Wot I learned: The Hobbit

 I read the Hobbit for the first time in many years, to my nieces at their bedtime. This is what I learned. Ah, note that none of these observations are original; this is just "stuff I noticed" having not read the book for a few decades.

Bilbo gets concussed. So if you are remotely familiar with Tolkien, you know he is a bit detail obsessed. Still, I was surprised to notice both times Bilbo takes a blow to the head, he actually shows signs of a concussion after. (The first time he's knocked out for an unknown length of time in the goblin caves; later he takes a rock to the head during the battle of the five armies.) That second time Bilbo is blacked out all night and till morning the next day. What's more, Tolkien even throws a line or two in on how Hobbits can recover from things like head trauma much faster than you'd expect. 

It's a small thing, but I always appreciate any time media remembers that getting knocked out is like, super bad for you.

Three magic races of birds. The giant eagles, the magic thrushes, and the magic ravens. Everyone remembers the first, but the other two are necessary parts of the plot. The ravens speak English, while the thrushes help the party find the secret door, and are the information conduit to let Bard know when to aim. The Thrushes speak their own language, but Bard thanks to his bloodline understands it. Speaking of...

Bloodlines for all. It's a very old, valid criticism of Tolkein to point out in his works your ancestry not only determines your skills, it also determines to a great extent your goodness and badness. I'm very familiar with this. What surprised me was that even aforementioned magic races of birds get a genealogy, like "oh, they are the **noble** ravens, descended from such and such." 

Tolkien is good at battles. While he's definitely hazy about how geology works (mountains are just magic places were stuff happens) he has a very good eye for battles. The Battle of the Five Armies (spoiler!) has contemporary tactics (describing vanguards, flanks, etc), and for the most part is just this big chaotic event most of the characters participate in but are not central to. Bilbo wisely nopes out of it entirely early on. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense, since Tolkien must have read many accounts of ancient battles [to say nothing of Tolkien serving in World War 1.]

Riddles in the Dark is obsessively plotted. Tolkien to repeat myself, was all about the deets. That said, Riddles in the Dark is kind of amazing, since every step in that chapter is carefully plotted, but often Tolkien will consider "well why didn't this happen instead" in the text. For an author who has been noted for using Deus Ex machinas, Riddles uses a very down to earth psychological realism to get Bilbo the ring, an riddle contest with Gollum, and Gollum inadvertently leading Bilbo to the cave labyrinth's exit.

There are four Dwarves. Those are Thorin (leader), Balin (older, wiser), Fili/Kili (younger), Bombur [fat]. I think the rest of the dwarves exist simply for when their numbers matter (meeting the dwarves in Chapter 1, getting help from Beorn, etc.)

Encounter with Smaug: still awesome. I mean, first this dragon howling with laughter at the idea of anyone taking vengeance on him, and then "my armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, my breath death!" That's worth about 20 minutes of CGI right there.

Alcock & Brown 4: the Actual Goddamn Flight

Tent of Construction, Quidi Vidi.

The warming shed.

Vimy under construction.

As anybody who uses their garage can tell you, keeping it dry when doing something is a help.

On May 26th, the ship with the disassembled Vimy finally entered St. John's harbor. Vickers contracted the Teamster Lester, who hauled the massive shipping crates containing the Vimy and its spares to Quidi Vidi.

There the Vickers crew set to work doing what its rivals had done: figuring out how to assemble an aircraft with a full set of tools but none of the structures or jigs, cranes, etc they normally would use, in an open field where the wind blew very cold. A tent gave some shelter, but they still needed a warming shack on the premises. Frequent rain squalls were also cold, and meant all work had to stop to cover completed sections in tarpaulins. It was cold enough that soldering irons warmed in a fire would often cool before they could be applied. Despite the difficulties, the mechanics managed to put the aircraft together in two weeks, finishing June 9th.

Then there was a lucky break: Lester the teamster make Alcock aware that he had a field that might serve the Vimy. One Buick ride later, Alcock and Brown were looking at Lester's field...s in Mt. Pearl. The field 300 yards long, but with relatively flat and open land beyond it of about 500 yards. Lester had been using it as a pasture for his horses, so at least there was no hypothetical crops to pay for. But, there was a fair amount of work to make it serviceable: in between the field and the meadow was a stone wall to take down, a ditch to fill in, and both fields were, quote, "strewn with boulders".

So Alcock, Vickers staff not engaged at the Vimy, Lester and his hired men, and the journalists from elsewhere toiled to make the field ready, Lester is often quoted as having let the land go for free, but he did pass Alcock an invoice at the end for all the work done. [footnote:pussages} Brown helped too, though the pain in his leg was such that he needed help getting in and out of his overalls. By toil and the writ of that good Anglo-Saxon naming convention, Lester's Field was ready on Sunday, June 8th.

Ready for flight on Quidi Vidi.

This was apparently the first genuinely summery, warm day. It was also the day that the V/1500 flew over St. John's. The Vickers crew thought for a moment they were beaten by the Handley-Page men, but this was only a test flight. Still, it was notice that Admiral Kerr and company were neck-and-neck with Vickers.

HP V/1500 under construction. I think the structure on the right is a wind break.

Somebody's double exposure of the V/1500 flying over Harbor Grace.

The Harbor Grace Kraken. No, of course they didn't name it the Kraken, it is the god-damned "Atlantic." I'm starting to think the Vickers made it because they *didn't* call it the Atlantic.

Building that in a big wind must have been a joy.

The next day, June 9th, the Vickers was complete. With enough fuel for a test flight, Alcock took off from Quidi Vidi and landed at Lester's Field after a pleasant half hour flight. The radio was completely nonfunctional, but otherwise only a few tweaks were needed.

 

That same day, the V/1500 droned overhead again - again it was a test flight. While not reported at the time, the four-engine bomber had a problem. Like most other aspirant aircraft, the V/1500 used Rolls Royce Eagle V12s. These had been mounted in two pods, one propeller pushing and the other pulling. This had somehow compromised the engine's cooling system - even on their short flights over St. John's, the engine's water coolant was boiling. New radiators were already on a ship from Britain, but this ship was delayed by dense icebergs off the Grand Banks.

Alcock and Brown were champing at the bit to go, but unfortunately, and I hate to keep harping on this, they'd no blimp to sacrifice. A gale blew the next day, June 10th and 11th, and Vickers in Britain sent a telegram: "WEATHER PERFECT HERE STOP PLEASE CABLE REASON FOR NON-START STOP".  The next day, weather was better in St. John's, but stormy over the Atlantic. June 12th saw a second test flight - the radio proved problematic - working well at first, but then gave Brown a violent shock. All else had been fixed, and the Vimy was ready to try the Atlantic. 

June 13th, the lucky number of Alcock and Brown, was that was good enough to make a start, despite the windy, grey weather. Painstakingly, the Vimy was fueled over the course of a morning via hand-pumping and gravity feed with all fuel first being passed through improvised copper wire mesh filters. Water had been distilled; gasoline had been heated to boil any water out of it. Then, around lunchtime, mild panic: the aircraft was sagging to one side. A shock absorber was broken and needed to be replaced, and that meant - taking all afternoon to painstakingly drain all the fuel out of the Vimy. Brown went trout fishing to relax. The mechanics would work all night swapping out the shock absorber and starting the fueling procedure again.

Later it got more sophisticated, when the barrels were put on sawhorses.

The weather on June 14th was good for St. John's: sunny but windy, with the weather over the ocean relatively clear. Alcock and Brown were ready to give this day the best shot they had. The pilot and navigator went early to Lester's Field, and Anges Dooley sent the customary sandwiches via a boy on a bicycle. Lester's field ran east-west, and the first plan was to take off to the east, against the prevailing wind, but downhill. Unfortunately the westerly [IE blowing from the west] wind freshened, so that plan was dashed. This delay gave various people plenty of time to do their thing. like the official judge of the contest affixing his seal to the Vimy (least Alcock and Brown swap their aircraft for another Vimy mid-Atlantic); the Mayor of St. John's arriving with a small bag of airmail for King George the Fifth, noted stamp-fancier; and Raynham was there to wish them well. Both Alcock and Brown stowed their plush black cat mascots in the tail emergency storage compartment. Brown's cat was named Twinkletoe, a gift from Kathleen Kennedy. Alcock found this hilarious and soon got his own, which he named Lucky Jim. Both men then got into their leather flight suits. The doctor who the Vickers party had been consulting with brought a complementary bottle of whiskey. Many photos were posed for as the wind murmured and blustered and the sun gave the unusual sensation of palpable warmth.

