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. 

 
The End

Notes

[footnote:pussages] Lester's field is often reported as being offered "for free" to the Vickers crew, but that's likely untrue. Lester likely rented the field, so some money changed hands with the owner or owners. What's more, Lester later billed Vickers for his part in preparing the fields. I found a copy of the bill. I've no idea what "pussages" are; maybe a per diem for the workers?

Receipt dated June 10, 1919 from Charles F. Lester made out to Capt. Alcock

The charges are for labour to clear Lester’s field in preparation for take off.
The charges are as follows;

2079 Hours @ .40 per hour = $831.60
330 Hours extra @ .25 per hour = 82.50
Pussages Allowance 30 men @ $1.20 = $36.00
Horse Labour = $165.00
Expenses for Securing Labour = $20.00
Coal for Shack = $10.00
Sub-Total: $1,145.10
Commission on Work = $150.00
Monday & Tuesdays Work on Field = $50.00
Total: $1,345.10

[footnote: adventure tales]This is a detail that sees a fair bit of variation. Usually Brown is taking his knife and chipping away at ice forming on carburetors. I think aside from the usual storyteller drift, it's just that you need to know what carburetors are and why them flooding is a useful bit of data to the pilot in order to understand why a man who needs a cane to get around is crawling around the Vimy's fuselage mid-flight.

[note: restraint] I mean, about as uneventful as navigating an airship across the ocean in 1919 can be; I could seriously nerd out about it, but am trying to stay focused. Airshipsonline has this article if you'd like details.

[Note: Lt. Cmdr. Landsdowne] Zachary Landsdowne is a name that may ring a bell if you are into lighter than air flight. He was later died as the commander of the USS Shenandoh (ZR-2) which was torn asunder over Ohio in 1925. For that matter, Major Scott might also ring a bell, as he would be killed in the R101 disaster.

Alcock and Brown 2: Our Names Will Be Mashed Together Forevermore

Hugo and the Sunrise.

Alcock was a man of action who had been sidelined for a year as a POW during the First World War. When he returned to England after the war's end, he was sidelined again, this time by his service. The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service had merged into the Royal Air Force, and were keeping Alcock in barracks while trying to work out who was still needed. Meanwhile, the dream that had sustained Alcock through imprisonment - winning the race to be first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic - was now being pursued by others on both sides of the ocean. Some of these others were old friends of Alcock from his prewar flying days.

In 1919, this sidelining got a little worse for Alcock, as the US Navy let it be known they were preparing for a transatlantic flight. Close reading would have shown this effort to be more paper tiger than bald eagle, as far as the race was concerned. Undersecretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt made it clear that the US Navy was legally restrained from competing in contests involving cash prizes. What's more, aside from aircraft engines, America aeronautics was less advanced than aeronautical industry in Europe in 1919; America lacked an indigenous aircraft that could complete flight directly. The plan was instead to make a multiple stop flight via the Azores and Portugal to England. Still, even paper tigers worked up the British Lion, who began bellowing about GREATNESS and BRITAIN and OUR OCEAN and the like. This certainly fired public interest in the race, as well as sold a shit-ton of newspapers.

By March 1919, a otherwise unoccupied Alcock could have made a close study of possible rivals in the trans-Atlantic race. By March 1st 1919, these were known to be Sopwith, Handley-Page, Martinsyde, Short, Boulton-Paul, Felixstowe and Fairey, (British) Sundstedt, (a man, Swedish) and America with its Curtiss flying boats. The RAF also possessed two airships, the R33 and R34, that could make the flight anytime, and America also had, in secret, a backup blimp.

Three of the British contenders would make it to Newfoundland.

Sopwith with the Sopwith Atlantic. Sopwith, still based out of Alcock's old aerodrome of Brooklands , had modified a single engine bomber of theirs, the B.1. The B.1 had been a single seat bomber built as a private venture in 1917, a bomber version of Sopwith's Cuckoo torpedo bomber. The B.1 failed to find a customer, with the RNAS buying a single aircraft. The B.1 GT Atlantic {guys, can you maybe try a little harder on the name} had a widened fuselage to fit a tandem cockpit, and fuel tanks instead of bombs, which was an especially easy mod as the B.1 had an internal bomb bay. Sopwith engineers also gave the Atlantic some additional nifty features: the landing gear could be jettisoned after takeoff, reducing drag,  and the cockpit around the pilot and navigator was detachable and water-tight, making a lifeboat if the aircraft had to ditch. It used one Rolls-Royce Eagle V12 engine, making 360 horsepower. The Atlantic's flight crew was Australian-born Harry Hawker, Sopwith's chief test pilot and Alcock's friend from the old days, plus Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve, a Royal Navy navigator.

