Everyone remembers Charles Lindbergh. Almost nobody remembers the three men who, a year later, flew the Atlantic the hard way — against the wind, from Europe to America — and nearly died doing it. Their aircraft was called the Bremen, and their forgotten flight was in many ways a braver piece of airmanship than the one that made Lindbergh a legend.

On 12 April 1928 they lifted off from a field outside Dublin. Thirty-six hours later they came down on a frozen pond on a tiny island off the coast of Canada, with barely two hours of fuel left — and made history.

The frontier after Lindbergh

Lindbergh had crossed from New York to Paris in 1927, riding the prevailing west-to-east winds. Flying the other way, into those same winds, was a far deadlier proposition — and it had already killed. In 1927 alone, ten attempts to fly the Atlantic east-to-west had failed, costing seven lives. The westbound crossing was aviation’s next great frontier, and a lethal one.

An unlikely trio

The crew was as improbable as the mission. Hermann Köhl was a German pilot who had flown bombers in the First World War. Baron Ehrenfried Günther von Hünefeld was the aristocratic sponsor who owned the aircraft — a frail man once rejected by the air service on medical grounds. And Commandant James Fitzmaurice was the commanding officer of the fledgling Irish Air Corps, a former RAF flier who had joined the venture at the last stage.

They took off from Baldonnel Aerodrome outside Dublin at 05:38, the Bremen groaning under some five tonnes of aircraft and 520 gallons of petrol, while the crowd cheered and, in an Irish touch, splashed holy water after them.

Lost over the ice

For much of the way the winds were kind. Then, around 900 miles from Newfoundland, the weather closed in and the compasses began to misbehave. The Bremen was blown far off its intended course, groping blind over a grey ocean and then a white wilderness of ice and rock. When the fuel gauges dropped toward empty, Köhl put the aircraft down on a frozen pond beside a lighthouse on Greenly Island, off the Labrador coast. The landing wrecked the undercarriage, but all three men climbed out unhurt.

Sixty journalists on a frozen island

Word of the landing electrified the world. The bush pilot Duke Schiller was first to reach the marooned crew; another Canadian aviator, Roméo Vachon, flew in with a pack of reporters, and before long some sixty journalists were crowded onto the little island to file the story. When the airmen finally reached New York, the city gave them a ticker-tape parade. For a brief, dazzling moment, Köhl, von Hünefeld and Fitzmaurice were the most famous men in aviation.

The Bremen itself survives, lovingly preserved at the airport of the German city it was named after. The flight, sadly, does not live on the way Lindbergh’s does — which is exactly why it is worth remembering the three men who beat the Atlantic at its most stubborn, and walked away across the ice.

Sources: Wikipedia; HISTORY; Smithsonian Magazine; The Irish Times; World Air Sports Federation (FAI); Ask About Ireland.