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| New York Sun, 16-June-1919 |
ALCOCK AND BROWN FL Y SAFEL Y TO IRELAND;
SPAN 1,932 MILES OVER SEA IN 972 MINUTES;
"JOURNEY A TERRIBLE ONE," SAYS ALCOCK;
COULD NOT SEE THE SUN, MOON OR STARS
British Aviators Land at Clifden in
County Galway in Slightly More
Than 16 Hours, a Record Time
for Airplane to Maintain Speed
RECEIVE $50,000 PRIZE FOR FEAT;
LONDON WILD WITH JOY AT NEWS
They Descend With Crash Into Bog Mistaken in the Mist for Smooth Turf
Occupants Unhurt and Machine
Only Slightly Damaged
RADIO USELESS FROM THE OUTSET
Alcock Reports by Telegraph to London and
Awaits Arrival of Officials to Verify
Flight He and Brown Suffered
Only From Fatigue
LONDON, June 15. -- Flying- further than man has ever flown in airplane before, fighting their way through blinding mist and fog over the gray Atlantic, with wealth and glory for success and death for failure, Capt. Jack Alcock and Lieut. Arthur W. Brown won their way to Ireland to-day.
Their achievement, the first crossing of the broad Atlantic in a single flight, is a great victory for Vickers biplane and Rolls-Royce engine, for pilot and navigator and for Great Britain and America, but back of it is the greatest victory of all, the victory of the airplane, unheard of a scant seventeen years ago, but now unanswerably proved a revolutionizing force in man's life. If this much can be accomplished in less than a score of years what may not the future bring? the thoughtful here are asking.
From the little town of Clifden, in County Galway, Ireland, there flashed by wire to London a few terse words from the partners in the daring enterprise, giving a scanty announcement of the accomplishment of the great feat. The flight of 1,932 land miles from St. John's to Clifden was made, according to the adventurers' own reckoning, in sixteen hours and twelve minutes. This indicates a speed of approximately 120 miles an hour, two miles in every sixty seconds ticked off by their chronometer, for the whole great distance over the unfriendly ocean lying below them. Meagre as was the information reaching London, there was enough to indicate that the flight was a desperate battle to the finish through day and night by the fliers for life and fame against the unrelenting natural forces against them.
ENCOUNTERED BLINDING FOGS.
From the gray sea beneath them rose up the most dangerous and most dreaded foe of flying man, fog. Blinding and at the same time destroying all sense of equilibrium and direction, it raised an intangible yet fearful barrier to the speeding plane. It was this same treacherous barrier that brought two of the three American seaplanes which first ventured the transatlantic flight down defeated despite the bravest efforts of their crews.
Capt. Alcock and Lieut. Brown fought against the shrouding mist together, the one to keep the plane upright in the air, the other to prevent her from wandering from her course to disaster. From sea level to two miles above the wave crests the Vickers bomber rose and fell to find a strata not shrouded with the ghastly white vapor their aerial Instincts hated and feared.
How long I hey roared defiantly through the mist is not yet known, but it is probable that it haunted them to the end, when the airplane dashed out of the clutch of the ocean over the green turf of Ireland. Even over the land it is probable that the mist persevered to some degree in its effort to bring disaster to the daring pair, for Capt. Alcock tried in vain to find a suitable landing place for the big bomber. All he sought was a smooth field, but he could find none.
The plane hummed in over the coast line of County Galway and circled about the wireless aerials of the great Clifden wireless station, vainly seeking a long meadow. The sudden appearance of the great airplane, whose size and markings proved it to be none other than the machine which faded from man's view and ken sixteen hours before, thrilled the wireless men on watch as they had never been thrilled before, and they dashed out to greet and aid the fliers.
The poor visibility dulled Capt. Alcock's keen eyesight, and he selected what appeared to be a fairly smooth stretch of turf. As he brought the tail and landing wheels gently downward The machine bounced and crashed down again. The spot, so smooth from above in the poor light, was actually a rough bog, inevitably the plane crashed, breaking the landing gear and damaging the fuselage.
The wireless men who rushed to the damaged machine found both men somewhat dazed and both deafened by the unceasing roar of the engines, which had steadily beat upon their ear drums during the long hours of day and night. The landing was made at 9 :40 A. M. British summer time.
Despite their condition the men were able to climb out of the cramped cockpit, in which they must have endured mental and physical tortures, and walk to the wireless station, where they telegraphed the news to their friends. They had breakfast -- a hearty breakfast and an unexpected breakfast -- for the two had promised themselves and their friends in Newfoundland was "luncheon one day in St. John's, luncheon next day in Ireland."
