On June 15, 1919, at 8:40 in the morning, a Vickers Vimy biplane with two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines and no radio contact with the outside world nosed down through the clouds over the west coast of Ireland — and drove itself straight into a bog at Derrygimlagh, near Clifden. The undercarriage collapsed. The nose buried itself in the soft ground. The fuselage stood on its tail at 45 degrees.

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown climbed out unhurt, looked around at the peaceful Irish countryside, and grinned. They had just flown non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland — 1,890 miles across the North Atlantic — in 16 hours and 27 minutes. The £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail was theirs. So was a place in history as the first humans to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an aeroplane.

The Prize Nobody Could Claim

The Daily Mail had offered £10,000 for the first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1913. The war intervened before anyone could attempt it. When the prize was reinstated after the armistice in 1918, several teams began preparing. The Atlantic was not a target for the faint-hearted: it was 1,890 miles of open ocean, frequently shrouded in fog, with no landmarks, no weather forecasting worthy of the name, and no rescue infrastructure if you came down in the water.

John Alcock was a Manchester-born pilot who had flown bombers and fighters in the war before being shot down and spending 18 months as a prisoner of war in Turkey. Arthur Whitten Brown was a Scottish-born engineer of American descent, also a former POW, who had spent his captivity studying navigation and teaching himself celestial navigation — the art of determining position by the stars. Their complementary skills were exactly what the crossing required.

Their aircraft was a modified Vickers Vimy — a twin-engine biplane designed as a heavy bomber for the war, which ended before it could be used. Vickers entered the transatlantic race specifically for the prize, stripping out military equipment and adding fuel tanks that gave the Vimy a range of around 2,400 miles. They shipped the aircraft to Newfoundland in pieces and assembled it in a field near St. John’s.

16 Hours in Hell

They took off at 13:58 UTC on June 14, 1919. Within hours, the radio compass failed, leaving them with no ability to take bearings. The weather deteriorated into dense cloud. Brown navigated entirely by dead reckoning and star shots when gaps in the cloud allowed — lying on his back in the open cockpit to sight the sextant through breaks in the overcast.

Over the Atlantic, they flew into a complete whiteout — cloud above, cloud below, no visible horizon. Alcock lost all sense of orientation. The Vimy entered a spin, dropping thousands of feet before Alcock regained control with just 100 feet to spare above the ocean waves. Ice formed on the engines’ air intakes. Brown climbed out onto the wing — five times — to chip it away with a knife, exposed to the full slipstream at 100 miles per hour. Both men were soaked through. Their open cockpit offered no protection from the cold, the rain, or the dark.

When dawn came and then landfall — first the Clifden radio masts, then the bog that looked deceptively firm — they had been airborne for 16 hours and 27 minutes. They had burned 865 gallons of fuel. The crossing had covered 1,890 miles at an average of 115 miles per hour.

Eight Years Before Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh’s solo crossing in 1927 is by far the more famous flight — the greater feat of individual endurance, and a far greater media event. But Alcock and Brown were first. Their crossing proved that the Atlantic could be flown non-stop and that the technology existed to do it. Lindbergh, who knew his history, acknowledged the debt plainly.

Tragedy followed quickly. Less than two weeks after the crossing, Alcock was killed in a crash while delivering a Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Air Show. He was 27. Brown never flew again after Alcock’s death. He survived until 1948, living with the memory of 16 hours over the Atlantic and the friend he had lost almost immediately after.

A statue of both men stands at Heathrow Airport. Another marks the landing site in Clifden. The bog is still there — peaceful, green, and utterly unremarkable, as it must have seemed from 100 feet up on the morning of June 15, 1919, when two exhausted men pointed their nose at it and decided it would have to do.

Sources: Robert Daley, An American Saga; Wikipedia, “Transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown”; Vickers Heritage archive; Daily Mail, June 16, 1919