It also sort of looked like a toaster with wings.

Martinsyde with the Raymor. Martinsyde got its name from its founding partners, H.P. Martin and George Handasyde, and their firm had been making motorcycles and airplanes since 1908. The Raymor was a modification of the Martinsyde Buzzard which, in a pattern you'll soon notice, was designed for World War 1 but was introduced too late for combat. The Buzzard would likely have been more famous had the war continued, as the scout aircraft was reckoned so impressive that orders for several thousand aircraft had been booked before a single plane was operationally deployed. These orders were cancelled after the armistice - the RAF liked the Sopwith Snipe better for its economical running costs.

The Buzzard was a biplane scout (what we'd call a fighter today) that managed to be easy to fly, maneuverable, and yet very fast. Its engine was a Rolls-Royce Falcon V12, a downsized version of the Eagle V12 used by other competitors, displacing only 14.2 L but still making 285 hp. The Raymor was modified for two, and given an extended fuel capacity.The name came from a portmanteau of its Pilot/Navigator team, Rayham and Morgan. Freddie Rayham was another old compatriot of Alcock's from the prewar days, and Captain C.W. Fairfax Morgan, AKA Fax Morgan, (not joking), who was a RNAS flyer and navigator.

Martinsyde Raymor. It had a tandem open cockpit.

In April 1919, when the Atlantic was test flying and the Vickers works was building Vimy #13, Rayham and Morgan were doing another sort of test. Both men topped the Raymor with fuel, climbed into their flying togs, collected the food they intended to bring with them, and then started up the Raymor's engine and climbed into their seats. There they sat, engine at full power, all day, through the night, and into the next morning, not disembarking until the engine ran dry. Then the engine was taken apart and checked for problems. The engine was found to be in perfect working condition, and the team considered themselves ready for the Atlantic.

Oh, and you should know the HP V/1500 was very large.

Handley-Page with the V/1500. The V/1500 was the successor to the O/400: a heavy bomber that just missed being used in the Great War, with aircraft being shipped to operational units in early November 1918. In fact, a raid by three V/1500s had been planned to attack Berlin, but bad weather caused the attack to be cancelled. Scheduled for the next day, it was cancelled again when the armistice was declared on November 11th, 1918.

Like really large (Sopwith Camel in foreground.)

Handley-Page had wasted no time in reconsidering its design for the expected civilian market, so setting aside one aircraft for the transatlantic race was simple. By the time Alcock was demobbed, Major Herbert Brackley had been appointed crew commander and was already conducting test flights to calculate fuel consumption. The wartime V/1500 had a crew of eight or nine, but the Atlantic challenger restricted itself to five: Major Brackley, Vice-Admiral Mark Kerr, RN, Lt. Col. E.W. Steadman, and Major Tryggve Gran, a Norwegian arctic explorer who was one of the survivors participants of Scott's final Antarctic expedition. The V/1500 used four Rolls-Royce Eagle V12s, two in a pusher and two in a tractor configuration.

Big.

Finally, the Royal Naval Air Service released Alcock on March 10th, 1919. The next day, Alcock returned to the Brooklands aerodrome, and went to Vickers, where he met Max Muller [who was Scottish despite the name], a prewar acquaintance now in charge of the Vickers works there. Taking shape on the shop floor was a potential transatlantic aircraft; the problem was that Vickers lacked a flight crew. Alcock had soon convinced Muller that he was that pilot.

