… on June 15th 1919 Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown landed their Vickers Vimy airplane in a bog near Connemara, County Galway and thereby completed the first successful transatlantic flight: They had set off from St John’s, Newfoundland about fourteen hours earlier. What with having to get to the airport three hours early to shuffle through Homeland Security, we haven’t as a practical matter improved much on flight time over the last hundred years. It was also the first transatlantic air mail delivery, as, shortly before takeoff, the Royal Mail decided to give Alcock and Brown a couple of sacks of post for Britain.
A couple of weeks later, on July 6th 1919 the first east-west transatlantic flight landed at Mineola on Long Island. The RAF airship R34 had left East Fortune in Scotland four days earlier, having been hastily converted to hold passengers, and with a plate welded to an engine exhaust pipe to enable it to cook and serve hot food, which is more trouble than most airlines would go to today. A tabby kitten called Wopsie who served as the crew’s mascot stowed away on the flight, and because nobody at the Long Island end knew anything about landing large airships Major E M Pritchard parachuted out a little early, and became the first man to land on North American soil by air from Europe.
These briefly famous men did not get to savor their celebrity for long: Major Pritchard died in 1921 when the R38 airship exploded over the Humber estuary; his body was never found. Captain Alcock, just six months after his triumph and being knighted by George V, died at Rouen in Normandy in December 1919 when his new Vickers Viking crashed en route to the Paris air show.
Mark Steyn, “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine”, SteynOnline, 2019-07-07.
August 9, 2019
QotD: Early milestones in aviation
Comments Off on QotD: Early milestones in aviation
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
