John Alcock, Arthur Brown, and the Vickers Vimy That Crossed the Atlantic Eight Years Before Lindbergh

The first nonstop transatlantic flight was not made by Charles Lindbergh. On June 14, 1919, British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew a modified Vickers Vimy bomber from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland - 1,890 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes. Lindbergh’s famous crossing came eight years later.

What Was the Daily Mail Transatlantic Prize?

In 1913, the Daily Mail offered £10,000 - the equivalent of roughly $1 million to $1.5 million today - for the first aviators to complete a nonstop crossing of the North Atlantic. The prize went on hold when war broke out in 1914 and returned to the table only after the Armistice in November 1918.

Newfoundland became the logical staging ground. As the easternmost point of North America, it offered the shortest overwater route to the British Isles - still nearly 1,900 miles of open ocean.

Who Tried Before Alcock and Brown?

By spring 1919, Newfoundland had become an impromptu international aviation competition. Multiple crews shipped their aircraft over by sea, assembled them in borrowed fields, and watched each other.

Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve went first in May, flying a Sopwith Atlantic. Their engine overheated roughly a third of the way across and they ditched in the ocean. The Danish merchant vessel Mary pulled them out - but the ship had no wireless, and the world assumed both men were dead for six days. London prepared obituaries. When the Mary docked at the Orkney Islands and the truth emerged, the city rang church bells.

Frederick Raynham and Charles Morgan fared worse. Their Martinsyde Raymor groundlooped on takeoff, collapsed the undercarriage, and never left the field.

Who Were John Alcock and Arthur Brown?

John Alcock, born in Manchester, had been flying since before the war. He flew torpedo bombers in the Aegean theater, was shot down, and spent time as a prisoner of war in Boudja and later Constantinople. In captivity, he built model aircraft from scraps and thought about the future of flight. He was 26 years old at the time of the crossing.

Arthur Whitten Brown, born in Glasgow to American parents, trained as an electrical engineer before the war. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over Germany in 1915, wounded in the leg, and spent nearly three years in German prisoner of war camps. He used that time to teach himself aerial navigation from books passed through by the Red Cross - celestial theory with a hypothetical sextant, over a hypothetical ocean. He came home walking with a limp, knowing more about star-fix navigation than most men who had actually flown over open water.

They were matched to each other. Alcock was the instinctive stick-and-rudder pilot who could feel an airplane through the seat of his pants. Brown was the precise navigator who could work a position from one glimpse of Polaris through a gap in the clouds.

The Vickers Vimy: What They Flew

Their aircraft was a Vickers Vimy, originally designed as a heavy bomber for raids on Germany and completed just after the Armistice. It had a 68-foot wingspan and two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines, each producing 360 horsepower. The bomb bay had been converted to carry additional fuel tanks - the aircraft held nearly 865 gallons.

They stripped everything non-essential. What remained: a sextant, charts, emergency rations, and two stuffed toy cats.

The Takeoff from St. John’s

The field at St. John’s was not a proper aerodrome. It was short, uneven, and crossed by a drainage ditch. Alcock and Brown positioned the heavily loaded Vimy at the far end and used every available foot of the run.

The aircraft cleared the boundary fence with an estimated 30 to 50 feet to spare.

What Went Wrong Over the Atlantic

The first hours were manageable. Brown shot star sights through gaps in the cloud cover. The two Eagles ran with their characteristic deep thrum. Everything tracked within expectations.

Then the radio failed. A broken exhaust pipe had knocked out the wind-driven generator within the first hour. They were completely cut off - no one knew their position.

As night fell and the overcast thickened, they lost the horizon. The instruments of 1919 offered nothing like a modern gyroscopic attitude indicator. With a compass that swung in turbulence and an airspeed indicator vulnerable to ice, Alcock flew on instinct. They drifted into a slow, undetected spiral in the dark. The bank built gradually. The nose dropped. The airspeed climbed.