The airplane was a Vickers Vimy, a biplane bomber that like its rivals that was just a smidge too late for the Great War.  The Vimy design was commissioned in 1917, and can be thought of as a smaller, neater HP O/400, being about 2/3rds the size but having slightly greater attack range and bomb payload. Developed with help from the first commercially available wind tunnel, the Vimy  would have been a significant combat aircraft had the war continued: it was planned that the Vimy would be a heavy bomber, and assume an anti-ship torpedo bomber role. 1000 had been ordered, but only about 112 would be completed under wartime contracts, and only 12 had been finished thus far. The bomber would have a successful post war career: the RAF selected the Vimy as their standard heavy bomber over the O/400 [mainly due to cheaper maintenance costs], and RAF Vimys flew in the third Afghan war, and also established a perilous airmail route between Cairo and Baghdad.

A standard Vickers Vimy. As target tugs the Vimy would stay in RAF service until the 1930s.

The Vimy in flight.

The fact that the Vimy was efficient and modern is of course relative: it was still a big honkin' biplane made from spruce wood and canvas. It had a similar configuration to the O/400 and even used the same engines: Rolls-Royce Eagle V-12s making 360 hp. In Great War trim, it mounted four defensive machine guns and could carry 2476 lbs [1123 kg] of bombs.In this spec the bomber had a 900 mile [1448 km] range, flying at 80 mph [129 km/h]. The trans-Atlantic special Vickers constructed made a few alterations. Armament was dropped and extra fuel tanks added in the former bomb bay, and a wind-driven electrical generator was added. The generator was necessary as early 20th century engines got the electricity for their spark plugs via a magneto around their driveshaft. This gave the plugs all the power they needed - but had no surplus. The Vimy was to have electric lights and heated flight suits, as well as a wireless set, so the generator was essential. The Vimy also had its cockpit modified to a side-by-side configuration. Compared to its rivals, the Vimy was a excellent compromise between proven technology and new advances.

With the aircraft mostly complete and a pilot like Alcock, one more thing was needed: a navigator. All the professional teams had figured wisely that this competition needed not only a crack pilot, but also a crack navigator if they were to have a realistic chance of winning.

This is how Arthur Brown enters the story.

Arthur Brown in uniform.

Alcock and _________

Arthur Witten Brown is often described as Alcock's opposite, and in some ways, he was. The intellectual Dr. Martuin to Alcock's hot-blooded Captain Aubery, Brown was more interested than Alcock in the abstract and the theoretical. While Alcock discovered his passion for flying early, Brown had a diversity of interests, only some of which would get him the navigator's seat in the transatlantic flight. But I think to just emphasize the opposites of the men is to overstate their differences. They both had many similarities, starting with growing up in Manchester, and both decided to be engineers in their teens, and in a similarity a writer would reject as too on the nose, both were POWs in the great war set upon the challenges of a transatlantic flight to stave off boredom. They were undoubtedly an excellent team, as both men complemented each other's strengths.

Arthur Brown was born in Glasgow in 1886, the only child of American parents. Soon after the family moved to a suburb of Manchester, where Brown's father, an electrical engineer, was establishing a factory for his employer, Westinghouse. Brown grew up in Britain, an introvert who's reserve would be shed in the company of friends to reveal a warm and insatiably curious boy. He had lots of interests, including flight, though for our narration the most important one was his hobby of experimenting with color photography. Like Alcock, when Brown left school he apprenticed as an engineer in Manchester, (Westinghouse, naturally) and knew Norman Crossland (of Norman Crossland engineering, who became later a patron of Alcock's flying ambition.)  Brown would frequently borrow Crossland's motorcycle for trips to the country. Brown also took courses at the Manchester Technical Institute. Once he was accepted as an engineer, Westinghouse sent Brown to South Africa, were he worked two happy, uneventful years until returning to the UK in the summer of 1914.

You can get how the Great War was viewed in 1914 when you learn that Brown - watcher of birds, avid reader, poetry fan - renounced his American citizenship so he could become a soldier in it. He trained in a 'pal' battalion and was commissioned in the Manchester regiment in January 1915 as a Lieutenant. I tried to find out about Brown's time in the British Army, but basically found nothing aside from what formation he was attached to. The Manchester Regiment were line infantry, and Brown arrived at the front just in time (January 1915) to get stuck in a series of battles that in April would culminate in the 2nd Battle of Ypers, famous for being the first example of chemical warfare. From what I could piece together, Brown served until May 1915, when he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps. His education as an engineer and his photography hobby saw Brown escape the mud to become an RFC observer for No. 2 Squadron, flying unarmed B.E.2c biplanes.

