The Curtiss NC Four, the Flying Boat That Crossed the Atlantic Eight Years Before Lindbergh, and the Forgotten Giant at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola

The Curtiss NC-4 flew from Long Island to Plymouth, England in May 1919, completing the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Eight years before Charles Lindbergh made the same ocean famous, a six-man Navy crew did it first. The aircraft that carried them still exists, hanging above the main floor of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, its 126-foot wingspan barely fitting inside the building.

What Was the Curtiss NC-4?

The designation NC stood for Navy-Curtiss, reflecting a joint program between the United States Navy and the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Four NC-class flying boats were built; the NC-2 was cannibalized for parts to support the remaining three - a practical reality of aviation in that era.

The NC-4 was powered by four Liberty Twelve engines, each producing approximately 400 horsepower. The Liberty Twelve was a standardized American powerplant designed for rapid mass production during World War I. It became the backbone of American military aviation in the war’s final years.

With a loaded weight of roughly 28,000 pounds, the NC-4 required a long water run and favorable conditions just to get airborne. It was a brute-force crossing machine, not a nimble one.

Why the Navy Wanted to Cross the Atlantic

The idea had strategic roots. In 1917, with German submarines sinking Allied ships at a rate that threatened to starve Britain, planners in Washington considered basing long-range patrol aircraft in Britain to hunt submarines far out in the open ocean - covering water no surface ship could reach in time. The war ended before that plan was implemented, but the question of whether the crossing was even possible remained.

The Navy turned to Glenn Curtiss, arguably the finest seaplane and flying boat designer in the world at that moment, with experience building water-based aircraft stretching back to before 1910. The NC program was the result.

The Crew

Six men flew the NC-4:

Lieutenant Commander Albert “Putty” Read - commanding officer, known throughout the Navy for methodical precision
Lieutenant Elmer Stone - Coast Guard officer on loan to the Navy, pilot
Lieutenant Walter Hinton - pilot
Lieutenant James Breese - engineering
Ensign Herbert Rodd - radio
Chief Machinist’s Mate Rasmus Christensen - responsible for keeping the Liberty engines running

Read’s nickname came from his complexion, not any deficiency of character.

The Flight: Rockaway Beach to Plymouth

On May 8, 1919, all three flying boats - NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4 - lifted off from Rockaway Beach on Long Island and headed northeast. The Navy had staged 68 destroyers in a line across the North Atlantic, from Newfoundland to the Azores, each ship lit up at night with searchlights pointing skyward to give the aircrews a visible chain of light to follow. It was the most elaborate safety net aviation had seen. It still wasn’t enough.

The fleet stopped at Halifax, Nova Scotia, then at Trepassey Bay in Newfoundland. NC-4 arrived at Trepassey behind the others, delayed earlier in the trip by engine trouble, with real concern that the other aircraft would depart without her. They caught up.

On May 16, 1919, all three departed Trepassey Bay over the open Atlantic. Clouds, fog, and haze moved in across the middle of the ocean. The destroyer chain below was invisible most of the time. Navigation was dead reckoning - heading, airspeed, elapsed time, and experience.

NC-1 went down approximately 200 miles short of the Azores after the crew lost situational awareness in the fog. High swells damaged the hull on landing. Everyone survived; the crew was rescued by the Greek freighter Ionia. The aircraft was lost.

NC-3, carrying Commander John Towers - the expedition’s overall commander - came down in the water about 45 miles from the island of Faial. Hull damaged. Everyone survived. With no ability to get airborne again, Towers and his crew did something that had never been attempted: they taxied. For two days, they drove that damaged flying boat across 200 miles of open ocean, navigating by dead reckoning on the surface, and arrived under their own power at Ponta Delgada in the Azores.

NC-4 stayed in the air. Read and his crew navigated through the deteriorating conditions and reached Horta in the Azores on May 17, 1919 - the only one of the three to arrive as intended.

After refueling and resting, NC-4 pressed on. May 27, the crew set down in Lisbon, Portugal. May 31, they reached Plymouth, England.

The reception was extraordinary - ships in the harbor, crowds at the waterfront, official delegations. The city understood that something had changed. The ocean was smaller than it had been the week before.

Why Lindbergh Gets the Credit

Three weeks after NC-4 landed at Plymouth, two British aviators - John Alcock and Arthur Brown - flew a Vickers Vimy bomber nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland. They won the Daily Mail prize of £10,000 for the first nonstop transatlantic flight. They crashed on landing in a bog, but they got there, and the distinction drove the headlines.

NC-4 had stopped in the Azores. That single word - nonstop - redirected the prizes, the newspaper front pages, and eventually the history books.

Then, eight years later, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone - 33.5 hours, no co-pilot, no fleet of destroyers below him. 100,000 people met him at Le Bourget. That story absorbed everything that came before it.

None of that diminishes what Lindbergh accomplished. A solo Atlantic crossing with a compass and a Ryan monoplane is one of the extraordinary individual acts in aviation history. But in 1919, nobody knew the crossing could be done at all. Three aircraft tried; one arrived under its own power. When Read and his crew lifted off the water at Trepassey Bay and pointed northeast over the dark ocean, they were flying into the genuinely unknown - no guarantee, no certainty, just the willingness to go.

Visiting the NC-4 in Pensacola

The NC-4 is on permanent display at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. The hull has been carefully restored; four replica Liberty engines are mounted where the originals once ran. The full 126-foot wingspan barely fits inside the building.

Admission is free. The museum covers virtually every era of naval aviation, from the biplanes that flew off the first carriers to the jets that flew combat in Vietnam - dozens of aircraft displayed in formation, frozen in flight. The NC-4 is older than most of them, bigger than almost all of them, and carrying a story that rarely gets the room it deserves.

Key Takeaways

The Curtiss NC-4 completed the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic in May 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh, with a six-man Navy crew.
The flight departed Rockaway Beach, Long Island on May 8 and reached Plymouth, England on May 31, with stops in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Azores, and Lisbon.
Of three NC flying boats that attempted the crossing, only NC-4 arrived at the Azores under its own power. NC-3’s crew made separate history by taxiing their damaged aircraft 200 miles across the open ocean.
Alcock and Brown’s nonstop crossing three weeks later - and Lindbergh’s solo crossing eight years later - overshadowed NC-4 in public memory, but neither erases what came first.
The original NC-4 is on free display at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida.