The Curtiss NC-4, the First Transatlantic Flight, and the Flying Boat That History Left at Pensacola

On May 27, 1919, a Navy flying boat called the Curtiss NC-4 landed at Plymouth, England, completing the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Six crew members had navigated more than 3,600 miles of open ocean in stages, guided by a chain of 68 destroyers and whatever stars they could find through the fog. Charles Lindbergh wouldn’t make his famous solo crossing for another eight years - yet most people today couldn’t name a single member of the NC-4’s crew.

What Were the NC Boats?

The NC designation stood for Navy Curtiss - a partnership between the United States Navy and Glenn Curtiss, whose flying boats had already proven themselves as naval patrol aircraft during the war. Curtiss had built the first aircraft to take off from and land on a naval vessel and had set speed records. When the Navy needed someone to design an aircraft capable of crossing the Atlantic, the conversation started and ended with his company.

The design requirements were severe. The aircraft had to carry enough fuel for 1,200 miles of open ocean on a single leg, survive open-water landings in Atlantic swells, and keep its engines running for 15 hours or more at sustained power. Curtiss’s engineers chose a deep biplane hull - boat-shaped for rough-water operations - with four Liberty engines mounted above the center wing section in a tandem push-pull arrangement. Two engines faced forward, two faced aft, with counter-rotating propellers. The blade clearances had to be exact; a miscalculation would destroy them in under a second.

The resulting aircraft had a 126-foot wingspan - roughly the length of a Boeing 737 - and weighed nearly 28,000 pounds fully loaded. The fuel tanks held more than 1,700 gallons of gasoline. Four Liberty engines at sustained power produced a sound you felt in your chest from a hundred yards away. Four NC boats were built. One was destroyed in a hangar fire before the mission could begin. Three - NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4 - staged in Trepassey Bay, Newfoundland.

The Competition Behind the Mission

The Navy wasn’t officially competing for a prize. But the London Daily Mail had posted £10,000 for the first nonstop transatlantic crossing by air - a prize originally offered in 1913, suspended during the war, and now drawing competitors from both sides of the Atlantic.

The Navy’s plan called for staged fuel stops in the Azores and Lisbon, which disqualified them from the nonstop prize. But they intended to be first across the Atlantic by air regardless.

Other teams were already in motion. Harry Hawker, an Australian test pilot, and his navigator Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve had recently departed Newfoundland in a Sopwith Atlantic biplane. They covered roughly 1,400 miles before engine cooling problems forced them down into the ocean. A Danish cargo ship rescued both men, but the ship had no wireless radio - Britain received no word for more than a week. Hawker and Grieve had already been declared dead before the ship made port in Scotland with both men alive.

With the field temporarily clear, the NC boats were staged and ready. The only obstacle was the North Atlantic weather.

Waiting in Trepassey Bay

Trepassey Bay in May offers nothing pleasant. Fog rolled in every evening off the North Atlantic. Mechanics worked the floats around each aircraft, checking fuel lines and testing magnetos. Navigators bent over charts with parallel rules, cross-referencing lists of destroyer positions.

Sixty-eight American destroyers had been stationed across the North Atlantic - one roughly every 50 miles from Newfoundland to the Azores - each crew prepared to burn flares, fire star shells, and sweep searchlights to help the aircraft navigate. It was the most elaborate aviation support network ever assembled, and the crews in Trepassey understood it might still not be enough.

The crews waited five days for a weather window to open.

The Crew of NC-4

Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read commanded and navigated NC-4. His reputation in the Navy was for precision, methodical planning, and an almost unsettling calm under pressure - the officer who planned everything twice and never raised his voice.

His pilots were Lieutenant Elmer Stone, a Coast Guard officer with more open-water flying boat hours than almost anyone in the service, and Lieutenant Walter Hinton. Lieutenant James Breese served as engineering officer, so familiar with the Liberty engines by that point that he claimed to hear misfires before the instruments registered them. Ensign Herbert Rodd handled radio. Chief Machinist’s Mate Eugene Rhoads knew the aircraft’s mechanical systems with a thoroughness that reportedly alarmed the officers nominally responsible for them.

Six men. One flying boat. Twelve hundred miles of North Atlantic to the first stop.

The Flight: What Happened to NC-1 and NC-3

On the evening of May 16, 1919, all three NC boats started their engines and lifted off from Trepassey Bay.

NC-1 encountered heavy fog east of Newfoundland. After hours of lost position and false bearings, the commander chose to land on the ocean to reorient. NC-1 hit a heavy Atlantic swell, took serious structural damage, and issued a distress call. A Greek steamship located the crew; the flying boat was taken under tow but sank before reaching port. All hands survived.

