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Flight of the
NC-4
World War I put many aviation plans on hold, which was
probably just as well. Had it not been
for the war many
more fliers would have tried crossing the Atlantic
and would have been claimed
by its icy waters. The planes of
1913 were not capable of the nearly nineteen-hundred-
mile (3,057km) flight
between Newfoundland and Ireland,
the shortest route across the Atlantic, nor of
the twenty to thirty hours
of reliable continuous operation
that would be required by any engine
that would power such a
plane.
In England, Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, publisher of the
London Daily Mail, had
offered a prize in 1913 of fifty
thousand dollars to the first aviator to cross the
Atlantic. Northcliffe had offered
other prizes—it was in pursuit of
Northcliffe prizes that Blériot had crossed
the English Channel
and Paulhan had flown from London
to Manchester—but this was
considered the ultimate prize,
and almost as soon as it
was announced, various groups in
different countries prepared to try for it.
Northcliffe realized how
difficult this feat would be in 1913. In the original rules,
the plane making the Atlantic crossing was allowed to land
on the water along the way, could be refueled in the Azores,
and even towed for repairs, as long as the flight continued
from the point of touch down. The only plane with any real
chance of making the flight would have to be a seaplane, and
at that time the best seaplanes were being manufactured by
Glenn Curtiss.
Curtiss was triumphant again in December
1918, when the U.S.
Navy unveiled the NC seaplane. With a wingspan of 125 feet
(38.lm),
it was among the most formidable
planes then in the air
While in England looking for buyers of
his planes, Curtiss met British naval commander John Cyril
Porte, who apprised him of the Northcliffe challenge and
even found him a financial backer in Rodman Wanamaker, the
Philadelphia merchant millionaire. (Porte, who was stricken
with tuberculosis and didn’t expect to live very long, even
offered to fly the plane across the Atlantic!) Curtiss began
testing his seaboat designs back on Keuka Lake and by
February 1914 had a gangly-looking aircraft that he
calculated would be able (just) to make the crossing.
The
aircraft was one of the largest built to that time, with a
forty-five-foot (13.5m) podlike hull, 126-foot (38.5m)
bi-wings, and three large engines, the entire aircraft
weighed more than twenty-eight thousand pounds (12,712kg).
Curtiss built two models and prepared to fly one, dubbed
America, to Newfoundland for the trans-Atlantic launching,
which after many delays was set for August 15, 1914.
The outbreak of war on August 4 made the
flight of the America impossible, but the British Admiralty
was so impressed with the performance of the planes that it
ordered sixty of them for submarine patrol. By the end of
the war, several things had changed. Curtiss was now
building planes in partnership with the U.S. Navy—the planes
were thus designated NC for “Navy- Curtiss” and
soon came to be called “Nancies”— in a larger plant in
Buffalo, New York.
The planes were now outfitted with four
powerful Liberty engines, the only advance made in American
aviation during the war. And Curtiss and navy engineers,
under the supervision of G.C. Westervelt, designed a
stronger, lighter, more streamlined hull.
The forward lookout of the NC-4
in flight (shown here in
1918) provides a sense of the aircraft’s scale.
RIGHT: The crew of the historic Atlantic
crossing (from left): Lieutenant Commander A.C.
Read; pilot Lieutenant E.F. Stone; pilot
Lieutenant W Hinton; radio operator N.C. Rodd;
engineer E.H. Howard; and reserve pilot
Lieutenant J.L. Breeze, Jr.
The navy decided (with strenuous lobbying by
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt) to
attempt the trans-Atlantic flight anyway “for scientific
purposes". A squadron of three Nancies took off from
Rockaway, New York, for the first leg of the trip to
Trepassey Bay, Newfoundland, on May 8, 1919. The lead craft,
NC-3, was piloted by a crew of six commanded by John H.
Towers, a famous Curtiss-trained Navy flier who had been
scheduled to fly the America in 1913.
The NC-1 was commanded by Patrick N.L.
Bellinger, also a famous flier, and the NC-4 was commanded
by Albert C. “Putty” Read. (The NC-2 had been used for spare
parts for the other three ships.) Read, a quiet New
Englander who earned his nickname because his face rarely
showed any emotion, was, at five-foot-four, the most
unlikely looking hero of the group and was not expected to
finish. In fact, the NC-4 went down eighty miles (128.5km)
off the Massachusetts coast with a broken connecting rod and
had to taxi through the night to the naval station at
Chatham.
It took six days for the repairs to be
completed and for Read to resume the flight, but he still
managed to catch up to Towers and Bellinger, who had been
fogged in, and the three planes took off on May 16 in V
formation. The route was marked by a string
of twenty-five navy
destroyers spaced fifty miles
(80.5km) apart. Problems plagued
the NC-1 and the NC-3 almost
from the start and, at one point, with
both their radios unable to transmit
and the fog making
navigation all but impossible,
both Towers and Bellinger decided
to put down to get their bearing
and attempt repairs.
