On 15 June 1919, two exhausted British airmen climbed out of a wrecked biplane half-buried in a bog in County Galway — and into history. The day before, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had taken off from Newfoundland to attempt something no one had ever done: fly across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. Our series Defining Moments in Aviation begins, fittingly for an Irish school, with a landing in Ireland.
A prize worth dying for
Since 1913 the Daily Mail newspaper had offered £10,000 — a fortune at the time — to the first aviators to fly the Atlantic non-stop. The First World War had paused the contest, but it had also produced bigger, stronger aircraft and a generation of experienced pilots. By 1919 several teams were gathered in Newfoundland, the closest point to Europe, waiting for their chance. Captain John Alcock, a skilled pilot, and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, an expert navigator, had chosen a converted Vickers Vimy — a twin-engine bomber built for a war that had just ended.
Sixteen hours of fog and ice
They took off from a rough field near St John’s on the afternoon of 14 June 1919. Almost at once the weather turned against them. Thick fog hid the sea and the horizon, so Brown could rarely see the stars he needed to navigate; for hours they flew blind, holding their course by guesswork and instinct. The radio failed early on. Ice built up on the aircraft, and more than once the overloaded Vimy stalled and dropped towards the waves before Alcock regained control. Through the freezing night they pressed on, nearly 3,000 kilometres of open ocean passing unseen beneath them.
A bog in Connemara
After about sixteen hours, the coast of Ireland appeared through the cloud near the town of Clifden. Looking for a place to land, the airmen spotted what seemed to be a smooth green field and brought the Vimy down towards it. It was not a field but Derrygimlagh bog: the wheels sank into the soft ground, the nose dug in, and the aircraft tipped forward and stopped. Neither man was hurt. They had crossed the Atlantic in a single flight — the first people ever to do so.
Into the history books
Alcock and Brown collected the Daily Mail prize, and within days King George V had knighted them both. Their flight came eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s more famous solo crossing, and it proved that the Atlantic — for centuries a journey of many days by ship — could be flown in less than a day. The age of long-distance air travel had begun.
Practice: put the story in order
These six moments are in the wrong order. Can you put them into the correct sequence?
- The radio failed and thick fog hid the sea and sky.
- Alcock and Brown took off from Newfoundland.
- The King knighted both airmen.
- The Vimy sank nose-first into an Irish bog.
- They flew almost 3,000 km through the freezing night.
- They collected the £10,000 prize.
CEFR Level B2 / ICAO Level 5
A century on, the same ocean is crossed every day without a thought — and airlines now chase non-stop routes that would have seemed pure fantasy to Alcock and Brown.