NC-3, commanded by Commander John Towers - the senior officer of the entire operation - also encountered impossible fog and landed in swells heavy enough to prevent takeoff. The hull remained intact, but the aircraft was finished as a flying machine.

Towers did not call for rescue. He ordered the crew to rig a jury sail from fabric aboard the aircraft, got the remaining outboard engines running at low power, and began taxiing. On the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, in a damaged flying boat with no prospect of becoming airborne again, Towers navigated approximately 200 miles over two full days until the island of Faial appeared on the horizon. NC-3 motored into Ponta Delgada harbor under its own power, salt-encrusted and barely recognizable. The aircraft was too damaged to continue the crossing, but Commander Towers and his crew had arrived on their own terms. That story is almost never told, and it deserves considerably more attention than history has given it.

NC-4 Crosses the Atlantic

NC-4 found clearer air south of the worst weather. Read navigated by star shots when the sky cooperated and by the destroyer chain when it didn’t. After 15 hours and 18 minutes of sustained flight - a new record for overwater aviation - NC-4 settled onto the harbor at Horta in the Azores. The crew stepped onto the hull and went to work checking the aircraft.

They waited in the Azores for the next weather window to open.

On May 20 - the same calendar date that Charles Lindbergh would depart Roosevelt Field eight years later - NC-4 lifted off from the Azores and flew 9 hours and 26 minutes to Lisbon, Portugal. Portugal sent a destroyer as escort. The crowds along the Tagus River were enormous.

On May 27, 1919, NC-4 completed the final leg north to Plymouth, England. The Atlantic had been crossed by air for the first time in history.

When a British journalist asked Read what the crossing had been like, he is reported to have said: “Rather foggy in places. The destroyers were extremely helpful.”

Why History Moved On

The crew returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York that drew hundreds of thousands of people. Congress authorized special medals. President Wilson sent congratulations.

Then history moved on.

Three weeks after NC-4 arrived in Plymouth, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown crossed the Atlantic nonstop in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber - fighting icing, cloud, and a near-spiral that almost drove them into the ocean before they recovered at low altitude. They claimed the Daily Mail prize and dominated the headlines. The nonstop achievement had a drama the staged crossing hadn’t quite matched.

When Lindbergh departed Roosevelt Field on May 20, 1927, and landed at Le Bourget 33.5 hours later - alone, in a silver monoplane, with 200,000 people waiting in the dark - the image became the defining picture of transatlantic aviation. The world has never forgotten his name.

NC-4, which had done it first, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1924.

Where NC-4 Is Today

NC-4 eventually made its way to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida - and the depth of what’s waiting there is difficult to overstate.

The museum is free to the public, somehow, given a collection spanning 700 aircraft from the earliest days of naval aviation through the jet age and into the space program. It sits on the flight line at Naval Air Station Pensacola, where generations of Navy and Marine pilots first trained. Half the docents are retired naval aviators who flew jets and helicopters off carriers and will talk to you for as long as you’re willing to stay.

NC-4 hangs in the main atrium. Not a replica - the aircraft itself. The museum has made deliberate choices in favor of preservation over cosmetic restoration. More than a century of existence has left its marks on the structure, and those marks are part of what the aircraft is now.

Standing under that hull and looking up at a 126-foot wingspan, the scale of what six men did in May 1919 settles in slowly. Fifteen hours over open ocean at night. Two sister ships down on the surface. Dead reckoning and star shots and the occasional flicker of a destroyer’s searchlight through the fog. The constant thunder of four Liberty engines. The smell of oil, gasoline, and salt water in an open hull.

They crossed the Atlantic. Most of the world never quite got around to remembering.

The museum displays the crew biographies, the original navigation charts, photographs from Plymouth harbor, and the story of Towers taxiing NC-3 across two days of open ocean. All of it is there if you take time to look.

Key Takeaways

The Curtiss NC-4 completed the first transatlantic crossing by aircraft on May 27, 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh made his famous solo flight.
The NC boats were designed by Glenn Curtiss and powered by four 400-horsepower Liberty engines in a tandem push-pull configuration; only one of the three aircraft completed the crossing.
Commander John Towers taxied the damaged NC-3 approximately 200 miles across the open Atlantic over two full days rather than call for rescue - one of aviation history’s most overlooked feats.
Alcock and Brown’s nonstop crossing three weeks later and Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight captured public memory, leaving the NC-4 crew largely forgotten despite their historical priority.
NC-4 is on permanent display in the main atrium of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, free to the public.