From the first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the crossing of the Atlantic in 1919, aviation had moved forward at an amazing speed. The story of Alcock and Brown’s non-stop crossing of the Atlantic is one of the great milestones in aviation – Very Highly Recommended
NAME: Race Across The Atlantic, Alcock and Brown's Record-Breaking Non- Stop Flight FILE: R2952 AUTHOR: Bruce Vigar, Colin Higgs PUBLISHER: Pen and Sword, Air World BINDING: hard back PAGES: 183 PRICE: £19.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Long distance flights, aviation pioneers, Vickers Vimy, ex-bomber, strategic bombing, WWI pilots, trans-Atlantic flight, twin-engine aircraft
ISBN: 1-52674-783-9
IMAGE: B2952.jpg BUYNOW: tinyurl.com/yy9eswpc LINKS: DESCRIPTION: From the first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the crossing of the Atlantic in 1919, aviation had moved forward at an amazing speed. The story of Alcock and Brown's non-stop crossing of the Atlantic is one of the great milestones in aviation – Very Highly Recommended The Daily Mail was a staunch supporter of aviation from the start and made a series of offers of large money prizes for the winners of a series of races. In 1913, Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail offered the amazing prize of £10,000 for the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic from North America, including Newfoundland, to the British Isles. To put this in perspective, the prize was worth the equivalent of $1,000,000 at today's value. Only a decade after the first tentative controlled powered flight at Kitty Hawk this would have been the equivalent of an Earth to Pluto flight only ten years after the first manned space flight. It really was a very big deal even after a postponement for World War One. When Rothermere offered the prize in 1913, it was expected that the entrants would be flying aircraft designed specifically for the race because no aircraft then flying was even remotely capable of undertaking such a long distance flight. As it turned out, the winner was a Vickers Vimy bomber, a standard military production design with a few modifications. However, while the aircraft was a standard machine, it was a landplane and there were very few airfields. This required an airfield to be prepared in Newfoundland and for the Vimy to be sent across in a series of crates to be assembled at the site. The challenge for landing was that there was no way of knowing if the aircraft could navigate across the Atlantic to a specific existing landing strip. In the event Alcock and Brown had to land in Ireland in open country, on what turned out to be a bog. They simply did not have the endurance to be certain of making a more suitable site. In the process, the Vimy was seriously damaged in the landing but the crew had arrived safely. The authors have produced a comprehensive account of the flight and of the preparations, including the coverage of competitors' efforts. There are a great many illustrations through the body of text and many of these are rare images, not seen together in a book before.