It was nighttime when he arrived. Over 33 hours after taking off from New York in his little silver Ryan Monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, Captain Charles Lindbergh of the US Army Air Corps Reserve picked out the lights of the London to Paris airways. He circled the airfield at Le Bourget, flew low to check the landing strip, then came in to land. Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris on May 21, 1927, made him the most famous man on Earth. Over four million people—well over half the city’s entire population—lined the streets for a ticker-tape parade when he returned to New York (by ship). During a subsequent tour of the United States, it’s reckoned that a quarter of the whole country’s population greeted him. He was the first modern global celebrity.
So, to learn that Lindbergh was not the first man to fly across the Atlantic is akin to being told that Neil Armstrong wasn’t the first man to walk on the moon (don’t worry, he was). In the eight years prior to his epic flight aboard his little monoplane, as many as ninety other people had made the journey, and many of their stories are as remarkable as Lindbergh’s own.
The outbreak of the First World War ended any early hope of winning a £10,000 prize, offered by the Daily Mail in 1913, for the first successful transatlantic flight. But war, and the emergence of a devastating U-boat threat, prompted the development of a new US Navy flying boat designed to counter it. The big, four-engined Navy-Curtiss aircraft, known as Nancies, arrived too late for the war, but all was not lost. The admirals realized they might enjoy some return on their investment by claiming the prestige of a first aerial Atlantic crossing for the United States. In public they argued that the expense and effort were justified “for scientific reasons.” Short of a landmark breakthrough, though, this seemed unlikely given that, in support of the attempt, they deployed sixty-eight destroyers and a further five battleships along the route via the Azores to Portugal. At a reasonably brisk pace, someone would have been able to walk the route and enjoy a bunk and a hot meal at the end of each day. That gives the impression that it was easy. For the crews of the three flying boats that took off from Newfoundland on May 16, 1919, it was anything but.
Charles Lindbergh poses with Spirit of St Louis. “Are there any mechanics here?” he asked after landing in France in front of a crowd of 150,000 people.
“Even if we crashed on landing,” said Captain Read of the moment his Curtiss NC flying boat turned toward the Portuguese capital, “the transatlantic flight, the first one in the history of the world, was an accomplished fact.”
Flying in open cockpits through thick fog, heavy rain, and squalling winds, the Nancies were thrown around the sky. One was almost hit by a star shell from a warship trying to guide their way. Another was nearly lost when the pilot became disorientated while flying blind and was lucky to regain control. The third became so lost that the pilot landed on the rolling ocean surface so that the crew could try to get their bearings. Soon overwhelmed by the heavy seas, which damaged the aircraft’s tail, they sent out an SOS and were rescued from their sinking machine by a Greek merchant ship 5 hours later.
The captain of the second Nancy, completely lost after 15 hours in filthy skies, decided to land. Smashing into the crest of a wave, the plane bounced, then crashed down again, cracking its hull on impact. Unable to take off, the crew pushed on by sea. It took them three days to sail to the Azores, backward, using the Nancy’s tail as a jury-rigged sail. For most of their 60-hour ordeal, a crewman had to sit at the end of the starboard wing providing the weight needed to keep the damaged plane’s port wing out of the water. It displayed guts and seamanship, but it marked the end of another Nancy crew’s ambitions.
Just one of the American flying boats, NC-4, skippered by Commander Albert C. Read, made it intact to the Azores. On May 27—eleven days after they’d left—Read and his crew carried on to Lisbon to become the first men ever to fly across the Atlantic.
Strangely enough, the first airmail to reach Britain from North America had arrived two days earlier. When the Nancies had left Newfoundland on their long journey, they’d left behind them four British teams each hoping to be first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Two days behind the US Navy flying boats, Australian test pilot Harry Hawker, reputed to be the finest flyer in Britain, and his navigator, Lieutenant-Commander Kenneth MacKenzie-Grieve RN, took off from a field in their Sopwith Atlantic. Fourteen hours later, they weren’t even halfway when an overheating engine forced them to ditch. After five days without word, they were officially presumed dead. The Daily Mail offered to provide for Hawker’s daughter, while King George V offered Mrs. Hawker his condolences:
The King, fearing the worst must now be realized regarding the fate of your husband, wishes to express his deep sympathy and that of the Queen in your sudden and tragic sorrow. His Majesty feels that the nation lost one of its most able and daring pilots to sacrifice his life for the fame and honour of British flying.
Hawker and MacKenzie-Grieve arrived home to read their own obituaries. When it had become clear they could not stay airborne, Hawker had diverted toward the shipping lanes, where he landed in the water alongside a Danish freighter, Mary. Without radio, the ship had no way of telling the world that the two aviators were alive. That had to wait until Mary’s signal flags could be seen from shore. The exchange with coastguards was brief:
– Saved Hands. Sopwith Aeroplane
– Is it Hawker
– Yes
The sack of drenched letters that Hawker had managed to hold on to throughout his dramatic Atlantic crossing was delivered as planned.
Another British attempt, which left an hour after Hawker and MacKenzie-Grieve, crashed on takeoff, seriously injuring one of the two crewmen. That left two teams, and one of those was clearly the underdog.
When asked during a job interview at Vickers Ltd. if he could navigate an airplane across the Atlantic, Arthur Whitten Brown simply said, “Yes.” It was enough to win him one of two seats aboard a converted Vickers Vimy bomber that the company hoped would win it the Daily Mail’s £10,000 prize. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, a navigator either. He’d taught himself while enduring two years as a prisoner of war. In an era when the art of aerial navigation hadn’t moved much beyond following railway lines, that meant he was well qualified.
