They Flew Upside Down

"Must see stars now!"

            "Lone Eagle" Charles Lindbergh became the most famous man on Earth when he landed in Paris after his 33-hour solo non-stop trans-Atlantic flight. Met by an uproarious mob, the first thing he said was, "My name is Lindbergh. I have come from America. Alcock and Brown showed me the way."

            Who in the world are Alcock and Brown? Eight years earlier in June 1919, Captain John Alcock and his navigator Lt. Arthur Brown showed Lucky Lindy the way to Europe. They made the first non-stop flight across the ocean, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland in sixteen-and-a-half hours.

            A British newspaper had offered a hefty prize to the first aviators to make the trip. Some didn't take the offer seriously. After all, the challenge had appeared in the paper's April 1, 1913, edition. (Weirdly, the pair had wanted to take off on Friday the 13th!)

            They had only flown together three times. Their craft, a Vickers Vimy WWI bomber, was little more than a kite with engines. This two-engine biplane was only 43 feet long, about the length of two cars. Canvas covered its hollow wood-and-steel frame wings, and the pilots had to squeeze onto a wooden bench in an open cockpit between two roaring Rolls-Royce motors. Top speed? About 100 miles an hour.

“Piece of Cake”

            The night before they departed the duo dined at the home of Brown's fiancée Kathleen. When her father asked Brown if he were worried, he replied, "Piece of cake." Shortly before they took off, Kathleen gave Alcock a good luck gift—a stuffed cat named Twinkletoes.

            Alcock and Brown would need all of its nine lives.

            "We have had a terrible journey," Alcock told the press upon arriving. "The wonder is that we are here at all. We scarcely saw the sun or the moon or the stars. For hours we saw none of them. 

            We looped the loop, I do believe, and did a very steep spiral. We did some very comic "stunts," for I have had no sense of horizon."

            Their first terror happened when an engine's exhaust pipe blew up, shooting out flames that threatened to set the wing on fire. Later, hail, rain, and lightning whirled the fragile craft into a dizzying spiral. It cascaded down thousands of feet in seconds. Before Brown could regain control, the Vimy came within 60 feet of the waves flying on its side nearly perpendicular to the ocean

            "The salty taste we noted later on our tongues was foam," said Alcock. 
            Once the calamity had ended, they discovered that they had gotten turned around and were heading back to Newfoundland!

More Trials Lay Ahead

            After again heading east, they had no idea if they were on course. Only briefly did the clouds part so Brown could navigate. "Must see stars now!" Brown scribbled on a note to Alcock. Finally, the Moon beamed down on them, and Brown, finding the North Star on his sextant, determined they had flown 850 miles—nearly halfway to their goal with only another 1,000 miles to go.

            Unbelievably, more trials lay ahead. Heavy snow and sleet drenched the Vimy. "We froze like young puppies….For four hours the machine was covered in a sheet of ice caused by frozen sleet," said Alcock. "The sleet was so dense that my speed indicator did not work." Weighted down, they plummeted. The freezing snow began clogging the engines' air intakes, threatening to choke the motors.

            Desperate, Brown crawled onto the top of nose of the aircraft and then down onto the right wing. Fighting blinding waves of snow, he clambered from strut-to-strut. Clinging for his life with one hand on a cable, he opened his penknife with his teeth and chipped furiously at the ice in the intakes. Having cleared them, he then went to the left wing and did the same. But he wasn't done. Later he repeated the entire perilous process on both wings a second time.

            It must be said, though, that the trip was not entirely without its pleasures. Brown and Alcock dined on sandwiches. The stoic Twinkletoes proved to be an amiable and fearless companion. Alcock enjoyed a beer, and Brown spiked his coffee with whisky. He even felt high-spirited enough to serenade the irritated Alcock with a folk song whose lyrics went "She's like the swallow that flies so high. She's like the river that never runs dry."

            In the 1950s, London's airport accepted public donations to build a monument to honor Brown and Alcock. Who sent in the first check? Charles Lindbergh.

MORAL: Sometimes you have to go out on a limb.
Or a wing.

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