Alcock and Brown, the Vickers Vimy, and the First Nonstop Crossing of the Atlantic Eight Years Before Lindbergh Got the Glory

John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew nonstop across the North Atlantic on June 14–15, 1919 - eight years before Charles Lindbergh made the crossing that history remembers. In an open-cockpit converted bomber with primitive instruments and no reliable radio, they covered approximately 1,900 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes. It remains one of the most consequential and underrecognized achievements in aviation history.

The Daily Mail Prize That Set the Stage

The Daily Mail had offered £10,000 - roughly half a million dollars in today’s money - for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, a prize it had dangled since 1913. It sat unclaimed through the war years. The moment the armistice was signed, competitors began arriving in Newfoundland, the closest land in the Western Hemisphere to Europe.

By spring 1919, four serious contenders were in the field: teams from Martinsyde, Sopwith, Handley Page, and Vickers. The Sopwith entry, a biplane called the Atlantic, launched first in mid-May. Pilot Harry Hawker and navigator Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve made it 1,100 miles before a clogged engine filter forced them to ditch in open water. They were rescued by a passing Danish steamer and awarded a £5,000 consolation prize. The £10,000 remained unclaimed.

Who Were Alcock and Brown?

Captain John Alcock was a Manchester-born pilot and Royal Naval Air Service veteran. Shot down over Turkey in 1917, he spent nearly two years as a prisoner of war - and spent that time reading everything he could find about long-distance flight. When the war ended, he went directly to Vickers and asked for their transatlantic entry.

Lieutenant Arthur Brown was built differently: Scottish, methodical, trained as an observer and navigator. He had been shot down over Germany and spent most of the war doing calculations by hand in a POW camp. His celestial navigation was extraordinary - cold, precise, and built to hold under pressure. When he and Alcock were paired, they had little time to get to know each other. The combination was exactly right anyway.

The Vickers Vimy: A WWI Bomber Crosses an Ocean

The aircraft was a Vickers Vimy, a World War One heavy bomber originally built to reach Berlin - a mission the war ended before it could fly. It was a biplane with a wingspan of just over 68 feet, with open cockpits separated from the slipstream by nothing but a windscreen.

For the transatlantic attempt, Vickers stripped out all non-essential weight, replaced the bomb bays with two fuel tanks holding 865 gallons of petrol, and installed two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines producing 360 horsepower each. These were V-12, water-cooled powerplants - the finest aero engines Britain could produce at the time. The fully loaded aircraft weighed nearly 13,000 pounds.

The instruments were primitive by any modern standard: a magnetic compass, an airspeed indicator, and an altimeter. There was no radar, no reliable radio, no weather forecast. Brown would navigate by dead reckoning, a drift meter, and celestial observation when the sky allowed.

The Takeoff from St. John’s

The field at Lester’s Field, St. John’s, Newfoundland had been carved out of a hillside and was barely long enough. The first takeoff attempt failed. After repacking and adjusting weight distribution, Alcock and Brown lifted off on the morning of June 14, 1919, at 13:58 Greenwich Mean Time. Witnesses said they cleared the trees at the far end by a matter of feet.

Sixteen Hours of the Worst Weather in the North Atlantic

What followed was, by any reasonable measure, one of the worst flying experiences in recorded aviation history.

Within the first hour, the exhaust pipe on the starboard engine partially failed. It was still running - just louder, rougher, throwing heat the wrong direction. There was nothing to do at altitude but keep going.

Atlantic fog set in around the four-hour mark. Not patchy coastal fog - the kind that fills everything and can be felt on the back of your hand. Alcock was flying instruments in an aircraft designed to be flown visually, with gyroscopic instruments that were basic and, as it turned out, unreliable.

Somewhere in the night, they lost spatial orientation entirely. The aircraft entered a spiral dive. Alcock recovered with the altimeter unwinding through 1,000 feet, the ocean materializing out of the fog no more than 100 feet below. A few more seconds in the dive and there would have been no story to tell.