Brown, with his pilot, John Alcock, known to all as Jack, arrived in Newfoundland to find a rival team flying a big, four-engined Handley Page V/1500 Berlin Bomber already well established. What the leader of the Handley Page team didn’t realize, but what Jack Alcock had figured out, was that it was the mineral content of the local water that had clogged Harry Hawker’s engine. And this same issue meant the V/1500’s Rolls-Royce Eagle engines were proving problematic too. Alcock made sure the Vimy used only water that had been boiled and filtered.
At teatime on June 14, 1919, Alcock and Brown, after a swig of whisky, climbed aboard and took off. In anticipation of the grueling journey ahead, they carried with them Fry’s chocolate, Horlicks malted milk, sandwiches, two Thermos flasks of coffee, and what was left of the whisky that, in Prohibition-era America, had to be prescribed for them by a doctor.
The flight through the night was largely uneventful, but at dawn the Vimy flew into thick cloud that obscured the sight of the nose from the cockpit. Unable to see and without the necessary instruments to fly blind, Alcock became completely disorientated and lost control of the Vimy. Then the big biplane stalled, literally falling out of the sky. As they tumbled, Brown watched the altimeter wind down from 3,000 feet to 500. And it was not a particularly accurate measure. We might hit the ocean at any moment, Brown thought. He loosened his harness and tried to stash his flight log ready for a quick escape, but he knew there was little hope of survival.
Suddenly, the picture cleared as they dropped below the cloud. Brown had barely realized that they were falling sideways, the horizon at ninety degrees to their aircraft, before Alcock wrestled the Vimy back under his control.
When, at last, the machine swung back to level, and flew parallel with the Atlantic, our height was fifty feet. It appeared as if we could stretch downward and almost touch the great white-caps that crested the surface. Before Alcock opened up the engines we could actually hear the voice of the cheated ocean as its waves swelled, broke, and swelled again.
Next they faced horizontal rain, hail, snow, and sleet. And with its arrival, a crucial fuel gauge became iced up, forcing Brown to unstrap, leave the safety of the cockpit and climb out onto the fuselage, kneeling in the slipstream, as the hail attacked his back like buckshot. He was forced to carry on with this until the storm was gone. He was safe, he thought, as long as Alcock kept the machine level. But he also knew that with the ice jamming the flight controls, there was very little Alcock could do to guarantee it. The Vimy would either stay level, or she wouldn’t.
Sixteen and a half hours after taking off they landed inelegantly in an Irish bog. And the country went wild. “Alcock Annihilates Space at 120 MPH,” exclaimed one enthusiastic headline. Another speculated that their flight paved the way for commercial transatlantic flights. A fortnight later that possibility looked to have come a whole lot closer.
William Ballantyne, a young airship rigger, was excited that “Tiny,” as the R34, Great Britain’s latest great airship, was called by those who worked on her, was on her way to America, but disappointed not to be part of the crew. Although the R34 was bigger than a battleship, the numbers she could carry on the first east-west aerial transatlantic crossing were limited to thirty, and Ballantyne had not made the cut. Rather than miss out, he, together with the airship’s mascot, a kitten named Whoopsie, hid on top of a girder between two gas bags. Twelve hours later, cramped and nauseous, Ballantyne made himself known. It was too late to put him overboard by parachute, so for the rest of the four-day passage to New York he was made to cook for the crew.
On arrival, the crew of the R34 were greeted by huge crowds cheering from grandstands, then fêted for three days before climbing back aboard their 643-foot airship and returning home—leaving Ballantyne behind in New York. Over the 75-hour journey they ate hot meals, slept in hammocks, and listened to jazz on a gramophone record player. Little wonder that Arthur Whitten Brown, who’d endured the spartan discomforts of the Vimy’s open cockpit, was sure that airships pointed the way toward commercial transatlantic flights carrying fare-paying passengers.
Just 161/2 hours to go. Alcock and Brown take off from Newfoundland on their way to becoming the first people to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.
So why, after the success of the NC-4, the Vimy, and the R34 in 1919, does Charles Lindbergh remain the most famous transatlantic aviator of them all?
I think it’s to do with the purity, perfection, and romance of Lindbergh’s effort. The US Navy Nancy hopped and skipped its way across the Atlantic, supported by a fleet of warships nearly the same size as today’s entire Royal Navy. Alcock and Brown bulled their way across and ended up nose first in a bog with their tail in the air. And the R34 carried thirty people—and a cat—across the pond while they listened to music and put a stowaway to work. All were remarkable, courageous efforts, but none possessed the poetry of Lindbergh’s solo flight. Alone in his silver slip of a plane he took off in New York and, 331/2 hours later, landed in front of a clamoring crowd of 150,000 people. Alone, that was the key. An editorial in The Sun got it right:
Alone?
Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and faith upon the left?
Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him, for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness made light by Emprise?
True, the fragile bodies of his fellows do not weigh down his plane; true, the fretful minds of weaker men are missing from his crowded cabin; but as his airship keeps its course he holds communion with those rare spirits that inspire to intrepidity and by their sustaining potency give strength to arm, resource to mind, content to soul.
Alone?
With what other companions would man fly to whom the choice were given?