The boys, before suiting up.

11:30 AM, and the wind was declining, but remained westerly. So the loaded aircraft was pushed from one end of Lester's Field to the other. While still taking off into the wind, now the Vickers was doing it slightly uphill. Alcock and Brown ate lunch. Food for the trip was sandwiches, Fry's chocolate, Horlick's Malted Milk, coffee and hot broth in "Ferrostat Vacuum Flasks." [IE thermoses]

Alcock abides.

Arthur brown in his flight suit.

Alcock, fortified via vacuum flask.

Also time to pose 'delivering the mail.'

Finally both men settled into their tandem cockpit and fired up the engines. Their mechanics and volunteers held the Vimy back as Alcock brought the Eagle V12s to full throttle. On Alcock's signal, the men let go and let the wing pass over them. The Vickers Vimy, with a great deal of punishing exhaust rhythm and deep propeller drone, began rolling uphill.

The first three hundred yards the Vimy made were alarming to both witnesses and crew, as the Vimy kept rolling and making noise, but showed little inclination to fly. Attempting to sprint uphill with a great tank of gas on its back, the Vimy became airborn in the final seconds of viable field, the Vimy cleared the stone wall bordering Lester's and the scrub spruce above it, then dipped over the crest of the hill. The sudden noise cutoff going over the hill caused alarmed the crowd, so much so that the barman/doctor grabbed his medical bag and began running to the hilltop. Then, the noise of two Rolls Royce Eagles thundering in the distance brought cheers. While it had been a close thing, the Vimy had cleared the hilltop, then flying on the hill's downward slope gained enough speed to safely lift itself out of the valley it was flying into. A quick buzz of Lester's Field, and Alcock put the blunt nose of the Vimy on a heading due east, over Cochrine's Hotel, the ships in St. John's Harbor, Signal Hill, and out into a brilliant blue ocean. 

I think these two photos might be different views of the same flight, that might well be the start of "the" flight.

To test the wireless system, Brown sent the message "all's well and started" back to the Mt. Pearl station. The Vimy ascended to 1500 ft. The sky was partially cloudy, with occasional shafts of sunlight turning the Atlantic from blue-grey to sapphire blue. Icebergs trawled beneath,  rendered brilliant white by sunlight. The cockpit was untroubled by wind but extremely noisy. Both men had headphones wired to vibration throat mikes around their necks This apparently didn't work well, and Alcock actually discarded the headphones around six PM as an annoyance. Communication then on was by gestures and notes.

The first hour away from Newfoundland was good weather. Then the Vimy found itself flying above a thick bank of grey fog and below a solid grey overcast. The ocean blotted up this color and became a slate grey. Brown, keeper of the log, attempted a wireless message, but found the radio dead - the wind driven generator had its blades stripped by a gust of wind.

This scarcely bothered Brown, who was having to keep a very close eye on the current heading, and taking any deviations into account when doing the math that told the men where they were. Without observations, dead reckoning was the only tool Brown had.

After six, the noise in the starboard engine changed, which a new sharp noise, described by Brown as "like constant machine gun fire." Both men soon saw why: the starboard engine's exhaust manifold facing the men had split, with part of it peeling away from the engine block. Keeping an eye on it, the fluttering metal pipe first went red, then white hot, finally crumbling away. This left the starboard engine slightly down on power thanks to the loss of compression, and of course made the engine even louder: one more noise that Alcock and Brown's minds had to filter out. Just to keep some trouble in mind, the three cylinders, now open to the air, were now milling flames into the slipstream.  These flames happened to cross a structural brass wire, which in the gathering gloom was soon glowing.

Seven PM, Alcock took the Vimy up through the clouds to 2000 ft. Above the first line of overcast, the men found more overcast, this time at 5000 ft. Brown handed Alcock a note, asking for some altitude to look for another celestial fix, if Alcock could do that at no risk to the engines. Both men were intensely occupied with their jobs, but some food was had throughout the flight, with Alcock eating and drinking one-handed. (Sidebar: Brown uses the term 'joystick' to describe the control column, I'd no idea that word was that old - Brown's account was written in 1920.)

Let me quote Brown here: "We happened upon a large gap in the upper clouds at half-past eight. Through it the sun shone pleasantly, projecting the shadow of the Vickers Vimy on the lower layer, over which it darted and twisted, contracting or expanding according to the distortions of the cloud surface." This allowed Brown 10 minutes of sun observations, and using his spirit level, Brown got a point to correct the drift in his dead reckoning attempts.  The Vimy had one bulb for illuminating the compass; the rest of the instruments used luminescent paint. Both men had flashlights for everything else, which for Brown included his all important chart and map. Night, between overcast layers over the Atlantic Ocean, was very dark indeed, with the only visible points outside the cockpit being the glowing brass wire and the dull red of the engine exhausts, with the three open cylinders still coughing flame.

Past midnight, and the Vimy was above 6000 ft. While there was still overcast above, this was broken, so occasional chunks of sky were visible. Thanks to a sighting of Vega and Sirius, Brown fixed the Vimy's position as 850 nautical miles from St. John's, at an average speed of 106 knots. Now that a definite fix had been taken, Alcock throttled back and allowed the Vimy to lose altitude, which found the biplane easing back into into the indefinite murk. The moon was in evidence for a time, but conditions didn't allow a sighting. In the wee hours, the only problem was a feeling of cramp. Bad enough for Brown with his leg, probably worse for Alcock, both feet on the pedals, both hands on the joystick. Brown wrote later: "An aura of unreality seemed to surround us, as we flew onward to dawn and Ireland. The fantastic surroundings impinged on my alert consciousness as something fantastically abnormal - the distorted ball of a moon, the eerie half light, the monstrous cloud shapes, the fog below and around us, the misty indefiniteness of space, the changeless drone, drone, drone of the engines."

At 3:10 am, the flight was enlivened by an incident.

The Vimy flew into thick cloud - so thick that the wingtips of the Vimy were invisible. Denied even basic visual reference points, the brains of both men did the natural thing and snapped the horizon perception onto the fuselage of the aircraft. Denied their sense of balance, trouble was not long in following. Airspeed started increasing with Alcock doing apparently nothing. At excess of 90 knots, Alcock pulled the nose back, but this did nothing to reduce the speed. Was the indicator jammed? Then, the Vimy stalled. Hanging for a second in midair, the aircraft slid backwards and rotated. Now the compass, the altimeter, and the perception of being pressed back into their seats told the men they were in a spin or a corkscrew dive. Prop revolutions jumped from 1500 to 2500 RPM, vibrating the Vimy like a unbalanced washing machine, until Alcock idled both engines, while trying to center his controls. Down and down the Vimy went; with no perception of a horizon, Alcock didn't know where the center was. If the 'obscuring nebulousness' (Brown's term) went down to the surface, the aircraft and quite likely the men were doomed. 

Finally, at about 100 feet, the sea appeared----above and to the side of the men's heads. Alcock centered his controls, then flipped the Vimy right side up again. At all of 50 feet, the crisis was past. Before Alcock throttled up the engines again, both men could hear the sounds of waves just beneath them.

I'd like to think the whiskey was opened at this point.

Sunrise was something of a disappointment - The sun made itself know only through the murk being illuminated slightly. From four to six am, visibility was only to the next cloud or fog bank. At seven, these clouds were filled first with rain, then with snow, then with hail and sleet. The cockpit was snug and dry, thanks to the windscreen. Unfortunately, not all the instruments were located there. A gauge that showed fuel overflow from the carburetors if the air/fuel mixture was too rich was located back along the fuselage, fixed on one of the center struts. The snow and sleet had naturally hidden it. So Brown got out of the cockpit and holding another strut for balance, moved back to the gauge and cleaned the snow off of it. "The change from the sheltered warmth of the cockpit to the biting, icy cold outside was startlingly unpleasant" says Brown. "The violent rush of air, which tended to push me backward, was another discomfort." Despite the discomfort, Brown had to do this six or seven times. [footnote: adventure tales]

Meanwhile, the freezing rain was coating the top of the Biplane's wings, which then dripped into the ailerons and froze, jamming them. They remained jammed for about an hour, though Brown writes that the rudder remained ice free, and the Vimy had "lots of lateral stability," so it was not a problem.