Though why Brown would want to leave all this remains obscure.

While being an observer was definitely making better use of Brown's skills, it is here he picked up a new interest: air navigation. While the Napoleon-era Royal Navy sailing ships could navigate and predict their travel times with near modern accuracy, air navigation was based entirely on spotting landmarks and dead reckoning and as everyone was learning, this was not very good. Brown's intellect jumped on this new problem.

In the meantime, the rest of Brown, along with the pilot of his B.E.2, Lt. Medlicott, were flying photography and recon missions and often having to flee from German fighters. The first time Brown and Lt. Medlicott were shot down, some flak shrapnel punctured their B.E.2's fuel tank, killing the engine and setting the aircraft on fire. Brown and Medlicott managed to come down on the British side of the line - but the landing gear of their aircraft hit telegraph wires, and flipped both pilot and observer out of their cockpits. Both were uninjured. The second, less lucky shootdown happened on the 10th of November 1915. On a cold and overcast day, Brown and Medlicott were supposed to recon German positions escorted by RFC fighters. Their B.E.2 made it to the rendezvous point, but their escort did not show. Instead of scrubbing the mission, Brown and Medlicott carried on - and soon had a brace of German fighters on their tail. Forced down behind German lines, their biplane flipped, and Brown broke his leg. Medlicott hauled Brown out of the wrecked aircraft, but before they could settle if the uninjured Medlicott should make a run for it, German troops showed up and ended the argument.

Both men, now POWs, were sent to a POW camp deep in Germany, where Brown spent six weeks in the hospital. Exactly like Alcock, Brown found himself with nothing to do, and to get through the tedium, decided to get deep into this aircraft navigation problem, using the trans-Atlantic race as a goal. Brown would spend three years as a POW, first in Germany and then in Switzerland as part of a prisoner exchange. During this time, Brown got the bad news that his limp was permanent - for the rest of his life, Brown would need a cane to get around. But it wasn't all bad: the Red Cross allowed him to keep in touch with his parents, who sent care packages and soon, books on navigation and necessities like pen and paper. As Brown had been sent to a RFC-centric camp, like Brown soon was discussing his navigation problems with knowledgeable POWs. Lt. Medlicott's hobby was escape, and he would go on to make 13 unsuccessful escape attempts, and one more attempt where he was shot and killed by camp guards.

Finally, in the fall of 1917, Brown was repatriated to England. As his injury excluded him from front-line roles, Brown got himself reassigned to the Munitions Ministry,  where he landed in the Aviation production department, and was soon working on aircraft engine designs. Brown's boss was a Col. Kennedy, and Kennedy had two daughters. Before 1918 ended, Brown was engaged to one of them, Kathleen.

The war ended in November 1918, and while obviously a good thing, it left Brown unemployed. It was a strange time: Britain was obsessing over new ways to shoot itself in the foot economically, the political gridlock made forming governments or getting things done very difficult, and it really sucked to be unemployed in Manchester. In addition to all that, demobilized soldiers were returning to make competition all that more intense, and apparently not being able to join the firm football team was a real disadvantage. The deadliest wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic had just ended, so being alive after that was definitely a plus. Brown persevered for the reason so many men have persevered throughout history: because there was a lovely lass there believing in him.

Finally, Brown sat down with Max Muller at Vickers at the end of March, 1919. It is unclear to me if Vickers was advertising for a general aviation position or specifically for a transatlantic navigator; it makes a better story if Brown walked in only knowing that they had a position on offer, not one that lined up with his personal obsession, so let's go with that. Once the challenges of aerial navigation came up, the formerly reserved Brown warmed to the discussion, and Muller soon knew he had his man. Alcock and Brown met, and soon they were discussing routes and navigation challenges, with Brown sketching with his cane a map of the North Atlantic in the dirt on the shop floor. The two men liked each other well enough, and bonded by their interest and determination,  they soon threw themselves into preparation.

That's Good, But We're Still Well Behind

Next door, the Sopwith boys had made their first test flight just a few days after Alcock appeared at the Vickers works, and a few days after that did a 1800 miles [2897 km] test flight, about the distance between Newfoundland and Ireland.  By the time March had ended, Sopwith was boxing up their aircraft to ship across the Atlantic. Also by the end of March, two other teams were already on the boat to Newfoundland. The press was already speculating that the next best flight window would be April 19th.

