Alcock and Brown and the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic on June fourteenth, nineteen nineteen

Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean on June 14–15, 1919, flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland in 16 hours and 27 minutes. They did it eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo crossing — in an open cockpit, with no radio, no gyroscopic instruments, and no autopilot.

What Was the Daily Mail Prize?

The Daily Mail had offered £10,000 since 1913 to the first crew to fly non-stop across the Atlantic in under 72 hours. World War I delayed any attempts, but by spring 1919, multiple teams had gathered in Newfoundland to compete.

Alcock was a former prisoner of war, shot down over Turkey and held for years. Brown was an engineer with a permanently injured leg from his own wartime crash. Neither was famous. They were simply two men who understood airplanes and needed something to fly toward.

What Aircraft Did Alcock and Brown Fly?

Their machine was a Vickers Vimy, a twin-engine biplane originally designed to bomb Berlin. The war ended before the Vimy ever saw combat, so this unproven bomber was stripped of its military hardware and fitted with extra fuel tanks where the bombs had hung.

The Vimy carried 1,880 pounds of fuel, pushing total weight past 13,000 pounds. Two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines produced 360 horsepower each — respectable for the era, but barely adequate for what lay ahead.

How Did the Flight Begin?

The departure point was Lester’s Field in St. John’s, Newfoundland — not an aerodrome but a pasture with a stone wall at the far end and a hill beyond it. If they didn’t get airborne before the wall, there would be no second attempt.

At 1:45 p.m. local time on June 14, 1919, Alcock opened the throttles. The Vimy bounced through ruts, the stone wall rushing closer. The airspeed built agonizingly slowly. The wheels left the ground and cleared the wall by what witnesses estimated was a matter of feet.

What Went Wrong Over the Atlantic?

Nearly everything.

Within the first few hours, the starboard exhaust pipe split open, producing deafening unmuffled engine noise for the remaining fourteen hours. They had no ear protection. Communication was reduced to hand signals and scribbled notes.

Then the radio failed. The trailing wire antenna snapped off in the slipstream. They had no way to call for help or report their position. Two men over the North Atlantic, and no one on Earth knew exactly where they were.

How Did They Navigate Without Instruments?

Night fell, and they flew into a wall of fog, rain, and turbulence. Brown’s sextant was useless without visible stars. Alcock was hand-flying with nothing more than a bubble level, an airspeed indicator, and his own inner ear — notoriously unreliable in cloud.

At one point, the Vimy entered a spiral. Alcock lost control. The nose dropped, speed built, and the altimeter unwound rapidly. They broke out of the cloud base at barely 100 feet above the waves. Alcock saw whitecaps rushing up and hauled back just in time. One hundred feet over the mid-Atlantic, in darkness, in a machine weighing six and a half tons.

Why Did Brown Climb Out of the Cockpit?

Sleet and frozen rain caked the engine intakes, wings, and windscreen. The fuel overflow gauge froze solid. The only way to confirm the engines were receiving fuel was to physically clear the ice.

Brown climbed out of the open cockpit six times during the crossing. With his injured leg, he stood on the wing structure at 7,000 feet in freezing rain over the North Atlantic and chipped ice off the engine intakes with a knife — the slipstream tearing at him, the airplane bucking in turbulence. One slip meant disappearing into black ocean with no one to mark the spot.

Meanwhile, Alcock fought the controls with frostbitten hands. Ailerons grew sluggish from ice. Fuel consumption ran higher than planned as they climbed and descended searching for clear air.

Where Did Alcock and Brown Land?

Just before sunrise, Brown caught a patch of stars with his sextant and confirmed they were roughly on course. At 8:40 a.m. on June 15, they spotted the Irish coast near Galway. Alcock aimed for what appeared to be a green meadow near Clifden.

It was Derrygimla Bog.

The wheels touched soft ground and dug in immediately. The tail rose, the nose buried into peat, and the airplane came to rest tail-up. Both men walked away uninjured. Behind them lay 1,890 miles of ocean.

What Happened After the Crossing?

King George V knighted both men within the week. Winston Churchill personally presented the £10,000 prize. They became Sir John Alcock and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown.

But the story has a somber ending. Six months later, on December 18, 1919, Alcock was killed while delivering a Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Air Show. He flew into fog over Normandy and crashed. He was 26 years old.

Brown never flew as pilot again. He said the Atlantic crossing had used up whatever luck a man gets in one lifetime. He lived quietly until 1948, carrying the memory of that night over the ocean for the rest of his days.

Why Don’t More People Know About Alcock and Brown?

Lindbergh’s 1927 solo crossing dominates popular memory, and deservedly so for its own achievement. But Alcock and Brown did it eight years earlier under arguably more dangerous conditions: an open cockpit, two engines that could fail at any time, no radio, no gyroscopes, no weather information, and a navigator willing to stand on a wing in a freezing gale with a knife.

The Vickers Vimy was recovered from that Irish bog. Today it hangs in the Science Museum in London. The cockpit is startlingly small, the seats fully exposed to the wind. Sixteen hours in that machine, in darkness and ice, over water that would kill in minutes — that was the price of proving the Atlantic could be crossed by air.

Key Takeaways

• Alcock and Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight on June 14–15, 1919, eight years before Lindbergh, flying 1,890 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes
• They flew a modified Vickers Vimy bomber with no radio, no autopilot, and no gyroscopic instruments — navigating by sextant when stars were visible
• Brown climbed out of the open cockpit six times at altitude in freezing rain to clear ice from the engines
• They narrowly avoided crashing into the Atlantic after a spiral descent to 100 feet above the waves in cloud
• Alcock was killed in a flying accident just six months later at age 26; Brown never flew as pilot again

Primary sources for this account include Alcock and Brown’s own post-flight reports and Vickers company records preserved at the Royal Air Force Museum. For the definitive full account, see Yesterday We Were in America by Brendan Lynch.