Arthur Brown’s Six Climbs Into the Dark

As the aircraft climbed back to altitude, they flew into icing conditions. The air intake scoops on the engines were accumulating ice rapidly, and the engines began losing power.

Arthur Brown climbed out of his cockpit six times during the crossing. In the dark, at altitude, in icing conditions, over the open Atlantic, he crawled along the fuselage to the engine nacelles and chipped the ice away with a knife. Each time, a single slip would have been fatal. Each time, Alcock held the aircraft as steady as he could while Brown cleared the intakes so the engines could breathe.

There is a photograph of Brown taken after the landing. His face looks like a man who lived twenty years in a single night.

They also flew through snow, through thunderstorms, and through fog dense enough that Alcock later said he could not see the nose of the aircraft. Through all of it, Brown kept his charts, kept his calculations, shot stars through gaps in the cloud when he could find them, and kept the nose pointed at Ireland.

The Landing in Derrygimla Bog

When they reached the Irish coast, Brown identified what appeared to be a suitable flat green field near the village of Clifden, County Galway, and told Alcock to set it down there.

It was not a field.

It was Derrygimla Bog. The Vickers Vimy touched down, rolled forward, and the landing gear sank immediately into the soft Irish peat. The nose pitched hard. The aircraft stopped fast. Alcock and Brown - who had just completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight in history - were thrown forward into their instrument panels, nose-down in a bog, the Rolls-Royce engines ticking cool in the Irish morning.

They were unhurt. Total elapsed time: 16 hours and 27 minutes. Distance: approximately 1,900 miles. Average speed: roughly 115 mph.

Recognition, Knighthood, and a Story That Ended Too Soon

Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and Air, presented the Daily Mail prize on June 18, 1919, calling the flight “the most memorable event in the whole history of aviation.” On June 21, King George V knighted both men at Windsor Castle. They became Sir John Alcock and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown.

The Vickers Vimy was donated to the Science Museum in London, where it still hangs in the Making the Modern World gallery. It is the same aircraft that crossed the Atlantic - bog dirt reportedly still visible on the undercarriage if you know where to look.

On December 18, 1919 - six months after the crossing - John Alcock was killed. He was delivering a new Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Air Show when he flew into fog over Normandy and crashed near Rouen. He was 27 years old.

He had survived being shot down over Turkey. He had survived two years as a prisoner of war. He had survived a spiral dive over the Atlantic at 100 feet in the middle of the night. He was killed on a delivery flight in peacetime France.

Brown lived until 1948, serving in the Second World War in a logistics capacity. He never flew as a pilot again after the Atlantic crossing. His son, Arthur Whitten Brown the second, was killed in the Second World War flying with the Royal Air Force.

Why Alcock and Brown Matter More Than History Gives Them Credit For

Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927 - eight years after Alcock and Brown. His was a remarkable solo achievement in an aircraft no less demanding, no less dangerous, and he deserved every recognition he received.

But Lindbergh flew in daylight for most of the crossing, with eight additional years of technological development - development that Alcock and Brown helped make possible. He had the benefit of knowing the crossing was achievable, because two men in an open cockpit had already done it.

What Alcock and Brown proved in June 1919 was not simply that the Atlantic could be crossed. It was that aviation had entered an era where the limiting factor was no longer the machine - it was whether the humans inside it had the skill and nerve to see it through.

They had both.

Key Takeaways

John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight on June 14–15, 1919, eight years before Lindbergh’s celebrated 1927 crossing.
Their aircraft, the Vickers Vimy, was a converted WWI bomber carrying 865 gallons of fuel and powered by twin Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines at 360 hp each.
The 16-hour-27-minute flight included a near-fatal spiral dive to within 100 feet of the ocean, engine icing, snow, thunderstorms, and a partial exhaust failure on the starboard engine.
Arthur Brown climbed out of his cockpit six times in icing conditions to chip ice from the engine intakes by hand - each time over open ocean, in the dark, with no safety equipment.
The original Vickers Vimy still exists and hangs in the Science Museum in London’s Making the Modern World gallery.