Alcock had been attempting to climb over the weather throughout most of this, and at 7 AM had reached 11,000 ft. Through a tear in the clouds, Brown caught the sun in his spirit level momentarily, and had a new fix, which showed the Vimy was not far from the Irish coast. Alcock then took the Vimy down to 1000 ft, where there was weather, but weather that was warm enough to melt the ice. Alcock was flying mostly blind, descending very slowly to look for the ocean. This was a tricky enough maneuver Alcock loosened his safety belt for a quick deplaning should he accidentally hit the waves. The risk was that their aneroid - their altitude gauge - used barometric pressure to work. A large enough difference between its calibration in St. John's yesterday and now would cause the instrument to give false readings.

But at 500 feet, the Vimy broke through the cloud, to see the same restless grey sea that had been beneath them all night. Breakfast was then served. The Vimy was now on a course almost due south: 170 degrees.

Just as the top was being screwed on the thermos, Alcock put a hand on Brown's shoulder and pointed, in his excitement saying something inaudible. Coming out of the mist was something that was not sky or sea: the two small islands Eeshal and Turbot. Brown stowed his charts and instruments, his job done.

The Vimy crossed the Irish coast at 8:30 AM, after being in the air 16 hours. The two men were unaware where they were exactly, and after following a rail line south they discovered Clifden, which Brown recognized from its prominent wireless station. The weather was still low and grey, so Alcock decided to land rather than risk getting lost in a fog, or making landfall the almost literal way. Amazingly, the Vimy had enough fuel remaining that it could have continued to London, still having 10 hours worth.

Ireland was very unlike Newfoundland in that it had as many nice, flat fields as any biplane pilot could want. One was quickly identified just south of the wireless station and the Vickers Vimy of Alcock and Brown landed into the wind. Then something odd: as they rolled, the nose wanted to move down as they slowed, instead of the biplane settling back on its tail. Alcock killed the engines. Then the nose suddenly slammed down into what was evidently a bog, and the Vickers came to an abrupt halt.

The alien, blessed sound of silence washed over both men. Brown said "What do you think of that for fancy navigation?" Alcock said "Very good!" and shook Brown's hand.

I've seen this picture before, but never noticed the gasoline drips on the fuselage.

This Bog Squishes like Success

Then a wave of cold gasoline from a ruptured pipe sloshed down the men's collars and began to flood the cockpit. A hasty exit was made, and then a sally back to save the navigation instruments and the bag of mail.

Once the excitement of the crash wore off, both men realized they were lucky to be uninjured. Alcock had braced himself on his solid steel rudder bar, and the crash bent it into a U-shape. Brown wrote later that the saving grace had been the canvased-over forward gunner position on the Vimy, which had absorbed the brunt of the crash. Both men we deafened by the silence and in a mild ecstasy at being able to move freely again when the soldiers from the wireless station found them.  The soldiers laughed when Alcock said they had flown from Newfoundland, and were skeptical until Alcock showed them the air mail. This changed matters, and the soldiers escorted Alcock and Brown to their mess to congratulate them properly.

The Vimy had been in the air 16 hours 28 minutes, not at all bad for the calculated flight time of 16 hours to Galway from St. John's. Brown's navigation, despite only 3 fixes after the first hour, was only 40 miles off from his calculated position, a pretty astonishing result. 

In the walk back to the station, Brown was suddenly hit by the sleepiness that tension and focus had staved off during the flight. Alcock was likely similar, though he professed to only wanting to live the entire rest of his life standing. 

"My memories of that day are dim and incomplete. I felt a keen sense of relief at being on land again, but this was coupled with a certain amount of dragging reaction from the tense mental concentration during the flight, so that my mind sagged. I was very sleepy, but not physically tired. [...] My hands were very unsteady. My mind was quite clear on matters pertaining to the flight, but hazy on extraneous subjects. After having listened so long to that loud voiced hum of the Rolls-Royce engines, made louder than ever by the broken exhaust pipe, my ears would not stop ringing."

Fortunately their host in Galway saw their exhaustion, and after 40 hours, both men got some sleep. Then, Alcock and Brown achieved another first:

"To begin with, getting up in the morning, after a satisfying sleep of nine hours, was strange. In our eastward flight of 2000 miles we had overtaken time, in less than the period between one sunset and another, to the extent of three and a half hours. Our physical systems having accustomed themselves to habits regulated to the clocks of Newfoundland, we were reluctant to rise at 7 AM, for the subconscious suggested it was but 3:30 AM.

This difficulty of adjustment to the sudden change in time lasted for several days. Probably it will be experienced by all traveling on the rapid trans-ocean services of the future - those who complete a westward journey becoming early risers without effort, those that land after an eastward flight becoming unconsciously lazy in the mornings, until the jolting effort of dislocation wears off, and habit has accustomed itself to new conditions."

So, Alcock & Brown possibly became the first people to experience what we'd now call jet lag.

The New York Times. Pretty rude about the Rhine, though--

By the time they woke up, newspapers the world over trumpeted their successful flight in large block letters. The men's train trip from Galway to London was something more than just a trumpet solo - to Ireland and the UK, Alcock & Brown were national heroes who scored one for Britain. Cheering crowds found them in Galway, and just got bigger as their train went to Dublin. In Dublin, the rugby team from Trinity Commons 'kidnapped' an entirely willing Alcock so he could hang with jubilant university students. When the men finally got to London, the city size reflected in its joyous, boisterous celebration, with a parade happening to bemused, slightly befuddled team. In all this celebratory noise, both men were sorry that they missed the crew of the NC-4, which had left just before their arrival. Alcock & Brown had wanted to hear about their flight firsthand. The Americans may have had more funding, but they flew from Newfoundland and challenged the Atlantic, and that made them one of the boys, that small, intense fraternity of transatlantic flyers.

Once in London, both men delivered the mail (apologizing to the London postmaster that it was not flown direct) and then shook hands and separated. Brown was off to meet his fiance, Alcock was going to a prize fight.

They probably needed some time to recharge, as soon the Daily Mail was having a celebratory breakfast at the Savoy hotel. I have to admit, celebratory breakfasts as thrown by British Edwardian aristocrats are about as far from my knowledge as a Japanese Tea Ceremony, possibly even further, so all I have in my head is a lot of formal wear and breakfast drinking, and possibly some B-reels from "Around the World in 80 Days." Alcock and Brown finally were given the now 13,000 pound prize, and Sir Winston Churchill gave a speech that ended with a surprise: Alcock & Brown were going to be Knighted.

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I think the biggest complement to Alcock & Brown's flight is that once a trans-Atlantic flight was accomplished, nobody was in a hurry to try again - at least, in an airplane.

The R34 was a British rigid airship that was a careful copy of a German Naval Zeppelin, the L 33, a R-class airship that crashed on British soil in 1916. The airship was quite a contrast to the Vimy: it had five Sunbeam Maori 12.2L V12 engines, each making 275 hp; it displaced some 1.9 million cubic feet, and was 645 ft, or nearly 200 meters long.

At 2 AM, July 2nd, 1919,  the R34 set off from Scotland to fly the Atlantic. She was captained by Major George Scott, RAF, and carried 30 people? [This number is oddly hard to pin down.] The R34 carried an American officer, Lt. Commander Z. Landsdowne of the USN,[Note: Lt. Cmdr. Landsdowne] and two lighter than air experts, a Brigadier General E.M. Maitland, and a Major G.E.M. Pritchard. Another crewman was discovered as a stowaway (he was supposed to have been left behind this flight) and he had brought along the ship's kitten, both hiding in the fuel tanks up in the airship's superstructure. The kitten was welcome, and this far into the flight, Major Scott couldn't turn back, so the stowaway was grudgingly accepted [The man was court-martialed later.] Another hammock was strung in the gangway. Hot food was prepared off of hot plates added atop a convenient exhaust pipe. The airship also had a large, robust radio, 6000 gallons of fuel, and space for a gramophone. The destination Was Mineola naval station, on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York.

