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| Off St. John's. |
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| The Atlantic drops its landing gear. |
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| 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]
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| 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.