Alcock, being the pilot and all around dab hand with aircraft, slept at the factory while Vickers put together Vimy #13, transatlantic special. Thanks to the number, Alcock and Brown would soon adopt black cats, the number thirteen, and presumably walking under ladders as their personal good luck charms. Brown, meanwhile, had his commission, so to speak, and was soon haunting Whilehall, and accosting people with obscure navigation questions. Once the Royal Navy men had sounded Brown's depth of knowledge [and Brown countered their 'walking away very fast' with 'cunning bathroom ambushes']  the RN became enthusiastic supporters, lending charts and instruments. The wireless radio for the Vimy was borrowed from the Air Ministry. There was also lots of opportunities for meetings with weather officials, sponsors (such as Shell, who was providing the fuel), and engine maker Rolls-Royce. The weather officials were somewhat notable, as at first the British government was doing literally nothing for the contest, aside from keeping its aircraft out of it. Then it was decided extra meteorology, shared with everyone, would be something worth doing, and a meteorological team was being dispatched to St. John's. At the end of the day, Alcock, Brown, and Muller would go out to a pub with the ten or so mechanics who would be the field crew, and would get some food and some beer of quality, and generally catch up with the doings of the day. Brown when he could got away to spend time with Kathleen, who was absorbing information on the topic of aviation at a fantastic rate.

On Good Friday, April 18th 1919, the Vimy took flight for the first time.

Over the next few days, the Vickers team did all the flight tests and by the end of April, the Vimy was boxed up with numerous spares to be shipped to St. John's. On May 4th, 1919, the Vimy advance team (Alcock, Brown, three mechanics from Vickers plus one from Rolls-Royce) departed on the Ocean liner Mauretania for Halifax, with the other seven team members sailing on the freighter S.S. Glendevon with the Vimy at a later date, bound for St. John's direct. Spring had not only come to Britain, it was the start of a gloriously long heatwave.

So many teams had many plans, and all were racing to the start line. While all the teams did empirical experiments and elaborate preparation to make sure their entry had a real shot, they all had one blind spot. It was a blind spot shared by the British media, and indeed by the Daily Mail and its contest.

None of these people making plans had been to Newfoundland. In the race to get a working airplane flight tested all had assumed the capital, St. John's, which was on the same latitude as France, after all, would have spring well under way by, say, March, and it would be an English spring, filled with sunshine, and that St. John's would be surrounded by nice flat fields which would serve as an ideal starting point.

These assumptions would be...problematic. 

Apparently, the image British people had of St. John's in their heads.

Big Chonky Sidebar: the Other Competitors

The Shirl dropping a torpedo. The 'heavy' RN torpedoes were designed to destroy armored warships, like cruisers and battleships.

Short's entry was the Short Shamrock. The Shamrock was a modified Short Shirl, the Shirl being a biplane shipboard torpedo bomber built too late for the First World War.  Designed to carry the Admiralty's standard 645 kg (1,423 lb) torpedo. The Shamrock was rebuilt to take a tandem cockpit for pilot and navigator, and replaced its torpedo with a gigantic suppository shaped fuel tank. This gave the Shamrock "still-air" range of over 5,000 km. This was reckoned to be great enough that the Shamrock was going to fly west from Ireland instead of east from Newfoundland. The Shirl used a single Rolls-Royce Eagle engine, a Mk. 7 V12 making 385 hp. Its pilot/navigator team was a Major J.C.P. Wood, and a Captain Wyllie.

Short Shamrock with a trans-Atlantic fuel tank. The man standing on the wing checking the engine gives a good sense of scale.

There's also this alternate suppository design.

On the same day the A&B Vimy made its first test flight, the Shamrock came up short. The Shamrock's crew had decided to attempt a Atlantic crossing against the prevailing winds, from east to west. Then, on the flight to Ireland, just 2 miles off of the coast of Britain, the engine stopped working, and the aircraft had to ditch. The crew was soon being rescued by local fishermen, and the Shamrock was salvaged, but was a wreck needing a complete reconstruction, effectively knocking Short out of the race.