"This is the best way to cross the Atlantic," Lieut. Brown commented after he had taken the fine edge off his appetite with a real Irish meal.
Report He Flew Upside Down.
At times, despite the great skill of Capt. Alcock, skill that brought him safely through many hours of flying in the flimsy mac-bines of the pre-war era, and through the many dangers of wartime aviation, the plane all but crashed into the sea in spin or nose dive. Each time his mind and body acting together In perfect unison brought the plane back to the horizontnal once more, despite the fact that all around him stretched the white blanket.
It was reported here that Capt. Alcock even flew upside down for a time near the surface of the water, hut this is doubted, because not even his great skill could right tbc great bomber In time to escape a plunge into the water if this were so. The big bombing planes are not built for "stunting," and bis engine must have stopped In such circumstances, their gas supply from the upper wing cut off by the inversion almost immediately. Planes that can fly upside down have pressure gasolene feeds. The gas is in one tank in such a machine, the tank firmly secured in place. On the machine Alcock flew the gas fed by gravity from the upper wing tank, and the heavy tanks probably would have torn loose from the fuselage had the machine been inverted for more than a second.
Radio Sending Apparatus Injured.
Capt. Alcock explained the silence of the radio of the airplane, a silence which had filled their friends and, indeed the people of two waiting continents, with dread by the explanation that shortly after the start the little windmill or propeller which operated the generator of the apparatus had blown completely off in the great blast of the propellers soon after the airplane left Newfoundland. This prevented the using of the sending apparatus, but wireless signals could he heard In the north Atlantic.
"We were much Jammed by strong wireless signals not intended for us," he added.
Capt. Alcock also despatched immediately official notification that he had landed and requested instructions of the Aero Club as to what they should do next. In this message the pilot merely gave the time of the flight, sixteen hours and twelve minutes. Seventy-two hours from the coast line of Newfoundland or other island or part of North America to the coast line of the British Isle was allowed to contestants In the Daily Mail $50,000 prize flight, but the Vickers had needed less than a fourth of that time to win.
Inspector Is on the Way.
"Keep machine Intact until observer arrives," the Aero Club telegraphed in reply to Capt. Alcock. It is necessary for the winning of the contest that an officer of the Royal Air Force must identify certain marks placed on the machine on the other side of the Atlantic. The Air Ministry said that probably one of the officers of the air service would leave Dublin by airplane to speed across Ireland to relieve the weary teammates, but so far no word that this has been done has reached here.
The speed made by the plane indicates that the gale of thirty or forty miles an hour which speeded the fliers eastward on their trip when they left Signal Hill behind them must have continued to help them for some lime on their long flight or else they encountered with the fog and drizzle another favorable wind further out.
The wind at the start of the trip was of great service to the two voyagers, for not only did It help lift the heavily laden plane off the landing field, but it aided In the most difficult part of the flight, the first miles in which the plane, with speeding engines, dragged Its great weight of fuel heavily through the air. Disaster was more to be feared at this stage of the flight, when the engines were not yet warmed to their task, than at any other. As It happened, however, fog and not the burden of the overloaded plane was the principal difficulty of the trip.
Alcock's Hopes Exceeded.
How greatly the flight exceeded the expectations of Capt. Alcock is seen by the fact that he said before the start he hoped to average eighty-five miles an hour, startlng at about seventy or seventy-five and speeding the lightened plane at the end of the trip. Actually he made thirty five miles an hour more than he had hoped, which compensated somewhat for the doubled danger brought by the fog.
The words two miles a minute convey more of the idea of the speed made by the plane throughout the jump across the ocean than does 120 miles an hour, but the great speed is even better emphasized by saying that in each second of that long flight the great plane dashed 176 feet nearer her goal. Neither the fastest express train nor the swiftest automobile could hope to cover more than half the two thousand miles under ordinary conditions on the ground In the same time.
Remarkable as the long flight would be even under perfect weather conditions, it is even more creditable to the dauntless teammates because of the mist which threatened them. Skilled pilots here who have themselves bucked mist and drizzle on the battle front in France are most enthusiastic in their praise of Capt. Alcock, for to them the fog is a real enemy, more hated than by seamen. In that blinding screen Capt. Alcock very easily might have so lost his air developed sense of equilibrium that the biplane would dive straight downward into the sea before either man, lulled by the monotony of the unceasing drone of the motors and the unchanging force of the wind beating upon their helmetted heads, realised anything was wrong.
Brown's Task Made Difficult.