Morning, halfway across the Atlantic.

The flight across the Atlantic was uneventful, [footnote: restraint] but at one point teetered on disaster. The problem of flying against the prevailing winds of the Atlantic was fuel, and after flying through North Atlantic weather I think we can call 'characteristic' now, even the R34's fuel supply was exhausted.  With efforts that included getting the dregs of fuel at the bottom of empty tanks in jam jars, R34 managed to arrive at Mineola (that Naval Air station on the eastern tip of Long Island that the NC flying boats started from) with 140 gallons of fuel left, approximately two hours worth, at 10 AM on July 6th. Her flight lasted 108 hours (4.5 days). It had crossed from Scotland to Newfoundland in only 55 hours, meaning it could have contended in the Daily Mail contest. After three days on July 10th, the R34 ascended again, and made it back to Norfolk on the 13th of July, after 75 hours. The R34 was the first aircraft to make the round trip across the Atlantic, and the first to fly east to west.

The crew was gifted a new gramophone plus some new records for the flight back. Note: cat

The R34 flight is mostly forgotten today, but I think it had an important effect at the time. The story of Alcock & Brown and other trans-Atlantic attempts that spring had emphasized how dangerous a trans-Atlantic crossing by airplane was. All the contenders that got to Newfoundland were exceptional pilots flying the latest aircraft, and it was only by the narrowest of margins that nobody was killed. The R34's flight, in contrast, demonstrated the handy superiority rigid airships had on very long flights compared to airplanes of the day. This belief was so widely held that when Brown wrote his account of the flight in 1920, he included a meticulously researched chapter on why the rigid airship was the way to go on long endurance flights. Alcock for his part thought very large flying boats would become commercial flyers. In fact, after the summer of 1919, there was only one flight across the North Atlantic before Charles Lindbergh's flight in 1927, and that was another airship. The Zeppelin that would be named USS Los Angeles [ZR-3] made a delivery flight from the Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen, Germany to the naval air station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and this was seen as a sufficiently big deal that the crew was treated to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and met President Coolidge.

It would be another 15 years before non-airship commercial flights would be experimented with across the Atlantic. On the other hand, the contest worked very well as a promotional vehicle for the British aircraft industry. Only Martinsyde would go bankrupt in the government imposed recession after the Great War, and that was down to the factory burning down in a fire. Sopwith, it was true, also declared bankruptcy in 1920, but that case was a strategic management decision. What motivated it is murky: I've read it was based on Sopwith's failure to diversify / because deflation made securing financing impossible / because Sopwith had a shit-ton of liabilities from Great War non-delivery of aircraft, or even that the government was going to start squeezing Sopwith over technicalities in the delivery of Great War aircraft just in an attempt to extract money. Whatever it was, the move was to declare bankruptcy, form a new company, and buy up Sopwith's assets. That new company was named Hawker, after Harry Hawker, the most famous man in Sopwith's old management team.

The firm would have a long and storied history after this, but the story of Hawker the man was almost finished. On the 21st of July 1921, Hawker was killed in a crash at Hendon aerodrome. Hawker was 31 at the time, and had apparently had a stroke or embolism after takeoff. This seems odd for such a young man, but there was a reason he remained the chief test pilot of Sopwith during the Great War: he had tuberculosis, and was thus ineligible to serve. Likely Hawker's TB was involved in his early death.

Vickers and Handley-Page would remain redoubtable British firms in aeronautics. The Vickers Vimy would have a long career both in the military and as a civil transport, and would be used in other pioneering flights. The Australian Government in 1919 had a similar contest to the Daily Mail, offering 10,000 pounds to the first aircraft flying from the UK to Australia, and a Vimy with a four man crew landed in Darwin in December 1919. A Vimy would also be used for the first flight from Britain to South Africa, though for reasons it had to be swapped out for another Vimy in Libya. The V/1500 would enter production and see 30-40 being made, and like the Vimy, would be used in combat in the Third Afghan War of 1919. It would also claim a first: a V/1500 would be the first airplane to make a direct flight to India. Ironically, it was retired and replaced by more Vickers Vimys.

John 'Jack' Alcock did not have long to savor his fame. He returned to being a test pilot for Vickers aircraft, though his contract was up at the end of the year. Alcock had made plans to take his share of the prize money and open a business with an old friend, Bob Dicker. It was going to be automotive, and I can't really tell if the business was about designing, making, selling, or repairing cars, but no doubt Alcock & Dicker would have been a storied name in the automotive world had it happened.

On December 21st, 1919  Alcock took off from Brooklands, bound for the Paris Air Show, the first major aviation trade show since the Great War ended. He was flying a new amphibian design, called the Vickers Viking, a flying boat that also had landing gear. The weather was dreadful, almost bordering on Newfoundland-like: snow, sleet, and fog. Over Normandy, Alcock became lost in the fog. As with the Vimy over the Atlantic, Alcock cautiously descended to see if he could find the bottom of this fog - and unluckily for him, this time it did descend all the way to the deck. The Viking crashed into a tree, and Alcock was thrown from the aircraft, taking a fatal head wound in the process. In November, Alcock had celebrated his 27th birthday.

Arthur Brown was at his drafting table when he heard the news. It hit the man pretty hard; he didn't attend the Alcock's funeral as he couldn't stand the thought of answering questions from the press that would be there. Brown would never fly again.

Wot I'm Reading: "Shadow Over the Atlantic" by Robert Forsyth

The book is my jam: it's a very detailed account of FAGr 5, the Luftwaffe long range recon squadron that flew Ju 290s. It also mentions the efforts of other Luftwaffe formations flying out over the Atlantic.

Here's what I want to share from it: how tiny the Luftwaffe long range recon force was compared to the Allies. FAGr 5 was operational by November 1943, and by the middle of December had lost two aircraft and its crews: one to Coastal Command Mosquitoes, the other in a crash.

On the 11th of December, total long range forces of Fliegerfurher Atlantik [unified Luftwaffe command for coordination with the Kriegsmarine] are:

3 Junkers 290s serviceable (of 6);

10 Focke-Wulf 200s (of 15);

1 Blohm und Voss 222 (of 2).

I'm thinking if you stick to RAF Coastal Command, you can find individual squadrons with more serviceable four engine aircraft.

After the operation on the 11th of December, U-boats were supported by two Ju 290s and one Fw 200.

Alcock & Brown Part 3: The Rock

Off St. John's.

St. John's Harbor.

The first man to discover the unexpected problems in the trans-Atlantic race was Captain Fairfax Morgan, navigator for the Martinsyde Raymor. He arrived in St. John's in January 1919, to look for a suitable field for the Raymor to takeoff from, but was delayed by his contracting the Spanish Flu on the way over. He was so weak that he had to be stretched off the ship. Fortunately for Morgan, the news that St. John's was the start point of a trans-Atlantic air race made everyone civic minded, and Morgan was nursed back to health in private homes rather than the hospital, which likely contributed to his survival. Morgan then experienced some depression, a common after-effect of the Spanish Flu (also, of being in St. John's in January and February), but by March, Morgan was ready to find a field.

This was also rather depressing. First, it was clear that St. John's was not blessed with flat fields. To quote Morgan: "everybody thought Newfoundland in spring would be teeming with flat green fields ideal for flying. It turned out to have very little but low hills and a lot of uneven ground that I could see was going to be swampy when the snow melted." Morgan surveyed possible fields at the start of March after he fashioned a device to punch through the three feet  of snow lying on top of said fields. He settled on a meadow next to a pond near Quidi Vidi, an outport near St. John's proper.

On Beyond the Maritimes

The Avalon Peninsula on Newfoundland's east coast is a roughly star-shaped landform, clinging to the larger island via a rocky isthmus, like a small child holding the hand of a stout, formidable aunt, both moving forever westward. The eastern coast of the Avalon is composed of sea cliffs hundreds of feet tall. St. John's became the capital of the island as it is the location of the best harbor on this coast.

Two hills several hundred feet high are sundered by a narrows (named 'the narrows' in that great Anglo-Saxon naming tradition that gave us 'the White Cliffs of Dover' and 'the Great Sandy Desert') which opens into a harbor south, behind one of these hills. This makes the harbor sheltered from the open ocean and its attendant gangs of vicious weather types, yet large enough to hold many ships. That, and it's closeness to the Grand Banks made St. John's the capital by 1600.

