Alcock and Brown and the sixteen hours that crossed the Atlantic for the very first time

Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by air on June 15, 1919, flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland in 16 hours and 12 minutes. Their flight predated Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo crossing by nearly eight years, yet remains one of aviation’s most overlooked achievements.

Why Were Pilots Racing to Cross the Atlantic in 1919?

The Daily Mail newspaper had offered a prize of ten thousand British pounds — worth over a million in today’s money — since 1913 to the first crew to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. The Great War suspended the contest, but by mid-1919 it was back on, and surplus military aircraft gave pilots the machines to attempt it.

Several crews converged on Newfoundland that spring. Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve had already tried and ditched in the ocean. A Handley Page bomber was being assembled nearby. The pressure to launch was intense.

Who Were Alcock and Brown?

The two men brought complementary skills to the cockpit, though they could hardly have been more different.

John Alcock was a stocky, confident Englishman from Manchester. He had flown bombers and fighters during the war, been shot down over Turkey, and spent two years as a prisoner of war. He was a pure stick-and-rudder pilot — the kind who could feel what the airplane was doing through the controls before the instruments registered a thing.

Arthur Whitten Brown was born in Glasgow to American parents. Quiet and bookish, he walked with a limp from a war wound. Brown was not a natural aviator. He was an engineer who understood celestial navigation, dead reckoning, and drift calculations — the invisible math required to hold course across two thousand miles of open ocean with no landmarks, no radio beacons, and no margin for error.

They came together at the Vickers aircraft factory, which had a machine it believed could make the crossing.

What Airplane Did They Fly?

The Vickers Vimy was a twin-engine biplane originally built to bomb Berlin. It featured an open cockpit, two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines, and no concessions to comfort or long-range flight. Vickers stripped out the bomb racks, bolted in extra fuel tanks, and calculated that with enough fuel and favorable conditions, the Vimy could reach Ireland.

The airplane was shipped to St. John’s, Newfoundland, in crates. Finding a suitable takeoff field proved nearly impossible. The crew settled on a rough pasture called Lester’s Field, which had a stone wall at the far end and an uphill slope. They cleared rocks and filled ditches by hand before the aircraft could even attempt a takeoff roll.

The Takeoff and the Nightmare That Followed

On the afternoon of June 14, 1919, with 865 gallons of fuel aboard and a gross weight exceeding 13,000 pounds, Alcock pushed both throttles forward. The takeoff was barely controlled — the Vimy clipped treetops, scraped over the stone wall, and sagged toward the rooftops of St. John’s before slowly clawing for altitude.

Once past the coastline, there was no turning back.

Within hours, they flew into fog so thick it swallowed the airplane completely. They carried no artificial horizon and no reliable gyroscopic instruments. Alcock flew on a basic airspeed indicator, a suspect altimeter, and whatever he could feel through the control stick.

The fog became cloud, the cloud became rain, and the rain became sleet. Somewhere over the black Atlantic in the middle of the night, they entered a massive storm cell. The Vimy was thrown violently, and Alcock lost control. The airplane entered a spin.

They fell from roughly 4,000 feet. At approximately 50 feet above the water, they broke out of the cloud base. Alcock saw whitecaps and realized the ocean was tilted at a wild angle in his windscreen — they were nearly inverted. He hauled the Vimy level and pulled back, skimming the wave tops so close that Brown later said he could taste the salt spray.

How Did Brown Deice the Engines Mid-Flight?

Ice accumulated on the wings, the rigging wires, and the engine intakes. The Vimy carried no deicing equipment — none existed. Brown climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing of the biplane, flying at roughly 90 knots over the North Atlantic in a freezing storm at night, and hacked ice off the engine intakes with a pocket knife. He did this multiple times, gripping a strut with one hand while wind tore at his leather coat.

Meanwhile, Alcock’s control cables were freezing, the ailerons grew sluggish, and the exhaust pipe on the starboard engine cracked, changing the engine’s pitch. There was no way to repair it in flight. They pressed on.

How Did Brown Navigate Across the Ocean?

Brown relied on dead reckoning and fleeting glimpses of the stars when gaps appeared in the overcast. He would catch Polaris or Vega through a brief opening, shoot a sextant reading with numb fingers, scribble calculations on his knee pad, and estimate their position. For most of the crossing, it was educated guessing — backed by skill and mathematics, but guessing nonetheless.

When the weather cleared near dawn, Brown spotted two small islands off the nose. They were the islands off the coast of Galway, Ireland — exactly where his navigation said they should be. His dead reckoning and star shots, performed in darkness with frozen hands, had brought them within a few miles of their target across nearly 1,900 miles of open ocean.

The Landing at Clifden

They crossed the Irish coast at Clifden, County Galway. Alcock spotted what appeared to be a smooth, flat meadow near the Marconi wireless station and set up his approach.

It was not a meadow. It was a bog.

The wheels dug into the soft ground immediately. The Vimy pitched nose-first, tail in the air, both propellers shattered, the lower wing crumpled into the Irish mud. Alcock and Brown were thrown forward but walked away without serious injury.

The crossing was complete: 16 hours and 12 minutes, approximately 1,900 miles, at an average groundspeed of about 115 miles per hour.

Why Did Lindbergh Get the Credit?

The date was June 15, 1919 — six full years before Charles Lindbergh’s famous 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh’s achievement was remarkable in its own right: solo, 33 hours, with the psychological burden of flying alone. But Alcock and Brown did it first, in an open cockpit, without gyroscopic instruments, in weather that would ground a modern airliner, with one crew member physically climbing onto the wing to clear ice with a knife.

Yet public memory consolidated around Lindbergh. The 1919 crossing, achieved just months after the armistice when the world was still absorbing the scale of the war’s destruction, never captured the lasting public imagination the way the Spirit of St. Louis would eight years later.

What Happened to Alcock and Brown?

King George V knighted both men within a week of the flight. Winston Churchill personally presented the Daily Mail prize.

Sir John Alcock was killed six months later, in December 1919, in a crash in France while delivering a new Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Air Show. He was 27 years old.

Sir Arthur Whitten Brown never flew again as pilot-in-command. He returned to engineering, lived quietly, and died in 1948. He rarely spoke publicly about the flight, and when he did, he gave all the credit to Alcock.

A monument to both men stands at Heathrow Airport in London, where millions of passengers walk past it each year on their way to board a nonstop transatlantic flight — most with no idea what those two names represent.

Key Takeaways

• Alcock and Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight on June 15, 1919, eight years before Lindbergh, flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland.
• They flew 1,900 miles in 16 hours and 12 minutes in an open cockpit with no gyroscopic instruments, surviving a spin to within 50 feet of the ocean at night.
• Brown climbed onto the wing multiple times in flight to clear ice from the engine intakes with a pocket knife — there was no deicing equipment.
• Brown’s celestial navigation, performed with frozen hands through brief gaps in the clouds, brought them within miles of their target after nearly 1,900 miles over open ocean.
• Alcock was killed in a flying accident just six months later at age 27; Brown never flew as pilot-in-command again.

Further Reading

Brendan Lynch’s book Yesterday We Were in America is the definitive account of the flight. The Science Museum in London holds artifacts from the crossing, including Brown’s original navigation log.