Alcock and Brown's Vickers Vimy
Vickers Limited, Weybridge · 1919
A large twin engined biplane with a boxy fuselage and a wingspan of more than twenty metres dominates one end of the Flight gallery. In June 1919 John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew this aircraft non stop across the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in a little under sixteen hours. It was the first time anyone had done it. They took off from a boggy field near St John's on the afternoon of 14 June, flew through the night in fog, sleet and cloud, and landed the next morning nose first in an Irish bog near Clifden that looked like a meadow from the air.
The Vimy was designed as a heavy bomber for the war that had just ended, and Vickers stripped it of military gear and filled the bomb bay with extra fuel tanks. Look at the open cockpit, where the two men sat side by side with no heating and no roof, and at the wooden propellers and fabric covered wings. Brown navigated by sextant and dead reckoning, climbing out onto the wing several times to clear ice from the engine gauges. At one point Alcock lost control in cloud and the aircraft spiralled down to within a hundred feet of the sea before he recovered.
The two aviators won the ten thousand pound prize offered by the Daily Mail and were knighted within days. Alcock died in a crash only six months later. Vickers presented the aircraft to the Science Museum before the end of 1919, and it has hung here ever since, restored but essentially as it was pulled from the bog. A memorable detail is the small bundle of mail they carried, making this also the first transatlantic airmail flight.
Did You Know? Alcock and Brown carried a small sack of letters, so their crossing was also the first transatlantic airmail delivery.
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