So I actually went to school in St. John's, and I think the best way to explain St. John's weather is to talk about how some of the ladies I was classmates with dress.

Boots are preferred footwear between September and May. Those with the means often wear seal skin boots (St. John's being the only place I know where you can shop seal fur products retail.) In addition to being stylish and warm, seal skin is waterproof and immune to salt stains. But those are pretty expensive; most common are black rubber boots. A good pair is a lot like a SUV: comfy, durable, and useful in all conditions. St. John's is also the only place I've been where even the most radiant Celtic beauty will wear socks and sandals with zero shame.

These ladies never carry umbrellas, despite the fact that water falling from the sky is the bullion stock that underpins of St. John's weather: rain, fog, freezing rain, snow, ice pellets (etc.) This is because the wind wrecks umbrellas more or less immediately, as gale force winds are the onions in the weather broth: so common as to pass unnoticed, unless missing. Maybe the umbrellas that come in the doors of Rolls-Royces could withstand the wind, being made from walrus hide, aircraft grade aluminum and a dynamic tension system using monofilament wire, but those are not sold in St. John's. The ones that are consist of cheap telescoping umbrellas from Shoppers Drug Mart and Dominion, and are an affront to the Wind Goddess. This Wind Goddess expresses her displeasure by twisting these umbrellas into metal tumble weeds of shame and whimsy the first chance she can get, and then flings the brightly colored wreckage across the parking lot, over the fence, and down the street in the general direction of Churchill Square. The Wind Goddess has taken your fifteen dollars as an offering for your foolishness, and she is not to be denied, at least on the Avalon.

Winter is one of the few certainties in St. John's weather aside from the wind and rain, though the change of the seasons is so indefinite even that single point of solidity has a random element. Winter can start as early as October or as late as January, and extend itself as far as May, with snowfall in June not unheard of. Snow accumulates to a depth of several feet, with supermarket parking lots being edged by snow piles two stories in height. Like most Canadian cities, St. John's despises those who don't own cars, and after one storm I got to see pedestrians at a major intersection slide down four feet of snow, cross the street, and then having to scramble up another four feet of snow on the other corner. In a useful coincidence, as I write this St. John's just suffered a 20-30 year blizzard, with 50-80 cm [20-32 in] of snow falling in a day and a half, and sustained winds of 100 km/h, with gusts reaching 160 km/h. This wind, combined with lots of snow on the ground being light and powdery, made for some serious drifting, with drifts sometimes forming up to the second floor of houses. When I was there, I remember a windy winter day where a 28 ft shipping container was blown off a supply ship in the harbor, and before it could sink, the wind whisked it through the narrows, so it could sink outside the harbor. This I imagine annoyed the crews of the three ships that then had to spend an cold and wet afternoon outside the harbor salvaging  the container. In early March that winter, there was forty-eight hours of a windstorm that had gusts of 130-160 km/h. I went out one day, and the sky was sunny and clear - aside from the snow, rock salt, plastic bags, flyers, and palm-sized chunks of ice being ripped from rooftops.

The sun always - eventually - reasserts itself, but how long the sun takes in melting snow and ice, and then warming things up and drying things out to send plants the spring signal depends on how much snow it has to melt, as well as how much overcast and fog it has to burn through. The yellow face with its million golden rays will burn through even grand banks fog eventually, but it can take awhile. 

This is a Canadian government-produced map of solar energy generation potential. Notice how the Avalon actually breaks the scale in its lack of sun. Quick googling puts the solar power potential of the Avalon on par with the Scottish highlands, the Hebrides, or the Shetlands.

 Quidi Vidi and the Meadow outside of it, summer 1919.

The first team to arrive was Sopwith's, with Harry Hawker and Mackenzie Grieve arriving at Placentia, NL on March 29th. They had aimed for St. John's, but sea ice had jammed the narrows, so they landed at another harbor where they could catch the train to St. John's. Their advance man, Captian Fenn, had been in St. John's for two weeks. Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve checked into the Cochrane Hotel, the finest hotel in the city, which was ran by the four Dooley sisters. Fenn then showed the recent arrivals what he'd found for an airfield.

It was called Glendenning's farm, and was not ideal. It had plenty of space, being 365 meters (1200 ft) long and 183 meters (600 ft) wide. The problem is that this area was in an L-shape, with with a hill in the middle of the right angle of the L. All other sides of Glenndenning were trimmed by a stubble of fir trees. While a hanger and a workshop had been built on-site, Hawker was dismayed, but Fenn made clear this was as good as it got. A teamster named Lester hauled the boxed-up Sopwith to the farm, which was of course covered in several feet of snow. A week of rain followed, which melted the snow a bit but also flooded the field to the point rebuilding the aircraft had to be put aside to dig some drainage ditches to keep the camp from flooding. Reporters from Britain and America also started to pester the effort.

By April 11th, the Atlantic was completed, and ready for her test flight. Snow and slush were swept from the field (actual quote) and the Sopwith flew. The test flight proved perfect (IE completely uneventful) and Team Sopwith declared itself ready.

Sopwith Atlantic. Mackenzie Grieve (left) and Harry Hawker (right.)

 

Raynham and Fax Morgan also witnessed this flight, as their ship had just come in. After the two men spent all day unloading the Raymor, they retired to - the Cochrane hotel, where Hawker, Grieve, and most of the reporters were staying. Out at Quidi Vidi, the Martinsyde team managed to get the Raymor together in five days, finishing on April 16th. The race was on!

As soon as there was some good weather. The fifteenth of April saw the wind turn gale, and she was still blowing the next day when the Raymor took off on her first test flight. This, like the Atlantic's flight, went perfectly.

With both teams now ready for flight, but stuck on the ground and living in the same hotel, paranoia soon flared between the teams, each eyeing the other for signs of a covert departure. Fortunately, soon they had hammered out a gentleman's agreement that each would not take off without giving the other side two hours notice (two hours being about how long the aircraft took to prep for takeoff.) This allowed the teams to relax while they waited for spring to come to the Avalon. In fact, it should be said that with one exception, the men that wanted to fly the north Atlantic were rivals but also egalitarian in their support of each other. Like mountaineers or Antarctic explorers, trans-Atlantic flight in 1919 was so risky, unpleasant and technically demanding that your opponents were bound to be a lot like you, and thus, almost impossible not to emphasize with.

Soon, a routine was established. The Dooley sisters became the caterers for both teams, preparing sandwiches and thermoses to give to the crews as they set out in the morning. Both teams would hear the latest weather forecast from the Mt. Pearl wireless station. The station was Royal Navy, and had recently gained RAF meteorologist, Lt. Clements. While Clements could forecast Newfoundland conditions, all the Lieutenant hand away from land was weather statements from ships on the Atlantic,  culled from the wireless (IE radio telegraph.) So not only was the news often bad, there was very little actual forecasting along most of the projected route. Eventually, all teams would stop looking for perfect trans-Atlantic weather, and merely aim for good takeoff weather. With the bad news from Lt. Clements, both teams then hauled out their aircraft and run up the engines to full power, and tested their radios. After one more baleful glance at the forecast, the airplanes were powered down and set back in their hangers.

Card games were popular in the evening, in the Cochrane's smoking room with its cast-Iron stove in the center, as were practical jokes. Morgan sold one of the reporters the story that the Raymor carried 10 homing pigeons, and the navigation scheme was just releasing pigeons ever few hundred miles, and following the direction the bird took to Europe. Laughs all around when this story made the newspapers the next day! Codfish also tended to end up in beds of reporters who typed their typewriters late at night. All this activity was resented by a French consul staying at the Cochrane hotel. Who knows why exactly he was there; but he evidently valued the peace and quiet the Cochrane usually stocked in abundance, now spoiled by reporters and rambunctious rosbif aviators. (Which wasn't even fair, Hawker was Australian.)

So the Consul must have been thrilled when the Americans landed. The USS Chicago [CA-14] arrived in St. John's Harbor at the end of April. [footnote: old Chicago.]  On May 4th, the support ships for the Curtiss flying boats arrived in Trepassey: a tanker, two destroyers, and a tender for the flying boats. The Americans were also deploying 22 destroyers to the Atlantic between Trepassey and the Azores, to act as navigational beacons, and rescuers if need be. America might not be a official competitor, but they were not using half-measures.