To Lieut. Brown equal if not greater praise is given, for his was the difficult task of heading the swaying, wind tossed airplane direct toward Ireland. He had to face and vanquish the ordinary difficulties of navigation and then the multiplied difficulties of taking sight in the unstable craft, of calculating the varying speeds and of figuring the direction and speed of the wind by observing how far from the true course the plane drifted. This latter he could only determine by the rough method of watching the foam of a whitecap neath the plane to see whether or not it disappeared behind them in a direct line. The mist must have prevented him from seelng the sun or stars for some time at least, so that he was compelled to keep track of the position of the speeding plane by dead reckoning. As the Vickers bomber was changing its position at the rate of two miles a minute this required agile headwork.
What is considered here the most remarkable feature of the whole epoch making flight is the fact that Lieut. Brown's navigation, beset by all these difficulties, was absolutely accurate. The Vickers men were aiming for Clifden from the start. They had selected the town because it was about the centre of the western coast line of Ireland, and they feared to miss the Island entirely. Ireland is a fairly large mark, but it is a difficult one to hit from almost 2,000 miles away.
Never Had Navigated a Vessel.
Many skilled naval and merchant marine officers here, who have had their own difficulties on the stable bridge of big ships in making a landfall where they expected to do so, shook their heads dismally after the start of the flight when they learned that Lieut. Brown never had actually navigated a ship in his life and had merely studied navigation aa a hobby, a study to take his mind off the engineering problems with which he was accustomed to wrestle before the war.
No man, they said, no matter how brilliant, could understand navigation unless he had stood upon the deck of a ship with the responsibility of bringing it and its people safe into harbor. But Lieut. Brown brought his craft safe into port as surely as If he had commanded a liner for years.
Capt. Alcock jokingly had remarked in Newfoundland, It is said, that he and Brown would "hang their hats on the Cllfden aerial. That prophecy might have been fulfilled in all seriousness had the transatlantic voyager wished, so true was their course toward Ireland. And not one of the wireless men, bursting with the enthusiasm they were endeavoring to restrain in accordance with Anglo-Saxon traditions, would have frowned upon the desecration of their great plant by the fear despising visitors.
That nowhere In the great Atlantic did the Vickers plane wander far from the course determined upon by Lieut. Brown is shown by the short time in which the flight was accomplished. From twenty to twenty-two hours was the time set by the fliers themselves before the aerial voyage. They beat their own estimate by four to six hours, so their path must have been straight and sure, indeed.
They Set a Rhomb Line Course.
Alcock and Brown had determined to disregard steamship lanes with the possibilities of rescue if the motors faltered, and steer a straight, or Rhomb line. course for Cllfden. They were staking everything, on the ability of their plane to make the trip, and they did not wish to add unnecessary mileage to the journey even to give themselves what could only be called a sporting chance of rescue if they failed.
Even when, somewhere over the banks of Newfoundland, the tiny wooden propeller operating thegenerator of the wireless was blown away, leaving them cut oft from all communication with the rest of the world, preventing them from calling for rescue to all ships within a radius of 156 miles, and leaving Lieut. Brown unable to check up his reckoning of position with any vessal they passed, even then they persevered In trusting entirely to their motors and plane.
Even the dauntless Hawker kept nearer to the steamship lanes than the Vickers fliers, and to this he and Commander Grieve probably owe their lives. But the Vickers filers aimed straight as an arrow at their mark at Cllfden. The fact that no ship during day or night reported hearing them shows how far from the steamship lanes they had set their course. Apparently the men came to an agreement somewhere on the course -- a silent agreement or an agreement shouted up to ear above the thunderous roar of the motor and the shriek of the wind to do away with every provision for safety on the already super-hazardous journey which might interfere with success. They would win or die. They won.
Carried Black Cat far Lark.
Like many other airmen, seamen and men of every trade whose lives depend in large part upon their own skill and daring, and upon that something variously known as luck, chance or Providence, Capt. Alcock and Lieut. Brown were superstitious, possibly jokingly so, but superstitious nevertheless. They carried with them in the crowded cockpit of their plane two black cats for luck -- real cats of the Halloween type -- to speed their plane. Certainly it the cats had anything to say about it the flier would succeed, for cats love water In bulk aa little as fliers love fog. The black cats apparently earned their passage and, no doubt, a very hearty breakfast of Irish bacon.
In the rejoicing of the crowd who read the extra editions of the London paper there was at first an element of doubt. They remembered the first report of Harry Hawker's fate; that he had fallen but forty miles from the Irish coast.
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