Sunrise in New Jersey.

Aside from Americans, the other foreigner with a airplane together was Swedish Captain Hugo Sundstedt. Sundstedt was a pilot much in the mold of John Alcock: a enthusiastic flyer who thanks partially to luck and partially to hard work had become a pioneer of aviation in his native land. With the backing of a Norwegian shipping magnate, Christoffer Hannevig, Sundstedt had gone to America and had a firm design and construct what would be called the Sundstedt-Hannevig Sunrise.

The Sunrise was a biplane floatplane who's secret advantage was lightness. While it had a similar wingspan to the NC-4, it weighed just half of the Curtiss design. This light weight meant it needed less power to fly, and thus could get better fuel economy. To quote this blog over here: 

The Sunrise was a huge aircraft for its time, its upper wing spanning 100 ft. However, its empty weight was 7000 lbs., less than half the 15,874 lbs. of the comparably sized U.S. Navy-Curtiss NC-4. Fully loaded with fuel and crew, the contrast was even more remarkable, approximately 13,000 versus 28,000 lbs.

This minimalist philosophy carried over to the engines, two inline 6 Scott-Hall motors making 220 horsepower, and the fancy enclosed fuselage. In a decision I expect Sundstedt would have regretted, the fuselage didn't allow people to stand. In fact, the fuel capacity of the Sunshine was maybe a little too minimalist, as Sundstedt figured the airplane had a range of ~ 2500-2800 km [1600 – 1760 miles], which is a bit worrying if you consider the distance between St. John's and Ireland is about 2700 km [1700 miles.] While all the potential racers except Short hoped to use the prevailing west-to-east wind, Sundstedt thought he had another ace up his sleeve: Sundstedt was something of a scientist, and had previously done research into air currents. The Captain thought there was a steady 60-70 km/h wind blowing from west to east across the Atlantic at about ten thousand feet. So the extra-light kite Sundstedt was constructing was also to ride this wind across the Atlantic with a comfortable safety margin.

This photo has the date 4/11/1919.

 While I can't nail down dates or what precisely happened, the Sunshine in April or May 1919 did itself serious damage, with the twin floats having to be rebuilt. The delay was fatal to competing in the Atlantic race.

Boulton-Paul, like Sundstedt, also aimed not only to win, but to use a new design to do it.

They had created in 1918 a new light bomber called the Bourges to replace the Airco DH.10. The war ended, however, and that was that. Boulton Paul then pivoted to the trans-Atlantic race, where components of the Bourges were recycled into a new design. It remained a biplane twin engine aircraft, but as Boulton Paul hoped to sell the new design as an airliner, they decided to incorporate as much new technology as they could.

The Boulton Paul Atlantic for starters, had an enclosed cockpit. {You were warned; see me after class.} Behind this cockpit was a cabin for a radio operator and navigator/backup pilot. It also had a provision for a fourth position for an observer, who lay flat beneath the cockpit, observing though their own window. Behind that was a fairly colossal amount of fuel tankage, with a design range of 3,850 miles (6,195 km), which meant that in theory the Atlantic could have flown from Ireland to America in a single hop. The fuel system also had a fast-purge option, which in the event of a ocean ditching might allow the now-empty fuel tanks to serve as a flotation device. The BP Atlantic engines were Napier Lions, in a W12 configuration making 450 horsepower each, about 1/4th more power than other aircraft. This extra power and aerodynamics meant the Atlantic had a designed cruise speed of 116 mph (187 km/h), which was approximately 1/3 faster than its rivals. After the first two hours of flight, the Atlantic could stay airborne on one engine, or on two engines on half-throttle.

This strategy of high tech new-ish design had one flaw: it was a hell of a lot of work with a unknown yet ferocious deadline hanging over the project, which meant that in their rush to completion, something was neglected. That something  turned out to be testing, specifically the fuel system. Thanks to a flaw previously undetected, running both engines at full throttle would fuel starve one of them. This was discovered on the Atlantic's first takeoff, when one engine failed and the biplane side-slipped into the ground, wrecking itself.

R34, a copy of German R-class Zeppelins.