The exact number of ships the USN used at various points in this effort is so large I couldn't be bothered to count them.

Reporters were now filing regular reports from St. John's. Fred Memory, reporter for the Daily Mail, was wiring stories about storms and sleet, but Britain was maybe also not getting the Newfoundland weather thing. The undersecretary for the Air Ministry had to field questions in Parliament as to what the delay was with the British flyers.

May 10th, 1919, saw Alcock and Brown's ocean liner arrive in Halifax - and in the harbor was a US navy seaplane tender, and two of the USN NC flying boats. The Americans had attempted on the 8th of May 1919 to fly from New York to Trepassey and the auguries began frowning before they had started, when a mechanic had lost his hand in a whirling propeller. Three NCs took off  [the NC-2 had a training accident in 1918 and had been used as spare parts for the other three flying boats] and soon NC-4 had engine problems. Landing on the ocean with a malfunctioning radio, NC-4 taxied 322 km (200 miles) to Massachusetts. The other two Curtiss flying boats soon encountered a storm off of Nova Scotia, and after fighting it for an hour or two turned to Halifax instead. They landed with no problems, but post flight inspection showed stress cracks in most of the wooden props, so they were swapped at the supply ship.

Unfortunately, the Vickers party didn't get a chance to stop and talk with the Americans. They were on the move, on a train to North Sydney (a port town on Nova Scotia's northern tip) and then on a ferry to Port aux Basques, an outport on Newfoundland's western edge. Vickers and company then took the train across the island. The train, nicknamed the 'Newfie Bullet', was famous for being slow. The trip (about 900 km) officially took 27 hours, but to make it in three days was not unknown.

On the train, the Vickers team got their first good look at Newfoundland. Coming from the start of summer, the brits found themselves thrust back into winter, some sort of bad weather closet where all of the British Isles packed away its winter weather during the off season, all slopping together into a grey and cold mess. Snowbanks could still be seen everywhere. Worst of all was [i]prohibition[/i]. Newfoundland at the time was its own nation-ish thing, (it's complected) and had for some god-forsaken reason started prohibition in 1917.  Fellow passengers commiserated with the Vickers crew by explaining the many ways people got around the law; perversely, it was a heck of an icebreaker with the locals. The preferred method for gentlemen to go around it was to consult with a doctor, who was happy to write a 'medicinal whiskey' prescription for a modest fee. [Footnote: morgan's rum]

Fortunately the train trip was only delayed by 12 or so hours, and Alcock and Brown finally arrived at St. John's around midnight on May 13th. Nobody was there to greet them; it was cold and smelled of fish. It was raining.

A&B's AirBnB

Alcock and Brown (and the four others of the Vickers party) took two horse drawn carriages to the Cochrane Hotel. Anges Dooley, when she saw the latest group of damp Englishmen said "Lord save us. More flying people. The hotel is full of you already! Has the whole world gone daft?" Still, it being very late, the Dooley sisters bedded down the party in the smoking room. As they were turning in, Brown pointed out they arrived on their lucky number, the 13th. Alcock was cheered by this.

The next morning, the appearance of Alcock and Brown in the dining room was greeted with cheers from their rivals. During breakfast, Alcock and Brown learned that there were no fields around St. John's that the Vimy could use. What's worse, the two fields that their rivals had procured were not long enough to allow the Vimy to take off with a trans-Atlantic fuel load, so even if, say, a crash knocked Sopwith or Marinsyde out, it was still no good for the Vimy. Like the other entrants, Alcock and Brown were totally gobsmacked by the lack of flat fields.

The mechanics that were with Alcock and Brown had to scrounge up their own accommodations, while A&B managed to get a room at the Cochrane. Then, the new arrivals started searching for a field. First renting a car, then buying a prewar Buick, Alcock drove up to Torbay and down to Bay Bulls looking for a likely field. This was a big ask for the farmers, who wanted to be paid for the loss of their crops, not a small concern thanks to the short growing season. Brown, meanwhile searched the town, consulting surveyors and the land registry for anything that would suit.

Like the other men, the Vickers crew usually socialized in the Cochrane's smoke room in the evening. This was great for Alcock, Hawker, and Raynham, who were old friends as well as rivals. Every source I've read suggests that Alcock and Hawker were birds of a feather, so I imagine that French consul was irritated indeed by what they got up to. Brown got into deep conversations with Grieve and Morgan on air navigation. [footnote: instruments] Brown was not all business, fortunately. A old sealing skipper, Captain Billy, at a loose end with the season now done, would often appear and tell, to quote a source, "interminable" stories of the land and sea to an apparently spellbound Brown.

Meanwhile, Handley-Page team lead by Admiral Kerr had arrived in Newfoundland - and gave St. John's a pass. The only team notified ahead of time about the vexations with landing fields, they instead went to Harbor Grace, a community about 50 km away. There the Admiral and his crew stayed in the mansion of Scottish-born businessman Robert Reid, constructor of Newfoundland's railway. The field the Admiral had secured was not a field. It was a "series of gardens and farms with rock walls between them. All of these had to be removed, as did three houses and a farm building. [footnote: wot] A heavy roller, drawn by three horses and weighed down by several hundred pounds of Iron Bars, eliminated the hummocks. The result, after a month, was a bumpy aerodrome." Like the Vimy, the V/1500 had not arrived yet.

The next day was Thursday May 15. The NC-1 and NC-3 arrived in Trepassey, flying from Halifax. On Friday, May 16, in St. John's, around 10:30 AM, aircraft engines were once again heard overhead. But this aircraft was new - it was a US Navy blimp.

The C-5 landing at St. John's.

Twenty-four hours earlier, the USN  blimp C-5 took off from Montauk, New York, on the easternmost tip of Long Island. The four man blimp was captained by Lt. Cmdr Emory Coil, the USN's chief lighter-than-air expert. [footnote: the mortal coil] The 2897 km [1800 mile] flight was a record for the time, and took 24 hours. After flying all day and all night, the C-5 found itself lost in fogs and thunderstorms off of the island of St. Pierre. It radioed the [i]Chicago[/i] in St. John's Harbor, who emitted a radio homing signal which helped the C-5 get to St. John's. The blimp was hauled to the ground by US Navy sailors and passers by at Quidi Vidi, at the same meadow where the Raymor was camping.

The exhausted crew went down to the harbor to get some sleep on the Chicago. Meanwhile, USN mechanics began inspecting the engines, taking apart the carburetors. The tie downs brought by the Chicago were designed to hold the blimp in winds up to 32 km/h [20 mph.] By early afternoon, the wind was naturally 60 km/h [40 mph.] As the sailors tried to keep the C-5 on the ground, the westerly wind started gusting to 97 km/h [60 mph]. The two things to do in this situation were to either fly and ride out the weather, or keep the blimp on the ground; the first was out as the two mechanics aboard the C-5 were in the middle of maintenance. Then, despite the sailors and efforts of the crowd, The blimp turned side on and tore free from its mooring ropes. In desperation, the sailors pulled the tear-away panels. These were big flaps in the lifting cell to drain the hydrogen in an emergency like this, but the rope broke without hauling away the panel. The mechanics jumped at this point, one of them shattering a leg. So the C-5 drifted away, over the cliffs and out to sea. The Wind Goddess scored quite a sacrifice that day.

The C-5, slipping the surly bonds of earth and the USN.

Meanwhile in Trepassey, the wind was blowing the right direction and it was sunny; good enough for the US Navy to start. But then, over the radio they heard the NC-4 was attempting to join them. When the Curtiss flying boat landed, they reported seeing a blimp drifting just above the icebergs, apparently unmanned. 

The next day, May 16th, was similarly windy but sunny, and after what I imagine was a great deal of faffing about, the three NC sisters took off from Trepassey for the Azores at 7:30 PM. The day after, it was reported that one of the aircraft had made it to the Azores. When this news reached  St. John's, it annoyed both Martinsyde and Sopwith teams. While the Americans were not contenders, both Martin and Hawker understood the value of actually being first, regardless. They both decided to attempt the flight the next day, hoping to beat the Americans to England.

