The Dangerous Book of Heroes

by Conn Iggulden

  The four planes had at least 1,880 nautical miles to fly—by a long, long way the greatest distance ever attempted—yet the biggest obstacle to success was the Atlantic weather. It was unpredictable, unknown, and dangerous, with no weather ships and no weather satellites; conditions could change in moments. Gales and wind shear can blow an aircraft miles off course. Clouds and fog can blind and disorientate pilot and navigator. Ice can form on wings, destroying the lift of the machine, and in those days, instruments and engines often packed up in such extreme conditions.

  In their favor was the west-to-east prevailing wind, so that even if they met contrary winds within a weather system, the system itself usually moved east. Yet even prevailing winds sometimes don’t blow, and weather systems don’t always follow the rules laid down by meteorologists.

  “It’s a piece of cake!” said Jackie Alcock after a test flight in England. “All we have to do is keep the engines going and we’ll be home for tea.”

  Fields long and flat enough for aircraft to take off from were rare in rugged Newfoundland. Sopwith and Martinsyde were first to arrive and found meadows suitable for their small aircraft—just. Handley-Page located fields sixty miles from Saint John’s at Harbour Grace and spent a month clearing and joining them together. Vickers took down hedges, dismantled walls, felled trees, rolled boulders, filled ditches, and even removed a stone dyke to create a five-hundred-yard airfield close to Saint John’s.

  Every Newfoundlander knew what was at stake, of course. Willingly, they helped the four teams prepare. Alcock christened Vickers’s airfield Lester’s Field, after the drayman who hauled the crated aircraft from the dockside. To ease the hard labor new words were added to a local folk song:

  Oh, lay hold Jackie Alcock, lay hold Teddie Brown,

  Lay hold of the cordage and dig into the ground.

  Lay hold of the bowline and pull all you can,

  The Vimy will fly afore the Handley-Page can.

  However, it was Sopwith’s Atlantic that first left Newfoundland, on the afternoon of May 18. That morning Hawker described the weather as “not yet favourable, but possible,” and began to fill his fuel tanks. Raynham made the same optimistic forecast and fueled Martinsyde’s Raymor. The V/1500 was not yet assembled, while Vickers still awaited its aircraft’s arrival.

  At noon, Hawker and Grieve decided they’d fly and informed the other teams. In a gentleman’s agreement it had been decided that each team would let the other know its plans. At 3:40 Hawker called cheerily from the cockpit: “Tell Raynham I’ll greet him at Brook-lands,” and sent the Atlantic swaying across the soggy field. After three hundred yards the wheels lifted, then cleared a row of trees. The airplane was off.

  Harry Hawker and Mac Grieve circled once above Martinsyde’s field alongside Lake Quidi Vidi to wave, crossed the coast, jettisoned the Atlantic’s undercarriage, and headed for the British Isles. In six minutes they were out of sight in the Atlantic murk.

  Two hours later, the faster Raymor, was ready and about two thousand Newfoundlanders had gathered to watch the takeoff. Freddie Raynham and Fax Morgan waved. Raynham opened the throttle and began the Raymor’s run across Quidi Vidi field into a crosswind. There is less lift from a crosswind than from a headwind. After three hundred yards, the Raymor’s wheels left the ground and she rose about ten feet—and obstinately stayed there, drifting slightly sideways. The Raymor dropped to the ground, the undercarriage collapsed, the propeller dug into the turf, and she crashed. Raynham was not seriously injured and crawled from the cockpit with a bang to his head, but Fax had to be lifted out and taken to the hospital. He was told he’d lose an eye.

  Alcock and Brown visited Martinsyde’s flyers in the hospital that evening. Raynham offered them the Quidi Vidi field so that they could assemble the Vimy for test flights while Lester’s Field was completed. Meanwhile, no radio message had been received from the Atlantic. In itself this was of no concern, for 1919 was also the pioneering age of radio; they frequently stopped working.