They broke out of the base of the overcast in a near-vertical bank, one wingtip pointed at the water. Wave tops were visible. Alcock pulled out. He estimated 50 feet to spare. Brown said he didn’t look - he was reading the instruments.

How Arthur Brown Dealt With the Ice

As they climbed back to altitude, temperature dropped and ice accumulated. The fuel flow indicators on the Vimy were small glass tubes mounted on the engine nacelles, readable only if you leaned out into the slipstream. In icing conditions, those tubes became coated and unreadable.

Arthur Brown climbed out of the cockpit.

In an open biplane, at altitude, over the North Atlantic, in the dark, he worked his way along the fuselage against the slipstream to reach the engine nacelles. He chipped ice from the fuel indicator tubes with a penknife, confirmed fuel was flowing, and climbed back to his seat.

He did this six times before dawn.

His wounded leg ached throughout every trip. He logged each instance in his navigation notes in flat, matter-of-fact handwriting. No commentary - just the action and the time. Alcock held the aircraft straight and level while it happened.

The Landing That Nearly Wasn’t

Dawn, June 15, 1919. Brown shot a sun sight and confirmed the Irish coast ahead. They crossed the Irish shoreline near Clifden, County Galway, 16 hours and 27 minutes after leaving Newfoundland.

Alcock scanned for a landing area. Below, on the edge of Clifden, was a flat green expanse that looked like a usable meadow.

It was Derrygimlagh Bog.

The moment the wheels touched, the nose went straight in. The Vimy pitched forward and buried both engines in peat up to the nacelles. Neither man was seriously hurt - the soft ground had absorbed what a harder surface might not have. Workers from the nearby Clifden Marconi wireless station walked out across the bog and found two oil-streaked men standing beside an overturned aircraft in apparently excellent spirits.

Brown telegraphed London from the Marconi office. 1,890 miles. 16 hours and 27 minutes. Nonstop. First.

Why This Matters for Pilots and Aviation History

King George V knighted both men within the week - Sir John Alcock, Sir Arthur Whitten Brown - two former prisoners of war decorated in a ceremony that felt like the inverse of everything the war had put them through.

Alcock was dead six months later. In December 1919, he flew a Vickers Viking amphibian to the Paris Air Show, hit fog near Rouen in northern France, clipped a hillside, and was killed. He was 26 years old. The North Atlantic had not collected him. A French hillside in low visibility did - the same cause that has taken pilots before and since.

Brown never flew again after Alcock’s death. He took an engineering position and lived quietly in Wales. His son, Arthur Junior, flew for the Royal Air Force and was killed in action in 1944. Brown died four years later, in 1948, at 62, reportedly from an accidental overdose of sleeping medication.

Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in May 1927 and became arguably the most famous person on earth. His solo crossing - 33 hours, no navigator, no second set of hands - was a genuinely different achievement and deserves its magnitude. But Alcock and Brown were first. By eight years.

Where the Evidence Sits Today

A stone cairn marks the Derrygimlagh landing site outside Clifden. The forward section of the original Vickers Vimy is at the Science Museum in London. A replica stands at Heathrow Airport, where hundreds of passengers pass it every hour without a second glance.

That is aviation’s particular problem with its own history. It moves fast enough to outrun its own memory.

Key Takeaways

• The first nonstop transatlantic flight was flown by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown on June 14–15, 1919 - not by Lindbergh in 1927.
• They covered 1,890 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes in a modified Vickers Vimy, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland.
• The £10,000 Daily Mail prize had been offered since 1913; at least two other crews failed during the same 1919 window.
• Brown climbed out of the open cockpit six times in icing conditions, at night, over the Atlantic, to clear fuel indicators with a penknife.
• Alcock died in a separate accident in December 1919 at age 26. Brown never flew again.

Note on Alcock’s age: The source script contains an internal inconsistency - describing Alcock as “thirty-six years old” during the crossing and “somewhere around twenty-six or twenty-seven years old” at death six months later. The historically accurate figure is 26: Alcock was born November 5, 1892, and died December 18, 1919. The article uses 26 consistently.