That next day after that happened to be a Sunday, and Alcock and Brown slept in. They then got into the Buick to check out rumors of flat land.

The Wind God was kind to the USN, but not to the British - that's what a blimp sacrifice will get you. The prevailing wind blows from west to east; but now it was blowing out of the North East.  At Glenndenning's farm, Team Sopwith could deal, having to fly a hypotenuse on their L shaped field to takeoff into the wind. The Raymor's meadow at Quidi Vidi was much less fortunate, having a crosswind. Lt. Clements confirmed to the two teams weather seemed good over the Atlantic. The other attraction for an attempt was the full moon.

Hawker wrote an account of the flight. "Getting off was a bit ticklish. The wind was about 20 miles an hour east-north-east, and that meant we had to go diagonally across our L-shaped ground, just touching that hill [...] and avoiding if we could, a deepish drainage ditch that ran along the foot of it. All our trial flights both in England and Newfoundland had been done with a three quarter load of petrol, and we new very well that there would be not much room with a full load onboard.

However, all was well. The going was rough, and the hillside made her roll a bit, but we missed the ditch by inches and got into the air with a respectable distance to spare between our wheels and the trees." Once airborne, Hawker and Grieve waved to their friends at Quidi Vidi, then set a course eastward. They jettisoned their landing gear, and were soon lost from sight.

The Atlantic drops its landing gear.

The Raymor ready to fly. I can't help but notice the bad weather of the previous days dropped a little snow.

Raynham and Morgan were unperturbed. As mentioned last time, the Raymor was faster than the Sopwith by a fair margin, so they expected to beat the Martinsyde aircraft once airborne. An hour later, the Raymor was ready.

The Raymor rolled down the damp meadow, and just got airborne when a strong crosswind gust hit her. The biplane dropped to the ground, splintering her landing gear and shattering her propeller as her nose dug in. The crowd of spectators ran to the aircraft. Here the sources differ: while all agreed that Raynham suffered superficial injury, Morgan is anything from "similarly unhurt" to "needed to be stretchered away from the wreckage.' The Raymor was out.

Some time later, Alcock and Brown returned to town. A pedestrian flagged them down, and told them Hawker had eft, and Raynham had crashed.

When Alcock and Brown returned to the Cochrane, they found Raynham with a bandaged head, but otherwise no worse for wear. Morgan was in the hospital. The sources that claim Morgan was injured say smashed his head against his instrument panel, and had "shards of glass from the compass embedded in his skull." Morgan would end up loosing an eye. It was here Rayham offered for free use of the Quidi Vidi meadow - while Alcock and Brown could not use it for the trans-Atlantic flight, they could use the field to assemble the Vickers, and fly the Vimy out of there with a modest fuel load to whatever field they settled on. In their desperation for a field, Vickers had even asked Admiral Kerr if they could borrow his. Kerr picked this evening to get back to them: the Admiral's message  offered Alcock and Brown use of the Harbor Grace field, once done, provided that they split the costs of making the field, and the V/1500 got to take off first on its Atlantic attempt. This was declined.

More worrying was that no message had been received from Hawker and Grieve. The Cochrane went to sleep uneasy.

The next day at breakfast, newspapers started to get details as to how the American flight to the Azores went. Of the three, only one flying boat, the NC-4, made it to the Azores. The NC-4 had managed to find Faial Island and the town of Horta, despite it being a relatively small island in the ocean, obscured by thick fog and rain. A second flying boat had ditched and been rescued, but the third was unaccounted for.

The silence remained about where the Sopwith was. Alcock and Brown, both veterans and former POWs, were pretty good at dealing with uncertainty and very bad news. While most assumed the worst, both men returned to seeking a field, with Brown setting up his radio on the roof of the Cochrane, to practice his radio skills.

It would take another three days for the missing flying boat to be found, and another few for the full story to be learned.

The Curtiss aircraft departed in good weather and flew in formation. In command was John Henry Towers, in the NC-3. Towers was the original USN naval aviator, being the first Navy officer to get a pilot's license (from no less than Glenn Curtiss) and the first to do any number of naval avation-y things.  As night fell the destroyers on station in the Atlantic lit themselves up and fired flares, providing a point of navigational reference. NC-4 was the first to have an issue: the flying boats were also lit up, and for some reason her navigation lights burned out. Getting a bit too close to NC-1, the aircraft's commander gave a signal to loosen up. That the NC-4 did, and soon as the weather turned stormy, NC-4 lost the other two. At some point NC-1 and NC-3 were separated as well. To keep alert in a haze of night and fog, the Navy crew used Strychnine, because nothing is so alerting as feeling the grim reaper himself is just behind you, and has just put a stiff, skeletal hand on your shoulder. [footnote: Strychnine]

I found this image. A grain is some archaic alchemy measurement, which you'll have to look up because believe me, you do **not** want to exceed the recommended dose. In this case, apparently the dose is 1/60th of a grain, ~ 1 milligram.

NC-4's navigation held true, and the next morning, despite the thick fog, they found the island of Horta and landed there. Tired but happy, the crew of NC-4 got to go to sleep wondering where the others had gotten to. The answer to that was that both NC-1 and NC-3 got lost, and in the midst of bad weather, decided to land on the ocean.

One of my sources for these posts is very old: [i]The Conquest of the Atlantic by Air,[/i] [1931] by Charles Dixon. Dixon was a flying boat pilot in the First World War, and says both lost crews fell prey to a common flying boat mistake. From thousands of feet in the air, Dixon says, it is very difficult to judge wave heights, and typically you only get an honest sense of the waves in the final seconds of flight. So for the tired, strychnine addled crews, both tried to land, and had a half second of "wait, those waves are bigger----------" and then they hit the waves, which slammed both aircraft so hard they couldn't fly. NC-3 reportedly hit the top of one crest, slammed into a second, and then took a third blow so hard it ruptured the hull.

NC-1 was comparatively  lucky: she landed around 8:30 AM local time and after having the "flying" slammed out of her, the boat spent six hours in the ocean before being rescued, not by a Navy destroyer, but by a passing Greek tramp steamer, the SS Iona. NC-3 was reduced to something less than a boat. Her engines still worked, but sea water shorted the radio, which could now receive but not send. The crew got to listen to the transmissions of the USN destroyers searching for them far, far away from where they actually were. The food the crew had was lost in the bilges. Taxing to the Azores was now the only option. The crash had destroyed one of NC-3's outriggers, and the crew had to in shifts climb onto the opposite wing to keep it from dragging in the swell. After three days of storms and nothing but chocolate-covered strychnine to eat, the crew finally, mercifully found an island. A destroyer spotted them then, but Towers insisted the shattered craft make landfall under her own power.

On Friday, the 23rd of May, Fred Memory burst in on Alcock, Brown and Raynham and shouted "Hawker and Grieve had landed!" There was a pause, and then Memory clarified they had landed in a ship. Then everyone cheered.

Six days before, the Sopwith Atlantic had cleared St. John's. Soon after, a problem was discovered with the radio. When in flight, electro-magnetic noise from the engine's magnetos made the radio useless. (You may wonder how this problem happened with the constant radio tests. Funny story: the radio was not tested when the aircraft was at full throttle, and the Mt. Pearl wireless station receiving their tests was approximately a mile away. It was only when trying to radio things further that the interference became noticeable.)  Otherwise, things went well: "About 10 PM all the blue in the sky had turned to purple, the warm glint of the sun had faded from the polished edges of the struts, and the clouds below us became dull and patchy and grey, only giving us a sight very infrequently of the ocean beneath them."

It was after dark that Hawker noticed something off with the engine. The water the engine used as coolant was climbing in temperature. Hawker guessed in his own words that "the most probable cause was a collection of rust and odds and ends of solder and so fourth" and plugging the engine's water filter. In an attempt to dislodge the crud, Hawker shut off the engine and then put the aircraft into an abrupt dive, then leveling out at 5000 ft. This cooled the engine, but as they were climbing back to ten thousand feet, they noticed the coolant start to heat up again. Hawker knew this was a sticky problem - without circulation, the water would eventually boil out of the engine, and then the engine would overheat and seize. Hawker tried the diving tactic many more times, as well as shutting off the engine and gliding, but both would cool the engine at the cost of fuel, as then altitude had to be gained.

