David Rooney > Quotes

“It was a world apart from the rest of British society, where everybody knew their place and kept to it. The flying community at Brooklands became a place where the gentry mixed with the proletariat. Women and men worked side by side. Teenagers could chat as equals with their elders. Britons rubbed shoulders with aviators from overseas. They all came together at the airfield’s café-restaurant, the Blue Bird, where they discussed their problems and pored over the latest copies of flying magazines while smoking cigarettes, eating bread and jam, and drinking endless cups of tea.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“A nonstop flight across the Atlantic might be routine to us. But it is only possible because of those who went first.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“There were new manufacturing techniques, new machine tools, new analytical processes, new business structures. Giant corporations like Westinghouse acted as crucibles for innovation. Then they scaled it up for industrial production. The four-decade period before the Great War saw the development of electric lighting and power, synthetic drugs like aspirin and heroin, a chemical industry, artificial fibres, radio, the telephone, cinematography, mechanical data processing, the machine gun, motor vehicles, and the aeroplane. Countless other innovations we take for granted today first emerged in that short, vivid period.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“It was May 1919. Hawker and Grieve were among seven aviators that summer who would take off from Newfoundland, intending to land on the shores of the British Isles without stopping along the way. The contest for the first nonstop transatlantic flight was sponsored by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. It was known to some, especially in the United States, as “the Big Hop.” Only two of the seven airmen would make it across successfully. The others would fail in their endeavours.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“For all the excitement of aerial adventure, this was the reality for those left behind: agony and loss.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“further”
― David Rooney, Burma Victory: Imphal, Kohima and the Chindits - March 1944 to May 1945

“Having been born in Glasgow to American parents and brought up in Manchester and Pittsburgh, Brown felt no fixed sense of home. “I caught neither a Scotch nor an American nor even a Lancashire accent,” he later said. It was as if he lived on the Atlantic: straddling it, with one foot in North America and the other in Britain. He certainly knew the ocean well.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future