  When the Atlantic’s maximum flying time of twenty-two hours was reached the next afternoon, there was still no word from Britain or any ship. It was evident that the aircraft was down somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

  The dismantled Vimy arrived at Saint John’s Harbor on May 26—the day after good news had arrived by telegram. Hawker and Grieve had been picked up from the Atlantic Ocean by a Danish steamer and reached Scotland on the twenty-fifth. The Atlantic’s radio had broken immediately after takeoff. The weather had worsened with heavy rain squalls, and after four hours the engine began to overheat. The problem was a blockage in the cooling system. By repeatedly switching off the engine, diving, then switching on again, Harry Hawker had partially cleared the blockages. They’d continued until dawn on the nineteenth, but it was clear the engine was not going to take the aircraft to Britain. With a gale approaching, Hawker and Grieve had searched for a ship and ditched the Atlantic alongside it. Half an hour later the gale came through.

  In Newfoundland, the Vimy was assembled in record time, working in the open through rain and snow. Only two weeks after arriving, the aircraft made its first test flight from the Quidi Vidi field. The same day, the V/1500 made its first test flight from Harbour Grace. On June 8 Alcock and Brown flew the Vimy in its second test flight to Lester’s Field.

  At Quidi Vidi, engineers and riggers were also repairing the Raymor and a navigator was found to replace Fax Morgan. Raynham was trying for another attempt. The V/1500 made her second test flight but also encountered engine-cooling problems. It was a toss-up which of the three aircraft would depart next.

  Alcock drained the cooling systems of the two Vimy engines, boiled the water twice, and filtered it to remove any matter that might block circulation. He thought that the sediment in the Newfoundland water might have caused the Atlantic and V/1500 cooling problems. The weather closed in again with successive gales before clearing on the morning of the thirteenth.

  Alcock made another decision at Lester’s Field, possibly taking a leaf from the Atlantic’s book. He removed the Vimy’s nosewheel in order to reduce drag. The nosewheel was there only for landing, to stop the plane from pitching forward should the undercarriage snag in grass. The Vimy normally rested and landed on the four wheels of the main undercarriage beneath the wings and a small tail wheel. Without a nosewheel Alcock would have to ensure he made a decent three-point touchdown when he landed.

  Riggers and engineers worked throughout the day and night, and by the morning of the fourteenth the Vimy was refueled and ready to fly. Stowed on board were 197 letters, potentially the first transatlantic airmail. Alcock and Brown spoke together briefly and decided to fly. They sent a message to the V/1500 at Harbour Grace and a telegram to Vickers. The Daily Mail sent a telegram to London. Raynham came to see them off.

  Early that afternoon, with the Rolls-Royce engines running smoothly, the Vimy jolted across Lester’s Field and gathered speed, heading slightly uphill into a west wind. The picnicking Newfoundlander crowd watched interestedly then anxiously: 100 yards, 150 yards, the tail lifted, 200 yards, 300 yards, 400 yards. Only 100 yards of field remained.

  Brown wrote later: “We were almost at the end of the ground tether allowed us.” He glanced at Alcock. “The perspiration of acute anxiety was running down his face.” The distance between success and disaster would be just feet. The watching Raynham knew how Alcock would be at the controls, the throttles wide open, gently coaxing the machine up.

  The jolting stopped as the undercarriage finally left the ground, the four wheels skimming the grass. Alcock eased back the stick a touch—only a touch—or the aircraft would stall and crash. Brown held his breath as they reached the end of the field. The Vimy rose, cleared a stone dyke, then the first trees, then disappeared behind rising ground 300 yards away. The crowd gasped and began running toward the hidden ground. The Saint John’s doctor ran with them.

  Then the big Vimy reappeared beyond the crest in a shallow climb, rising slowly into the
gray sky. Brown waved his arm above the cockpit; Alcock concentrated on his airspeed. At 1:42 P.M. on Saturday, June 14, 1919, they were off.

  Alcock gained height, then banked the Vimy in a gentle turn to the east to fly over Saint John’s Harbor, where ships’ whistles blew farewell. At 1,200 feet, Brown took a departure position from the Newfoundland coast and sent a radio message: “All well and started.” They flew out over the Atlantic Ocean, and thirty minutes of steady climbing took them to 5,000 feet.

  In the previous attempts to fly the Atlantic nonstop, one airplane had ditched in the Irish Sea, one had ditched in the Atlantic Ocean, and one had crashed on takeoff, but no one had been killed. Now the fourth was finally airborne, the first of the heavies.