It was also around this time that storm systems began to get in the Sopwith's way. Previously, Hawker could have attempted climbing over them, but now high altitude would just lower the water's boiling point and make the coolant problem worse. Hawker went around the storms, but this was also at the cost of fuel.

At one AM, Grieve discovered a navigation error - they were about 150 miles further south than he had previously thought. This was in the end positive: this brought the biplane close to the shipping lanes, while its original course was far from them.

Throughout the night, Hawker struggled with cooling. As the water flashed into steam, it sprayed out of the engine, coating the goggles of both men in ice. Around six AM, it was time for another cooling dive - only the engine didn't start. Hawker got Grieve to duck down and to furiously pump fuel to the engine carburetors, while thinking this would be a good crash position for him. Finally, at wavetop height, the engine coughed, sputtered, and returned to life.

To quote Hawker , ‘We now decided just after 6 am to wander around in search of a ship.’ The weather was stormy, lashing winds and rain, and the sea was the color of wet slate. At 8:30 AM, they spotted a small Danish steamer, and flying in front of it fired some flares. The flares were answered, and the Sopwith ditched in the sea. In their water-proof flight suits, Hawker and Grieve launched detached the cockpit lifeboat. The ship, the small Danish steamer Mary, stopped and launched a boat, but thanks to the awful weather it took an hour and a half to recover the aviators. While the main part of the aircraft was abandoned, it would be recovered in a few days by another passing ship that possessed a large enough winch to haul it aboard.

The final twist is that the Mary lacked a radio, and in the dirty weather saw no other ships that they could signal to. The sixth morning the Mary saw Lewis' Butt------

[checks notes]

the Butt of Lewis, the Hebrides most northerly point, and signaled the lighthouse atop the butt that Hawker and Grieve were in fact alive. Later that day a Royal Navy destroyer came and met the Mary, and took Hawker and Grieve back to the mainland. Both men discovered a nation who'd given them up as dead and were now ecstatic to discover them alive. Hawker and Grieve were greeted as heroes by the press and public, with The Daily Mail giving the men $5000 pounds as a consolation prize.

Sources disagree as to why the Sopwith had problems. Hawker's theory about many radiator fill/drain cycles leaving enough debris to accumulate was reported in St. John's, as Alcock after this was very cautious to only use distilled water and filtered fuel. Most sources repeat this claim. But as the Sopwith Atlantic was recovered, Tom Sopwith and company could do a post-ditch analysis. The Eagle aircraft engine had slats at the front of the motor, which you can see in pictures.

These slats could be adjusted to let more or less air around the engine and its radiator. Sopwith concluded that when the Atlantic was built or rebuilt, a switch controlling these slats was wired backwards, so when Hawker opened the slats all the way to get more air across his radiator, he actually closed the slats entirely. I also saw one author suggest that Hawker, unfamiliar with the aircraft, accidentally closed these slats and kept them shut. At any rate, this mistake or accident is likely why Alcock & Brown are shacked by an ampersand, not Hawker & Grieve.

Speaking of Alcock & Brown, both men always expected that the Martinsyde or Sopwith team would pull it off. Now, they were eliminated. And while they didn't have a field for tackling the Atlantic, they now had an assembly field. The Vickers crew was now the front runner, with only its rival in Harbor Grace nipping at their heels.

Next: the actual goddamn flight

Footnotes

[footnote: old Chicago.] The Chicago was a fairly interesting ship: it was one of the first steel-hulled ships commissioned by the US Navy. Initially called a Protected Cruiser, she was commissioned in 1889; the ship had a steam engine and backup sails. The sails were eventually deleted. As a ship from the 'pre-dreadnought' era, she mounted guns in blisters along her hull.

CA-14 in 1897, and at Pearl Harbor in 1920.

[Footnote: morgan's rum] Martinsyde navigator Captain Morgan lived up to his name, returning with the Raymor a very large crate labeled "aircraft parts" brought in with it containing enough booze to keep Winston Churchill and his Second World War cabinet afloat for a week.

[footnote: instruments]It's worth a moment to discuss what the would-be trans-Atlantic aviators had as tools. If you want to read about navigation methods, Brown's 1920 account actually has a full chapter on those. It's worthwhile to know that the Atlantic flyers had two navigation methods: celestial and dead reckoning. Celestial navigation used a sextant to measure the angle to the horizon of the sun, moon, and stars. Once you had two sightings, latitude and longitude could be calculated (provided an accurate clock) or I suspect in flyer's case, looked up in a comprehensive chart. Astral navigation had a problem that all the flyers would struggle with: the requirement for partially clear skies and a clear horizon. Dead reckoning was simply estimation of location by calculation using the known variables (like speed and strength and direction of the wind) to provide an estimate. A long-settled art on ships, it was tricky to do in aircraft, simply because wind could both have a dramatic effect and could be difficult to estimate, especially at night or in poor visibility.

Brown had a few extra tools: the first was a 'Appleyard Course and Distance Calculator', which was basically a circular slide rule to help with dead reckoning calculation. Another almost slide rule was this thing: a Wind-Gauge Bearing Plate.

To quote the RAF museum: "Dated 1918, this 'Wind Gauge Bearing Plate' course and drift indicator was the first to be used by the Royal Flying Corps. A navigation instrument designed to determine, and allow for, the velocity and direction of the wind. It was mounted on the side of the aircraft and the navigator was obliged to face aft, in the slipstream, in order to use it."

The last weapon in Brown's arsenal was just brilliant: it was called spirit level horizon in one of my sources, but you could just as easily call it an artificial horizon. So: when navigating via stuff in the sky, you need to be able to see the object and be able to see the horizon. The horizon might be hard enough to find on the surface; in the sky it is much more difficult. So, some genius figured out "well, if you can't see a horizon, why not make one?" The device is a glassed-in reflective liquid (which stays level even if you are working on a non level. If you can see a celestial object, you catch its reflection in the mercury, and then measure the angle between the celestial object and its reflection. Then divide the result in half, assuming the liquid is level, and you have a sighting with a horizon.

One more note on navigation: one night at the Cochrane, Brown had a most unexpected guest: Captain Richard Byrd. Byrd had accompanied the NC flying boats to Trepassey, but didn't get to fly with them. The navy had decreed that only men who had served been overseas could participate - and Byrd had been to Newfoundland before, which the Navy had deemed "overseas." So Byrd went to St John's to visit the British delegation. Brown and Byrd discussed the problems of air navigation, and Byrd tried to get Brown one of his newly invented bubble sextants from the United States. This didn't get to St. John's before the famous flight, but I do find it interesting that given Byrd's sometimes glory seeking behavior later (in not much time he's going to be on a Norwegian island, lying to an airship crew about flying over the north pole) that he was willing to help out non-American rivals.

[footnote: Strychnine] Strychnine is a deadly poison that works by blocking neurotransmitter signals, so that your muscles tense themselves, in lethal doses freezing up the muscles associated with breathing. It was a vicious enough poison that the UK banned its use as rat poison. But in Victorian and Edwardian times, Strychnine was also used in very small doses as a stimulant, which considering everything is very much like using cyanide to clean coins, instead of using, I dunno, vinegar or cola or something.

[footnote: wot] Pretty much every source commented on how odd "yeah, knock down all these houses" sounds. I think the truth was a bit less extreme: in addition to being compensated, the owners of those houses likely moved them, not knocked them down. Newfoundland houses of the era were built from stout wood frames and lacked basements, which meant they could be moved and even floated to new places when circumstances warranted. I found this picture in the Memorial University's archive of one of these houses being moved:

[footnote: the mortal coil] Emory Coil was a personal friend and Navy Academy classmate of Robert Byrd, and had become the USN's chief expert on LTA flight. But when Coil was given the command of the C-5's flight, a larger factor was likely the Navy trying to assist Coil in his bereavement over the death of his wife and small child from the Spanish Flu that previous autumn. Coil would go on to perish in the R38 disaster of 1921. Had he not died, he likely would have been the commander of the R38 in its delivery flight for the US Navy, and thus become the first Commander to make a nonstop flight from England to the United States, and likely would have had a similarly storied career like Byrd or Towers.