Alcock and Brown, the Vickers Vimy, and the First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic in Nineteen Nineteen

Ask most pilots who first flew nonstop across the Atlantic and they’ll say Charles Lindbergh. They’re wrong. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919, flying a converted Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland - eight years before Lindbergh reached Paris in 1927.

Who Were Alcock and Brown?

John Alcock was the pilot: a Manchester-born airman, cheerful and natural on the controls, who had flown bombers during the Great War and spent time as a prisoner after being shot down over Turkey. Flying was simply what he was built for.

Arthur Whitten Brown was the navigator, and a very different character - quieter, an engineer by training, also shot down during the war. A crash left him with a permanent bad leg, and he walked with a cane for the rest of his life. But Brown could do the one thing the flight depended on: find his way across an ocean with a compass, a watch, and the stars.

That skill mattered more than anything. In 1919 there were no radio beacons over the Atlantic, no controllers, and no way to fix your position from the ground. Once you left the Newfoundland coast, your position was whatever the navigator said it was. If he was wrong, you flew until the fuel ran out and the ocean took you.

Why Did They Attempt the Flight?

The spring of 1919 came just months after the war ended. Four years of conflict had transformed aviation from a county-fair novelty into a serious machine, with reliable engines, capable airframes, and thousands of battle-trained pilots suddenly home with nowhere to point their nerve.

There was also a prize. The London newspaper the Daily Mail had offered £10,000 to the first crew to fly nonstop across the Atlantic - from anywhere in North America to anywhere in the British Isles - in under 72 hours. In 1919 that was a fortune, and the glory was worth even more.

Crews gathered in Newfoundland, the far eastern tip of North America and the closest jumping-off point to Europe. Several teams tried that spring. Some ditched in the sea. Some never got the chance to launch.

The Aircraft: A Vickers Vimy Bomber

Their airplane was a Vickers Vimy, originally designed as a heavy bomber to carry loads to Germany. The war ended before it saw much of that work, leaving this big, honest biplane in search of a purpose.

Its specifications were formidable for the era:

Two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines, 360 horsepower each
A wingspan of more than 60 feet
Fabric stretched over a wooden frame
An open cockpit - no canopy, no heater, no real windshield

The crew stripped out the bomb gear and packed the aircraft with extra fuel tanks instead. Fully loaded, the Vimy weighed roughly six tons, and all of it had to stagger off a rough, sloping strip carved out of a Newfoundland hillside called Lester’s Field, with stone walls and a stand of trees waiting at the far end.

What Happened During the Crossing?

They launched on the afternoon of June 14, 1919. The takeoff alone nearly ended the attempt - the heavy Vimy clawed off the grass so slowly that onlookers were sure she’d never clear the trees. She staggered into the air with feet to spare and headed out over the water.

The trouble started almost immediately. The wind-driven generator powering their wireless radio failed, leaving them unable to send or receive a single message. They were mute and deaf over the ocean.

Then the weather closed in. The North Atlantic threw fog, towering cloud, rain, sleet, and snow at them - all of it coming sideways into an open cockpit at 80 to 90 miles an hour. For hours at a stretch, Brown had no sun and no stars to shoot with his sextant. Just gray, in every direction, with no horizon at all.

The Spin That Nearly Killed Them

Deep in the cloud that night, the Vimy stalled and fell into a spin. Without a horizon or an artificial gyro, Alcock had no way to tell up from down - only the changing note of the wind and a tumbling compass. They spun out of the bottom of the cloud so low that Brown said afterward he could see the whitecaps and taste the salt spray. Alcock leveled off with the sea almost brushing the wheels and climbed away.

Brown Climbing Out to Chip the Ice

Higher up, the cold became the enemy. Ice built on the wings and, more dangerously, on the engine gauges that told them the Eagles were running properly. The story Brown himself told is that he climbed out of the open cockpit into a freezing 100-mile-an-hour slipstream, thousands of feet over the Atlantic at night, to chip the ice off those gauges by hand - more than once. A man who needed a cane on the ground, out on the wing over the ocean, so the engines would keep singing.

They ate cold sandwiches, drank coffee and a little whisky against the cold, and traded off flying hour after hour. They even carried two small stuffed toy cats as mascots - a reminder that these two war veterans were human, and scared, and went anyway.

Where Did They Land?

Somewhere in the night, Brown finally got a break in the cloud and a glimpse of the stars - just long enough to shoot the sextant and fix their position. His navigation, worked out with a pencil and the math in his head, proved very nearly perfect.

As the sun rose on June 15, 1919, they sighted land: two small islands and then the green coast of County Galway, Ireland, right where Brown had predicted. They had crossed nearly 1,900 miles of open ocean, nonstop, in about 16 hours.

The Atlantic had one last joke. Near the town of Clifden, they spotted what looked like a flat green field and set up to land. It wasn’t a field - it was a soft peat bog. The wheels dug in, and the Vimy pitched up onto her nose in the mud, tail in the air. Neither man was hurt. Because they had carried a small sack of mail, their landing also counts as the first transatlantic airmail delivery.

What Happened to Them Afterward?

Within days, King George V knighted both men - Sir John Alcock and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown. They collected the £10,000 Daily Mail prize and, for a brief moment, were the two most famous aviators alive.

The story turns sad quickly. Alcock was dead within six months - in December 1919, he ran into fog while flying a new aircraft to an airshow in France and went down in a field. The Atlantic couldn’t kill him, but a patch of fog on a routine flight did. Brown, shaken by the loss of his friend, largely stopped flying and lived out his years quietly.

Then the wider world did what it so often does - it forgot. Eight years later, Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris swallowed up the memory of the two men who had already crossed the ocean the hard way, side by side, in the dark.

Can You Still See the Aircraft Today?

Yes. The actual Vickers Vimy that Alcock and Brown flew was pulled from the Irish bog, repaired, and now hangs in the Science Museum in London. You can stand beneath it and look up at the fabric, the wire, and the two Rolls-Royce Eagles that carried two men across an ocean on a June night in 1919.

Key Takeaways

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919, eight years before Lindbergh’s 1927 solo crossing.
They flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber with two 360-hp Rolls-Royce Eagle engines and an open cockpit, covering nearly 1,900 miles in about 16 hours.
The flight faced a failed radio, a near-fatal spin, and severe icing - Brown reportedly climbed onto the wing mid-flight to chip ice from the engine gauges.
They landed nose-down in a peat bog near Clifden, Ireland, on June 15, 1919, unhurt, also completing the first transatlantic airmail delivery.
Both were knighted and won the £10,000 Daily Mail prize; the original aircraft is preserved at the Science Museum in London.