  Looking from their windy cockpit to the north, to port, Alcock saw icebergs on the horizon; beyond was Greenland and the Arctic. Ahead there was only ocean until Europe, sixteen to twenty hours away. To the south, to starboard, there was also nothing but ocean. Behind and diminishing rapidly was North America.

  At 5 P.M. they passed over sea fog below and the ocean disappeared. Clouds gathered above and the sun disappeared, then the fog reached up to them and everything disappeared—no clouds, no horizon, nothing. Alcock steered his compass course, holding the bubble in the turn-and-bank indicator central to keep the wings level and checking the altimeter to keep the nose level. He flew “blind” for more than an hour.

  The small propeller of the radio generator sheared off in the slipstream, and their communications were finished. Suddenly, the starboard engine clattered. The two men looked to their right in alarm.

  “A chunk of exhaust pipe had split away and was quivering before the rush of air like a reed in an organ pipe,” wrote Brown. “It became first red then white-hot and, softened by the heat, it gradually crumpled up. Finally it was blown away.” The clattering stopped.

  They dined on sandwiches and coffee, Brown feeding Alcock, who kept one hand lightly around the control stick. When darkness fell, Brown wanted an accurate position, so Alcock took the Vimy above the clouds at 6,000 feet. It was cold up there, and Brown’s fingers were numb as he took star sights of Polaris and Vega at 10 P.M., using an artificial horizon fixed to his sextant. He calculated their position while Alcock came down to a lesser cold at 4,000 feet.

  After eight hours’ flying they had covered 850 nautical miles, a speed over the ground of 106¼ knots. A light tailwind and less drag without the nose wheel had given them a greater speed than expected. They were almost halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Flying through cold, misty moonlight, the aircraft skimmed across the top of the clouds. Beneath them were silvery gray valleys, above the distant starred heavens. Brown found an aura of unreality about the flight. He recorded in the logbook: “The distorted ball of a moon, the weird half-light, the monstrous cloud shapes, the fog, the misty indefiniteness of space, the changeless drone, drone, drone of the motors.” On they flew, growing stiff and numb on the wooden bench seat. “I looked toward Brown and saw that he was singing,” Alcock said later, “but I couldn’t understand a word!”

  Behind them the moon set, and ahead, perhaps above Ireland and Britain, came the first suggestion of the pale dawn. Suddenly, a massive cloud towered in the darkness ahead, silhouetted for the first time against the eastern sky. There was no way around: they flew straight in. It was 3 A.M. on the fifteenth.

  Inside the black cloud a storm was raging. The temperature plunged, the air heaved and roared about them, and the Vimy shook and twisted in violent wind and rain.

  “The aircraft swung, flew amok and began to perform circus tricks,” Brown said. “Until we should see either the horizon or the sky or the sea and thus restore our sense of the horizontal, we could tell only by the instruments what was happening.”

  The bubble in the turn-and-bank indicator had disappeared, giving no indication of how level the wings were. The airspeed indicator had jammed at ninety knots, while the roar of the storm masked the roar of the engines. Only the altimeter registered, just under four thousand feet. The aircraft pitched and tossed like a cork and, with Alcock disorientated in the roaring cloud, flew slower and slower in the darkness.

  Without warning, the plane shuddered and stalled. The nose dropped, and immediately the big Vimy slipped into a spinning dive, the most dangerous and deadly condition for any aircraft.

  In 1919 a spinning nosedive was called a Parke’s dive, because Lieutenant Parke was one of the very few pilots who had managed to fly out of it. Unfortunately, even Parke wasn’t sure how he had done it. Once begun, a diving spin more often than not continued down and into the ground—or sea. Early airplanes often disintegrated in a spin, their wings torn off.

  The theory is that with enough height, you get out of a spin by putting the stick forward into a steeper dive to regain airspeed and thus lift. Apply rudder opposite to the direction of the spin, then the plane will stop spinning and you can level out. Even in daylight, when you can see the ground and the horizon, it’s about the greatest test for any pilot.

  In the Vimy’s cockpit, inside the cloud, the altimeter reeled away the height down and down. The compass spun continuously, which in reality was the aircraft spinning around the compass, while Alcock tried to fly out of the spin in complete blackness. “How and at what angle we were falling we knew not,” wrote Brown. “Jackie tried to centralise [the aircraft] but failed because we had lost all sense of what was central.”

