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.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.