LAST MONTH the world marked the 70th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's historic adventure. Undoubtedly, New York to Paris, solo, has a certain ring to it, in part as the American Century's dramatic tribute to the spiritual capital of the Old World; but a more recent anniversary reminds us that Canada to Connemara has priority in the annals of no stop transatlantic flight.
On Sunday, June 15th, 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown guided their twin engined Vickers Vimy biplane to a safe landing on a bog near Clifden, Co Galway, more than 16 hours after takeoff from St John's, Newfoundland. The distance? Call it 1,890 miles. The rewards? Glory, knighthood - and a £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail.
Like so many of history's glorious advances, this feat by Glasgow born Brown and Mancunian Alcock was born of the requirements of war.
Just as the rockets that delivered men to the Moon were developed to deliver megatons to Moscow, the flying machine that accomplished the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic was basically a bomber, a plane with a capacity and range undreamt of just five years earlier its Rolls Royce engines part of the fruits of wartime research and development.
And, of course, Alcock and Brown got much of the relevant training courtesy of the Royal Navy Air Service and, later, the newly created RAF. Alcock had already been a pilot before the first World War, so his first duties for the Crown were to help train his comrades.
Prisoner of war
In 1916 he was posted to a wing group in the eastern Mediterranean. His exploits included the bombing of Constantinople, but a forced landing in the sea near Suvla Bay in September 1917 left him and his twoman crew prisoners of the Turks for the rest of the war.
Alcock left the RAF in March 1919, and three months later flew into history. However, he met the fate of many a pioneering airman only six months after the historic Co Galway landing, when he crashed and was killed in bad weather at Cottevard, France, while delivering an amphibian aircraft to Paris.
Brown's war career was less glorious than Alcock's - he also outlived him by 29 years - but his navigation of the transatlantic flight is particularly impressive.
"I shall shape our course for Galway Bay," Brown said before take off. Considering that, because of fog, the two men hardly saw the sea, let alone any land, for 16 hours, Clifden was a pretty good approximation. At least the wind was at their back as they reached freezing heights of 11,000 feet - still shrouded in cloud - and then skimmed close to the sea's surface in search of some semblance of visibility.
A bath and a shave
"That is the way to fly the Atlantic," one of them managed to declare on arrival. The other enquired as to where he might get a bath and a shave.
The Irish Times had no doubt about the importance of their achievement. In its edition of June 16th, 1919, it said Alcock and Brown "will go down to history, with Columbus and Captain Cook, among the pioneers of human progress. (Revisionists clearly had not yet got hold of the latter pair.) "They have robbed ocean of its immemorial adjective - the dissociabilis of Homer, the `sundering' of Swinburne." (That was when reporting was reporting, what?)
"We are certain today, as we were not certain yesterday," The Irish Times continued, "that we stand on the threshold of rich and wonderful development in the arts of peace and in the fellowship of mankind."
Thus were greeted the exploits of a pair of adventurers chasing a £10,000 prize, accomplishing what someone else was bound to accomplish at some time. Meanwhile, adjacent to the Derrygimla Bog where the lads landed, some genuinely paradigm shifting work was taking place.
At a station near Clifden, the Marconi company was hard at work developing a transatlantic wireless link. Englishman John Smale was at the start of a cutting edge technical career that would later take him to the position of engineer in chief at the Cable & Wireless company. On June 15th, he was a recently demobbed engineer labouring away at the Clifden station.
"Hullo, Smale!" the nodoubt ebullient Alcock exclaimed to the man he had met as a fellow airman during the war. "What are you doing here?"
History does not record if Smale returned the question. Ironically, the only serious difficulty of Alcock and Brown's flight was that their inflight "wireless" didn't work to their satisfaction, so perhaps there was material for more extensive conversation. Or maybe Smale was enlisted to help unstick the Vickers Vimy from the tenacious Connemara bog.
Loving a loser
The infatuation with losers so notable in our culture - remember Gareth Southgate? - is not, apparently, unique to this era. The Irish Times, in its report on Alcock and Brown's success, dwelt at length on the attempt at the same feat of Hawker and Griere, "who failed with equal glory".
"it is possible," the newspaper opined, "that the success of Captain Alcock and Lieutenant Brown may not stir `the general heart of man' quite so deeply as Mr Hawker and Commander Griere's failure. The latter's desperate effort to anticipate the American seaplanes, their almost miraculous escape, and our long suspense concerning their fate made an irresistible appeal to the world's emotions.
But whatever about the world's transient emotional commitments, history's verdict on the relative claims of the two pairs is certainly more in line with the newspaper's hard headed conclusion: "After all, however, success is success."