Yesterday morning, at about 9 o'clock, a great aeroplane came to earth beside the Marconi Station at Clifden. Two young men stepped stiffly out of it. One of them said, "That is the way to fly the Atlantic," and the other expressed his wish for a bath and a shave. In this casual way the beginning of a new era in the history of human progress was announced to the world. Captain Alcock and Lieutenant Brown have succeeded gloriously where Mr Hawker and Commander Grieve failed - but failed with equal glory. They left St. John's, Newfoundland, soon after four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, in their double-engined VickersVimy machine, and reached Clifden a little before or after (there are discrepancies in the reports) nine o'clock yesterday morning. They had flown across the Atlantic, a distance of 1,900 miles, in sixteen hours, at an average rate of 120 miles an hour.
The Irish Times, June 16th, 1919.