Alcock and Brown and the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic, June fourteenth, nineteen nineteen

On June 14, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown took off from Newfoundland in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber and flew nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland. They completed the roughly 1,900-mile crossing in about 16 hours, becoming the first people to fly the Atlantic without stopping—eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s famous 1927 solo flight. Lindbergh flew alone; Alcock and Brown flew the harder version of the trick first: coast to coast, in a single unbroken hop.

Who Flew the First Nonstop Transatlantic Flight?

The pilot was John Alcock, a stocky, cheerful man from Manchester who had flown bombers during the First World War, been shot down over Turkey, and survived as a prisoner of war. By 1919 he had logged more hours wrestling heavy aircraft through bad weather than almost anyone alive.

The navigator was Arthur Whitten Brown, quieter and more serious, who walked with a permanent limp after being shot down himself. Brown’s rare skill was celestial navigation—fixing his position over open ocean using a sextant and the sun and stars. Doing that math by hand in a freezing, lurching open cockpit was the real magic of the flight.

Why the Flight Happened: The Daily Mail Prize

The crossing was driven by a £10,000 prize offered before the war by the London newspaper the Daily Mail. The rules were simple and brutal: fly an aircraft from anywhere in North America to anywhere in the British Isles in under 72 consecutive hours, with no stopping and no landing on a ship to refuel.

Several teams gathered in Newfoundland in the spring of 1919, because it offered the shortest stretch of open water—and even that was about 1,900 miles of cold gray ocean.

What Aircraft Did Alcock and Brown Fly?

They flew a Vickers Vimy, a large twin-engine biplane bomber designed at the end of the war to carry bombs to Berlin. The war ended before it ever flew that mission, so Vickers reasoned that an aircraft built to haul a heavy load a long distance could instead be stripped out to haul fuel a long distance.

Key details of the aircraft:

Wingspan of nearly 68 feet, built of wood, wire, and fabric
Two Rolls-Royce Eagle water-cooled V-12 engines, 360 horsepower each
An open, side-by-side cockpit—no roof, no real heater, almost no windscreen
Roughly 865 gallons of fuel packed where the bomb bay and fuselage tanks had been

In short, two men sat in an open wooden craft in the sky, surrounded by 800-plus gallons of gasoline, with no reliable radio, no heater, and no second chance over the North Atlantic—where the June water could kill a downed airman in minutes.

A Dangerous Takeoff from Newfoundland

The takeoff field near St. John’s was a sloped, rough, rock-strewn meadow the crews had cleared by hand. Loaded with all that fuel, the Vimy was right at the edge of being too heavy to fly.

Witnesses said the aircraft staggered into the air so low and slow that it barely cleared the trees and a fence at the far end of the pasture. Late in the afternoon, local time, Alcock pointed the nose east over the harbor toward open ocean and the coming night.

What the Atlantic Crossing Was Actually Like

The crossing was a nightmare from almost the start. The small wind-driven generator powering their radio failed early, leaving them with no way to call for help or get a position fix from a ship.

The two unmuffled Rolls-Royce engines roared a few feet off each shoulder for hours, so loud the men couldn’t hear each other speak. They communicated by scribbling notes, using hand signals, and shouting directly into an ear, while constant vibration numbed their hands.

Then the weather closed in—thick fog and heavy cloud for most of the night. With almost no instruments to show attitude, Alcock had to fly by feel, and in cloud the inner ear is a liar. Somewhere over the black ocean the Vimy stalled and fell into a spin.

They tumbled through the murk with no sense of attitude or altitude until the cloud finally broke open—revealing the ocean filling the windscreen, the aircraft nearly pointed at the waves. They were so low and so steeply banked they could hear the sea over the engines. Alcock hauled the airplane level just a few hundred feet, perhaps less, above the whitecaps.

Climbing Out on the Wing: Brown Fights the Ice

Conditions worsened as they climbed back up into sleet, snow, and freezing rain, and ice began building on the airframe. The engines’ gauges and air intakes were icing over, threatening to choke the engines and give false readings.

So Arthur Brown climbed out of the cockpit—bad leg and all—into the slipstream, in the dark, over the Atlantic, and chipped ice away with his bare hands and a knife. By some accounts he did this several times through the night.

Between those efforts, Brown still navigated. Whenever the clouds parted, he shot the sun or a star with his sextant and nudged Alcock back on course. A few degrees of error over 1,900 miles would mean missing Ireland entirely and running out of fuel over open water. Brown didn’t miss.

Landing in a Bog at Clifden, Ireland

At gray dawn, land appeared low on the horizon—the west coast of Ireland. They had crossed the ocean. Alcock brought the Vimy down over the little town of Clifden in County Galway, aiming for what looked like a flat green field.

It was a peat bog. The wheels touched, rolled a few feet, dug into the soft ground, and the Vimy pitched up onto its nose, tail in the air, after nearly 16 hours and 1,900 miles without a stop. Both men walked away bruised but unhurt. Locals who ran to the bog could scarcely believe these two soaked, frozen, deafened men had just flown from America.

What Happened to Alcock and Brown Afterward?

They won the £10,000 prize and were knighted by King George V within days—Sir John Alcock and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown—becoming, briefly, the most famous aviators in the world.

The aftermath turned tragic. In December 1919, just six months after the crossing, Alcock was killed at age 27 when he went down in fog near the French coast while ferrying a new aircraft to an airshow. Brown lived a long life but flew little afterward; losing his friend and the toll of the war and the flight weighed on him. The two names remain bound together forever for one impossible night in June.

Why the Flight Still Matters

Everything modern aviation takes for granted began with someone going first, in the dark, with worse equipment than any pilot today would accept. A modern oceanic crossing has satellite navigation accurate to a few feet, reliable turbine engines, a pressurized cabin, datalink, and weather radar. Alcock and Brown had a wet compass, a sextant, a man on the wing with a pocketknife, and raw nerve.

Every airliner that crosses the North Atlantic tonight is flying a path two half-frozen Englishmen proved survivable in a stripped-out war-surplus bomber. They didn’t follow a map of the way—they were the map.

The actual aircraft survived. It was dug out of the Irish bog and is on display today at the Science Museum in London, where you can stand beneath it and see how thin the wire is and how open that cockpit was.

Key Takeaways

Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight on June 14, 1919, eight years before Lindbergh’s 1927 solo crossing.
They flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber roughly 1,900 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland in about 16 hours, winning a £10,000 Daily Mail prize.
The flight nearly ended several times—a near-fatal spin toward the ocean, severe icing, and a lost radio—with Brown climbing onto the wing to chip away ice.
Both men were knighted, but Alcock died in an aircraft accident just six months later, at age 27.
Their Vickers Vimy survives and is displayed at the Science Museum in London.