Both aircraft were badly damaged in
landing and for them the flight was
over. The crew of the NC-1
was picked up by a Greek freighter, but Towers
and the NC-3 were not
spotted and the plane drifted for
nearly three days. Fighting sixty-mile-per-hour (96.5 kph)
gales and rough seas, hoping that as they were
floating backward they were being
blown toward the Azores, and
requiring a crew member to climb out to the end of a
wing and hang on for most
of the sixty-hour ordeal in order
to balance the craft after a portion of the wing on
the other side broke off,
the NC-3 finally limped into Horta
Harbour in the Azores. (Ironically, the element of
the entire mission that
drew the most notice from aviators was Towers’ seamanship
and not Read’s airmanship.
The NC-4 taxis into Lisbon Harbour, having
completed the first crossing
of the Atlantic by air—on May 27,
1919, eight years before
Lindbergh’s
historic flight. Some experts were
reluctant to acknowledge the
achievement because the seaplane covered
some of the
ocean miles on water, but most
hailed the crew as heroes of flight.
Far more powerful land-planes were already in existence
and in just a few weeks,
one would complete a non-stop
crossing of the Atlantic. But Towers had shown that the
sea could be counted on as
a safety buffer for a plane that
went down over the ocean. It led to the
rise of the great flying
boats as the primary intercontinental transport aircraft of
the 1930s.)
Meanwhile, Read and his crew flew the NC-4 to the
Azores, arriving on May 17. They waited
there anxiously for the
NC-3 as they repaired the NC-4 and prepared for
the next leg of the trip to
Lisbon, Portugal.
Read knew that word of his success
would reach two crews back in
Newfoundland who would race to launch their aircraft
and still beat him to England—although not
by air— (demonstrating that
the Daily Mail money was not all
that important to the aviators.) One was the
Sopwith team, flying a
biplane called Atlantic, and piloted by
Harry Hawker and Kenneth
Mackenzie Grieve; the other, the
Martinside team of Frederick P. Raynham and
William Morgan, flying a
biplane called the Raymor (a
combination of the aviators’ names).
The Atlantic took off first
on May 18 and the Raymor followed
two hours later.
The Raymor never made it aloft; a
gust tipped the overloaded
aircraft on takeoff, crushing a
wheel, and the plane dug nose-first into a
bog, a total loss. The
Atlantic did little better: the radiator
clogged and the engine started
overheating over the mid-
Atlantic. An hour into the flight, Hawker knew he wasn’t
going to make it. In a bit
of inspired airmanship, Hawker
headed south toward the shipping lanes, hoping to spot
a freighter he could ditch
near, while he bobbed up and down
trying to air-cool the engine. He
spotted a ship that turned out to
be a Danish freighter with no radio and he
put the Atlantic down.
Hawker and Grieve were rescued
(and, amazingly, so was the floating Atlantic a few days
later), but there was no
way of getting word to England
until the ship reached British waters on May 25.
Hawker and Grieve arrived in
London just as the memorial ceremony honouring their
martyrdom was concluding.
With both challengers out of the running, Read took
his time and set out for
Lisbon on May 25. He landed on May
27, completing the first crossing of the Atlantic by
an airplane. Two days
later, Read took off again (Towers
refused to relieve Read of command of the
NC-4, even though navy
protocol would have allowed him to do so)
and landed in Plymouth,
England, on May 31. The success of Read and the NC-4 was
hailed by the British and the
French no less than by the Americans. All three countries,
in fact, heaped medals and
accolades on the crew of the NC-4.
What puzzled Read, though, was that he
arrived in England in the
middle of a similar celebration of
the accomplishment of Hawker and Grieve. (Read had
to ask several times to
make sure he got it right, that the
pair had failed to cross the Atlantic by air.
What made matters even more
confusing was that the Daily Mail
awarded the pair a twenty-five-
thousand-dollar consolation prize; Read and his crew were
offered nothing.) The flight of
the NC-4 was quickly forgotten: a
non-stop flight across the Atlantic was only a few weeks
away and the
great flights of the next decade eclipsed the
accomplishment of Read and his crew. Even at the
time, few newspapers
covered the flight (admittedly difficult
for reporters to keep up with), and the
most extensive reporting on
the operation was filed by a Yale undergraduate for the Yale
Graphic.
The reporter was named Juan
Terry Trippe, and he would later become the creator
of Pan American Airways and
pioneer the great flights of the
clipper flying boats to South America.
For many years, the NC-4
was stored in a forgotten hangar and
gathered dust; it was even
broken up into several pieces and
stored in a number of places. Read died in relative
obscurity in 1967 near
Washington, D.C., but he lived
long enough to see the NC-4 restored after World War
11 and to see his contribution to aviation history
remembered and acknowledged.
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