  Spinning through 3,000 feet, 2,500 feet, 2,000, 1,500, 1,000 feet, the altimeter unwound until Brown could hear, somewhere around them, the hissing and churning of the ocean. He thrust the logbook into his Burberry flying jacket. If they ditched, one of the extra fuel tanks would become their lifeboat, and it was his responsibility to drag it out.

  Abruptly, the Vimy dropped out of the bottom of the immense cloud a few hundred feet above the Atlantic Ocean—almost upside down. Alcock saw the luminescence of the wave tops above his head, flipped the aircraft over, kept the nose down, opened the throttles, countered the spin with the rudder, and leveled out fifty feet above the water. The propellers clawed at the air and dragged the aircraft from danger, hauling her slowly away from the sea. Pilot and navigator exchanged glances.

  Alcock eased back the stick and set the aircraft climbing between the clouds. They had to get height, away from the turbulent air over the surface of the sea. “The salty taste we noted later on our tongues was foam,” Alcock said.

  A check of their situation showed that the instruments were registering again. There was no damage to the aircraft, there was still plenty of fuel, and dawn had broken. They needed a position to reset their course since the last 10 P.M. position, another very good reason to climb above the clouds into the sun.

  Heavy rain drove into the cockpit, onto their leather helmets, their goggles, and their flying jackets. It drummed upon the canvas of the wings and fuselage. As they gained more and more height, the rain became lighter and changed into snow. At eight thousand feet, still climbing, still in dense gray cloud, the aircraft was coated with snow, which then froze to ice. Alcock kept working the controls to stop permanent icing, rotating the stick and moving the rudder pedals backward and forward. As yet there was no danger to the aerodynamics of the Vimy, but some of the instruments would be affected.

  While Alcock kept the plane level, Brown slipped out of his harness. He stepped up onto the seat, clutched a wooden wing strut with one hand, pushed himself out into the slipstream of 100 knots with the other, and knocked away the ice from the instruments. The propeller blades swished nearby. He cleared the air tubes of the speed indicator and the glass faces of the fuel gauges, for once ice formed, the only way to melt it would be to descend again to near sea level.

  Four times they completed those maneuvers, until at 11,800 feet they finally broke clear of the cloud. There was the red-yellow morning sun, low in the east. There was no warmth in the rays at that altitude, and with stiff, frozen hands Brown took his sextant shot and calculate
d their dead-reckoning position, Alcock maintained the hard-won altitude.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  Eventually, Brown leaned across the cockpit to Alcock with a new course and a written message: “About eighty miles to the Irish coast!”

  The starboard engine backfired. Ice had formed over the air in-takes, which Brown had no way of reaching because of the spinning propeller, so Alcock switched the engine off. Closing the throttle of the port engine to idling speed, he put the Vimy into a shallow glide along the new course. At a lower height, the seal of ice would melt and he’d start the engine again.

  They were still over the Atlantic, so there was no danger of flying into a mountain, yet no pilot enjoys losing height in cloud. There was the altimeter, but altimeters work according to air pressure, and their instrument had been set sixteen hours ago in Newfoundland. They had no way of knowing how accurate it was.

  They leveled out in clear air five hundred feet above the sea, gray and white beneath them. Alcock opened the port throttle for flying speed, then started the starboard engine and opened that throttle too. The Rolls-Royce Eagles roared. All was well, so they stayed just below the cloud, peering through their goggles for the continent of Europe.

  They saw first two small, rocky islands in the distance, with a low smudge across the horizon farther on. Twenty minutes later they flew over Eeshal and Turbot Islands. Ten minutes after that, they crossed the west coast of the Emerald Isle. Turning to starboard, they flew south along the desolate coast until Brown identified the tall masts of the British wireless station at Clifden. They’d reached Ireland over Connemara, only ten miles north of the planned route.

  “What should we do?” they discussed, shouting and using hand signals.

  “We had plenty of fuel, enough to fly on to England,” Alcock said later, “but there didn’t seem any point.” In fact they’d used only two-thirds of their fuel, with enough left to reach France if they’d wished. They cruised above Clifden looking for a suitable landing field. They flew over a long, green field with no trees near the wireless station, and Alcock decided that would do.