At 8:40 on the morning of 15 June 1919, a big biplane came out of the low cloud over County Galway. The pilot saw a flat green field near the Marconi wireless station at Clifden and put the aircraft down. The field was a bog. The wheels sank, the nose dug in, and the bomber tipped up onto its face. Neither man aboard was hurt.

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had just flown from Newfoundland to Ireland without stopping, the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic by aeroplane. It took them 15 hours and 57 minutes, in an open cockpit, through fog, ice and snow. Charles Lindbergh's famous solo flight to Paris was still eight years in the future.

The Race for the Daily Mail Prize

The Daily Mail had offered £10,000 for the first crossing of the Atlantic by aeroplane in less than 72 consecutive hours. After the war, several teams gathered in Newfoundland to try, among them the Sopwith pair Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve, who came down in the ocean, and a Handley Page team under Admiral Mark Kerr.

Two weeks before Alcock and Brown set off, the US Navy flying boat NC-4 under Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read completed the first flight across the Atlantic, but it took 23 days with six stops. We told the NC-4 story here. It did not qualify for the Mail's non-stop prize, which was still there to be won.

Vickers entered a converted Vimy, a twin-engined bomber built too late for the war. The bomb racks were replaced with fuel tanks holding 865 imperial gallons. Alcock, who had been a bomber pilot and a prisoner of war, would fly. Brown, an engineer who had also flown in the war and been a prisoner, would navigate with a sextant.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology on the engineering behind Alcock and Brown's flight. Video: IET

Sixteen Hours of Fog and Ice

They took off at about 1:45 pm on 14 June. Almost everything that could go wrong did. At 5:20 pm the wind-driven generator failed, taking the radio, the intercom and the heating with it. An exhaust pipe burst, and the noise made talking impossible. Thick fog hid the sky, so Brown could not take a sextant sighting until 12:15 am.

Twice Alcock lost control in cloud and the Vimy fell into a spiral dive. At 3 am they flew into a snowstorm that soaked them and iced the instruments. The carburettors iced up too. Legend has it that Brown climbed out onto the wings to clear the engines, though he never mentioned doing so himself.

Down in the Bog

Over Ireland, Alcock chose what looked like a perfect field. Derrygimlagh was a bog, and the landing tipped the Vimy onto its nose. Both men climbed out unhurt, having covered about 1,890 miles at an average of around 115 mph. The newspapers of the day printed slightly different figures in the excitement.

Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for Air, presented them with the £10,000 prize. Alcock received a further 2,000 guineas from the State Express cigarette company and £1,000 as the first Briton to fly the Atlantic. A week after landing, King George V knighted them both at Windsor Castle.

Arthur Whitten Brown describes the 1919 flight in his own words. Video: Peter Borenius

Showing Lindbergh the Way

Sir John Alcock did not live to enjoy his fame. On 18 December 1919 he was killed when he crashed near Rouen while delivering a new Vickers Viking amphibian to an air show in Paris. Sir Arthur Whitten Brown lived until 4 October 1948. The Vimy, rebuilt by Vickers, hangs in the Science Museum in London.

Eight years later, when Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris after the first solo non-stop crossing, he did not forget who had gone first.

Lindybeige on the first transatlantic flight. Video: Lindybeige

Sources: Wikipedia (Transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown), HISTORY, The New York Times (16 June 1919)