I should also mention the lighter-than-air aircraft, and maybe more specifically why they only crossed the Atlantic after the prize was won.  The British had two rigid airships, the R33 and the R34. The R34 would not only fly the Atlantic a few weeks after Alcock and Brown, it became the first aircraft to fly east to west, and the first to make a return trip. The problem was that British airships and blimps (the British had several very capable later war designs) were all government manufactured, and the Daily Mail contest was specifically about being a spur to private industry. My impression is that the British would have only prepared a LTA attempt only after private industry had given it a go, as both airships were made by the Royal Airship works. I think this tracks with the reluctance of the government to back the Felixstowe Fury.

Another C-series blimp in what looks like Lakehurst NAS, New Jersey.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the USN also had a secret airship. As a contingency against the failure of its flying boats, it would be flying a blimp, the C-5, to Newfoundland. The C-series blimps had been meant for patrol, but in practice served more as an experiment in building capable naval blimps. Used mainly for training air crews, the end of the Great War saw them repurposed for training and experimentation. The C-class had a crew of four in open cockpits and two 150 hp engines, and displaced 181,000 ft³ (5,125 m³), with a useful lift of 1,837 kg (4,050 lb). It was this payload capacity that gave the C-class ocean-crossing range of 2,320 km (1,440 miles) though the plan seems to have been to fly to the Azores, not make the direct flight.

The front of sister ship C-2's gondola. As you can see, not luxurious. Also probably hearing damage.

 Moving from lightweight and buoyant, we have the heavyweights. The Americans were going to use their Curtiss Navy flying boats to attempt a flight, staging themselves from the town of Trepassey, on the Avalon Peninsula's southern tip. Meanwhile, Felixstowe, the British Government's flying boat research center, lead by John Cyril Porte, had constructed the Felixstowe Fury. Both flying boats were extremely large, and were close relations with each other. Glenn Curtis and Porte were old collaborators, thanks to the Daily Mail's trans-Atlantic prize.

Glenn Curtiss was America's other most important aviation pioneer, and as was probably inevitable, he hated the Wright Brothers. The Wright brothers held patents that they said gave them the right to collect royalties from everybody flying airplanes, and Curtiss was the pioneer selected by the Wrights to deliver the legal beat-down for patent infringement. The acrimony between Curtiss and the Wrights was such that Orville later would say Wilbur's early death was due in large part to the stress of these lawsuits. Curtiss for his part at one point counterfeited a flying boat design another inventor had been working on before the Wright Brothers made their historic flight, all to try and take away the prize of saying the Brothers had been the first powered airplane flyers. This is a level of drama even the Kardashians would opt out of (though probably not Kanye West.)

Yeah, Curtiss looks like he'd be a chill dude in the face of lawsuits.

 Oh, my point: in addition to being an Aviation Pioneer, Curtiss had been experimenting with flying boats.

This is the peak intensity of male emotions in 1913. Porte is left, Curtiss is right.

 John Cyril Porte was a former Royal Navy officer and engineer who had been retired early thanks to tuberculosis. In 1911, he and Curtiss teamed up to create flying boats, with the goal of creating a transatlantic aircraft. The plane both men built with money from Rodman Wanamaker, [when the hell did we stop naming kids Rodman], a Department Store Magnate, was an impressive step foreward for 1913. The cockpit was enclosed. Because the vector of thrust was so offset from the hull, and as a result as speed was gained the hull plowed ever deeper,  the two men used sponsons to buoy up the hull at speed. It had a theoretical range of  1,100 mi (1,770 km), and was going to attempt the Atlantic on the 5th of August, 1914----

----only to see the First World War break out on July 28th and the subsequent cancelling of the contest. Rats.

The aircraft in question, with some mos def not OSHA-compliant work going on top, between the engines.

 Porte was recalled to the Royal Navy, and wasted very little time in convincing the Royal Navy that they needed these new flying boats. The two America aircraft were militarized and sent to the UK, and Curtiss found the US Navy ordering copies, too. This was the start of the 'H' series of flying boats, with the America types being called H-2s by the British, and subsequent aircraft starting with H-4. Both navies used the 'H' series for patrol, anti-submarine attack, and  Search and Rescue (SAR) missions.  The British liked the American flying boats, but disliked their boat-ish qualities, and assigned Porte to the new naval aviation station at Felixstowe to refine the design. This soon turned into a licensed variant, the Felixstowe F series. Both aircraft types were similar to each other, being big biplane flying boats used for patrol. Porte and Curtiss freely shared their discoveries with each other, so the family of aircraft evolved into extremely capable machines.

