Alcock and Brown
Take the Atlantic
Back in Newfoundland, two teams worked feverishly to
finish assembling their planes and testing
their equipment in
preparation for what they considered the ultimate
prize: the still unclaimed
Daily Mail prize of fifty thousand dollars for the first
non-stop crossing of the Atlantic.
One team had a clear head start:
the Handley Page team headed by
Admiral Mark Kerr. The Handley Page
V/1500 “Berlin Bomber” was the largest aircraft built
by the Allies during the war, and
was equipped with four
powerful Rolls-Royce engines.
The plane and crew were making
preparations to fly the Atlantic
almost from the beginning. They
watched Hawker and Grieve begin their
ill-fated trans-Atlantic
flight; Alcock and Brown had also
heard about the failed attempt of the
Shamrock, which had gone
down while crossing from England to Ireland in
the first stage of an
east-to-west crossing; and they had
been there when the navy group passed through on
their way to the successful
crossing (with stops) of the
Atlantic. The plane enjoyed the best airfield
and the best
accommodations, and for some of the time, had the only
fuel on the island.
Afterward, Handley Page executives
would wonder what had kept their plane on the ground.
Alcock and Brown taking on mail on Vickers Vimy, June 13,
1919
By the time the final plane and
its crew arrived in Newfoundland
on May 26, the Handley Page had
been tested and repaired many
times. In what might be considered typical of the naval
approach, Admiral Kerr seemed
determined not to attempt the flight until his plane
was in perfect condition.
The last plane to arrive was the Vickers
Vimy, a night bomber built too late to be used in the
war. The Vickers engineers
replaced the bombs with fuel
tanks, quickly disassembled the plane,
and shipped it to
Newfoundland. The crew for the flight was headed by
Captain John Alcock of the
Royal Air Force, and the navigator was Lieutenant Arthur
Whitten Brown of the Royal Flying
Service.
Both men had spent the last years of the
war in a German prison camp and had very
limited flying experience,
especially with so large a plane. (Brown, as it
turned out, had been an
observer when he was shot down,
and had taught himself aerial navigation while a prisoner.
He had almost no experience
as a navigator before the flight
of the Vimy.) The Vimy was
assembled in an open field (there was
no available hangar big enough) in cold and often
rainy weather.
Spectators and Vickers Vimy at Lester's Field, June 1919
Miraculously (and with the help of a gifted local
mechanic named Lester), the plane was
ready after only fourteen
days—Kerr was waiting for a new radiator to
replace one on the
Handley Page that “wasn’t quite up to
snuff.” What Kerr did not know, but Alcock realized,
was that the problem was
not with the radiator, but with
the water. Using local water, the Handley
Page radiator kept
clogging—which was exactly what had brought
Harry Hawker down—because
of the heavy mineral content and sediment. To counter this,
Alcock had the water filtered
several times and boiled (and then
cooled), so that the radiator
would not clog. On the morning of June
14, while the Handley Page team was preparing for yet
another test, Alcock and Brown took off.
Take off of Alcock and Brown's Vickers Vimy, June 14, 1919
The flight of the Vimy was a difficult one. Brown had
to climb out onto the wings six times during
the flight to chip off ice
that formed there. Several times, Alcock had
to fly precariously close to
the ocean, hoping that the
warmer air of the lower altitude would melt the ice that
kept clogging the engine.
And on at least two occasions,
Brown made what he thought would be a last entry
into the flight log and
stuffed it into his shirt, hoping his experience would be of
use to later aviators if his body
were ever found.
Alcock and Brown’s historic 1919
flight ended ingloriously,
as the Vimy ploughed into an Irish
bog—its front landing gear
had been removed before the
flight. The first people to greet
the aviators thought they were
joking when they claimed
they had just flown across the Atlantic.
Sixteen and a half hours later, on the morning of June
15, the Vimy landed in a
bog near the installation at
Clifden, in Ireland. People on the ground tried to
wave them off from the bog
and direct them to a landing field
that was prepared for aircraft;
Alcock and Brown just waved
cheerfully back. Before taking off, Brown had
removed a front nose wheel
from the plane in the hopes of
reducing weight and drag. Now, without the front
wheel, the Vimy landed in
the bog and simply ploughed its nose
into the soft mud. Local people and soldiers
ran up to the plane and
asked Alcock where he had flown from.
When he said they had flown
across the Atlantic, the crowd
broke out in laughter.
The outgoing John Alcock and the diffident
Arthur Whitten
Brown—both of Manchester, England—had the right combination
of
skills to win the Daily Mail prize for the first flight
across the Atlantic, outclassing better-funded teams.
England erupted in celebration. Alcock and Brown
were knighted by King George V and awarded
the Northcliffe prize by
the Secretary of State for War and
Air, Winston Churchill. Alcock and
Brown toured England and
were praised from banquet to banquet. But
Alcock was killed in a
crash in December 1919, and Brown
never flew again (though he lived till after World
War II).
Back in Newfoundland, Kerr
decided he would attempt some sort
of land record instead and flew to
the United States. The Handley
Page crashed near Cleveland, Ohio,
and while the crew survived, the
Berlin Bomber was a total loss,
marking the end of Admiral Kerr’s brief
career in aviation.
Alcock and Brown’s crossing of the Atlantic was to
have a profound effect on two men
who up to this point had
not done much flying.
One was a navy lieutenant named
Richard E. Byrd, a dashing young
flier trained at the navy’s
Pensacola Flight School. During the war, Byrd
had volunteered to fly bombers built in the United
States to England, and when the
war ended, before any such
ferrying could take place, he formally requested to
be part of the crew that would
fly a Nancy across the
Atlantic. Byrd could not know that such plans were
already afoot, so when he
was called to Washington he was
disappointed to discover that he was not being asked
to fly the planes, but to take command of the naval
air station in Nova Scotia to
scout out a suitable stop for a
possible trans-Atlantic flight by the U.S. Navy.
Later he discovered that foreign service
(even in Canada) disqualified him from being a member of the
NC crews.
The other man was a Frenchman who had
worked his way up from being a shepherd in France to being a
waiter to, by 1919, being the owner of two fashionable
Manhattan hotels. His name was Raymond Orteig, and he had no
connection to the world of aviation. But watching the prizes
of post-war aviation being garnered by England and the United
States, and seeing France fall by the wayside, he sent a
letter to the president of the Aero Club of America, dated
May 22, 1919:
“Gentlemen: As a stimulus to the
courageous aviators, I desire to offer, through the auspices
and regulations of the Aero Club of America, a prize of
twenty-five thousand dollars to the first aviator of any
Allied country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from
Paris to New York or New York to Paris, all other details in
your care.
Yours very sincerely, (signed) Raymond Orteig.
Orteig made no secret of his motive: he hoped the prize
would prove an incentive to French fliers and would lead to
France’s once again being a first-rank nation in aviation.
In the original rules, a five-year limit was set (it was
later extended), and there was no stipulation that it had to
be a solo flight—that was Lindbergh’s idea (as a way of
lightening the load).
The year 1919 saw yet a third crossing of
the Atlantic, this one in July by a British dirigible, the
R.34, a virtual carbon copy of a captured German Zeppelin
(called, as it happened, the L.33). The crossing was, in
fact, a two- way transatlantic flight, making the R.34 the
first aircraft to cross the Atlantic both ways. The flight
from Scotland to New York was not without its harrowing
moments. The weather was bad the entire trip over, and at
one point a crew member had to parachute out of the airship
to direct the ground crew. But the airship created a
sensation in New York and heralded the beginning of regular
airship service over the Atlantic. (The crossing back to
Europe took only three days.)
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