14. (per Lieut. Clements, R.A.F., the official starter at Newfoundland:- "Capt. Alcock and Lieut. Brown left St. John's, Newfoundland, in a Vickers-Vimy machine on a flight to England to-day, June 14, at 4.13 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time.", as quoted in Flight magazine June 19, 1919.)
The rate of climb was meagre to say the least and to the spectators on the ground, disaster appeared to have struck when the Vimy disappeared behind a low rise. Finally it reappeared and Alcock turned the aircraft east, crossing the Newfoundland coast at 1,200 feet.
Brown radioed, "All well and started" but that was their first and last message because a short while later, a propellor broke off the radio's wind powered generator.
He carried a sextant, navigational charts, a slide rule and an instrument known as a drift bearing plate. He needed frequent views of the sun or the stars to get sextant bearings but this was no means certain in those regions, which made the drift bearing plate important. So long as the sea was visible, this could offer some help with his dead reckoning calculations.
Less than an hour after taking off, a piece of exhaust pipe broke off the starboard engine, which brought much greater noise but, more worryingly, exhaust flames were very close to a bracing wire. Despite it glowing red hot at times, it did not fail.
Three hours into the flight, at the behest of Brown, Alcock climbed to 6,000 feet so that a sextant reading could be taken. They gradually descended to 4,000 feet, just above the clouds but at 3am they were confronted with a massive wall of cloud over which they could not have climbed.
The Vimy's instruments were very rudimentary and after a while, Alcock became disoriented in the thick cloud, with the bubble on the turn and bank indicator having disappeared. Finally, the aircraft stalled and entered a spin. They descended from around 3,000 feet, finally leaving the cloud at 100 feet almost inverted and only resuming level flight at an estimated 50 feet.
The time in cloud had also destroyed Brown's awareness of their position so once again they climbed to obtain a sextant reading. By the time they climbed to 11,000 feet, the rain had turned to snow and ultimately ice but by now, dawn was approaching and eventually, Brown saw the sun and was able to calculate that they were some 80 miles from the Irish coast. The starboard engine's air intake had become iced over at this altitude and it stopped. The Vimy was not capable of flying on one engine so they commenced a gradual and mandatory descent and finally, the by now de-iced engine restarted at 500 feet.
They passed over two small islands off the west coast of Galway, Eeshal and Turbot, and soon after caught site of the tall masts of the Marconi wireless station at Derrygimlagh on the Errislannan peninsula. They fired two flares from a Verey pistol and, getting no response from the station, flew three miles east to the small village of Clifden, where most of the good citizens were in church at the time, their minds occupied with higher things. Returning to the Marconi station at Derrygimlagh they spotted what appeared to be level ground and so they landed. They had unwittingly chosen the Derrygimlagh bog and after running along for about 50 yards, the wheels dug in and the Vimy tipped onto its nose, with little damage to itself and none to its crew apart from a light bump on the nose for Brown! They landed at 8.40 am on Sunday 15 June after 16 hours and 27 minutes in the air.
The landing had at last caught the attention of the Marconi operators who ran across to greet them. They had plenty of fuel remaining and had intended to take off again and fly to London; the Derrygimlaghgh bog put paid to that! The Daily Mail had placed a reporter in Galway some weeks earlier to 'scoop' the story but that plan was aced by the editor of the Connacht Tribune who had his moment in the sun, finding John Alcock relaxing in the Marconi social clubhouse smoking a cigarette. The flyers were taken to Galway later that day clutching the small sealed mail bag containing the first 800 Transatlantic airmail letters. They were feted at the Railway Hotel and the following day a civic reception was held in their honour. They travelled by train to Dublin where there was a motorcade and a dinner at Trinity College. They left Ireland from Kingstown Harbour, today known as Dun Laoghaire, disembarking at Holyhead and travelling by train to London, arriving on June 19.
The following day, June 20, a lunch was held in their honour at the Savoy Hotel by the directors of the Associated Newspapers. Lord Northcliffe was unable to attend due to illness and so the cheque for £10,000 was presented by Mr. Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War.
Northcliffe, however, wrote a most effusive and, to our contemporary eyes, politically incorrect letter to Alcock, "My dear Alcock, A very hearty welcome to the pioneer of direct Atlantic flight. Your journey with your brave companion, Whitten Brown, is a typical exhibition of British courage and organising efficiency.
"Just as in 1913, when I offered the prize, I felt that it would soon be won, so do I surely believe that your wonderful journey is a warning to cable monopolists and others to realise that within the next few years we shall be less dependent upon them unless they increase their wires and speed up. Your voyage was made more quickly than the average Press message of 1919. Moreover, I look forward with certainty to the time when London morning newspapers will be selling in New York in the evening, allowing for the difference between British and American time, and vice versa in regard to New York evening journals reaching London next day. Then we shall no longer suffer from the danger of garbled quotations due to telegraphic compression. Then, too, the American and British peoples will understand each other better as they are brought into closer daily touch.
"Illness prevents me from shaking you by the hand and personally presenting the prize. But I can assure you that your welcome will be equal to that of Hawker and his gallant American compeer, Read, whose great accomplishment has given us such valuable data for future Atlantic work.
''I rejoice at the good augury that you departed from and arrived at those two portions of the British Commonwealth, the happy and prosperous Dominion of Newfoundland and the future equally happy and prosperous Dominion of Ireland."
A couple of days later, Alcock and Brown were knighted by King George V at Windsor Castle.
The Vimy was taken back to England where it was repaired and in December 1919 was presented to the Science Museum in South Kensington. It remains on display to this day.
Tragically, Sir John Alcock was killed on the afternoon of December 18 at Cote d'Evrard, about 25 miles north of Rouen, while flying a new Vickers aircraft to the Paris Salon. He was attempting to land in foggy conditions and a wingtip clipped a tree. Medical help was slow to arrive and he died within a few hours without regaining consciousness. Brown was, understandably, quite shattered by this news.
Sir Arthur Whitten-Brown died in October 1948, leaving his wife, Kay. His only son, Arthur, was killed during the Second World War during an operation over occupied Europe.
In 1994, 75 years after the flight, a sculpture resembling an aircraft tail fin was unveiled on some high ground at Errislannan by Anne Alcock, Sir John's niece. About a mile and a half inland, in the Derrygimlagh bog, there is a white cairn, near to the site of the long gone close to the Marconi station, commemorating the spot at which they landed. My wife and I toured the west of Ireland in June 2007 and the following photographs show some of the area as it is today.
I obtained all the information for this post from Alcock and Brown by Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, Connemara Girl Publications, 1999, The Pathfinders by David Nevin, Time-Life Books Inc 1980 and several copies of Flight magazine from 1919 in the FlightGlobal archive - www.flightglobal.com
The engraving on the monument at Errislannan.
The brass plaque at the same place unveiled in 1959, 40 years after the flight.
Looking east over the Derrygimlagh bog.
The white cairn marking the landing spot. This is a little over a mile from the site of the previous three photographs.
I tried to get there - don't tell Hertz - but the track was getting decidedly iffy.
The cairn remains quite a way off.
Peat, the kind of stuff they landed in.
Edited by Gary Davies, 02 June 2009 - 15:33.