A Felixstowe F1. Unlike the RFC, the flying boats of the RNAS embraced some bomb-ass dazzle camo schemes.

Curtiss NC. If the Atlantic Race was a Mario Kart, this is what Bowser would fly.

The NC-4 was the latest iteration of this series. When America joined the Great War, there had been some talk of moving the license built Handley-Page and Caproni bombers by flying over the Atlantic than rather packing them in crates to ship. The USN got in on this act, and asked Curtiss to design a new large patrol flying boat capable of traversing the Atlantic if need be. Using the newly available American Liberty V12 aircraft engine, Curtiss created a three to four engine flying boat known as the "Naval Curtiss" or NC series. (Oh, ah, side note: Curtiss seemed to despite naming conventions, so if you are confused about the H series being different aircraft types and the newest type having a completely different name and a number that doesn't denote type but literally which one was built first, you are not alone.) NC 1 through 4 were built too late for the Great War, but now like the C series blimp, were seen as excellent experimental aircraft.

Visually, imagine the NC series as the bastard child of a DH 2 and a American threshing machine.

The USN planned to fly its aircraft to Newfoundland, staging the C-5 out of St. John's, and the flying boats out of Trepassey, NL, a community on the Avalon Peninsula's South-East tip. The plan was then to fly to the Azores. Since the US Navy was managing this, it had marshaled a not-so-small fleet of ships in support, establishing a picket line of destroyers from NL to the Azores by May 1919 to assist any NC aircraft that ended up ditching.

Our other, even larger flying boat can trace its creation back to another Curtiss project. So, after World War One Started, Rodman Wannamaker wanna make a very large airplane, and commissioned Curtiss to design and build it. The result was the world's largest aircraft at one point being a triplane flying boat, called many different names but the wiki calls it the Curtiss-Wanamaker Triplane. Built specifically to compete in the Daily Mail's trans-Atlantic contest once reinstated, [after all this war is going to be over by Christmas] the Triplane has a length of 58 ft 10 in (17.93 m), and a upper wing of 134 ft (41 m). The Royal Navy bought it and had it shipped to the UK, where it was taken to Felixstowe, given four French engines, and its first flight, where it promptly crashed and was written off.

Curtiss-Wanamaker Triplane.

I suspect this is the Curtiss after delivery to England.

Despite this, when Porte decided to build his version of a trans-Atlantic aircraft, he also picked the format of 'gigantic triplane flying boat.' This aircraft was the Fury, though it was also called the Porte Super Baby, showing how even Curtiss' scorn for logical nomanclature had crossed the Atlantic. The Fury was even larger than the Curtiss triplane, 63 ft 2 in (19.26 m) long with a span of 123 ft (37.5 m). Thanks to engine technology it had a 1 metric ton greater payload capacity. Using five Rolls-Royce Eagle engines, it flew for the first time with Porte piloting on 11th November 1918. 

The Felixstowe Fury.

I think it gets extra points for the tri-themed tail.

While it didn't promptly crash, military use was obviously out. In 1919, it was hoped the Fury could join the Atlantic race, but the Fury was doomed to be undone by politics. Felixstowe was a government facility, not a private one, and the British Government didn't want to pay for the expenses a trans-Atlantic flight would rack up. HM's Government also wanted a private entry to win, and officially said no to unleashing the Fury in the race in early May 1919. A new scheme saw an attempt to make a record-breaking flight down to South Africa. Extensive meteorological and logistic support had been arranged in Africa when on August 11th 1919 the Fury was undone, crashing into the harbor and writing itself off, and killing a crewman in the bargain. 

Porte would die in October 1919 of TB, and Curtiss would see his company merged with the Wright Brothers company, causing him to leave aviation entirely. The old gypsy woman had been right about triplane flying boats.

Last and least, Fairey didn't get very far with their entry; I bring it up exclusively as their pilot was named Sydney Pickles, and he had to withdraw from the race for personal reasons. Maybe Pickles' wife was stepping out with a Mr. Branston.