The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

by David Rooney

The inspiring story of a pathbreaking 1919 flight and the courageous fliers who risked their lives to make aviation history.

In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in “the Big Hop”: an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.

Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration—and a welcome distraction—to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.

Mining evocative first-person accounts and aviation archives, Rooney also follows the participants’ journeys: learning to fly on flimsy airplanes made of timber struts and varnished fabric; surviving the bloodiest war that Europe had ever yet seen; and battling faulty coolant systems, severe storms, and extreme fatigue while attempting the Atlantic. Rooney transports readers to the world in which the great contest took place, and traces the rise of aviation to its daredevil peak in the early decades of the twentieth century. Recounting a deeply moving adventure, The Big Hop explores why flights like these matter, and why we take to the skies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Travel, Audiobook, Biography

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 3, 2024

About the author

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

Reviews

[History Today]

The names ‘Alcock’ and ‘Brown’ – when appearing together – have faded so far from public awareness that they are most likely to appear as the unexpected answer to a trivia question about the identity of the first persons to fly across the Atlantic. As David Rooney writes in The Big Hop, many people assume the answer is Charles Lindbergh, who became the first to make the crossing solo when he flew from New York to Paris in 1927.

Probably the main reason Captain Jack Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown’s crossing in 1919 has been forgotten is that their journey did not prove to be the start of a brave new world of flying. It would be eight years before newspapers used the term ‘Atlantic Fever’ to describe public interest in crossing the ocean by plane, propelled by a growing belief that the future of aviation lay with heavier-than-air machines, rather than airships or balloons.

Alcock and Brown – and three rival teams – took on the crossing in 1919 because a set of circumstances converged to persuade pilots and manufacturers that the time was right. The First World War had shown that planes could play a key part in an armed conflict, but when the war ended pilots found themselves jobless. Aircraft makers including Sopwith, Handley Page, and Vickers – manufacturers of the Vickers Vimy, the heavy bomber in which the successful pair flew – faced empty order books. In 1913 Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, had offered a prize of £10,000 for the first plane to cross the ocean non-stop within 72 hours. The prize was suspended at the outbreak of war before anyone had attempted the crossing, but by 1919 it was up for grabs again.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Midge Gillies’ Atlantic Furies: The Women Who Risked Everything to Be the First to Fly is forthcoming with Scribe.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, in 1919, 7 men attempted to make history crossing the Atlantic, nonstop, from America to Europe by airplane. The Big Hop was a contest created by UK’s Daily Mail, where a £10,000 prize would be awarded to the first person or team to successfully make the flight. It is surprising to me that today these men are not household names and their story is not well known.

This book tells that story. What is a mundane occurrence today was thought to be impossible just over 100 years ago. Most of these men developed bravery and courage during World War I and took those skills to pave the way for a future of international travel. ✈️

[Chris Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding book and worth the time of anyone who is curious about the early pioneers of aviation. Rooney’s narrative style is easy to read, and he brings the characters and events to life.

[Lee Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, what struck me was just after the great war which affected everyone in Britain then to be hit with the Spanish Flu, the country needed something to cheer.
Great book

[Jan Prins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating story about some incredible achievements. A few too many details here or there, but a very easy read.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. Having grown up in Ireland, I was well aware of Alcock and Brown's soggy arrival in a Connemara bog, but the story of the flight and the competition leading up to it, as well as all the other teams who strove and prepared, was enthralling.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The names ‘Alcock’ and ‘Brown’ – when appearing together – have faded so far from public awareness that they are most likely to appear as the unexpected answer to a trivia question about the identity of the first persons to fly across the Atlantic. As David Rooney writes in The Big Hop, many people assume the answer is Charles Lindbergh, who became the first to make the crossing solo when he flew from New York to Paris in 1927.

Probably the main reason Captain Jack Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown’s crossing in 1919 has been forgotten is that their journey did not prove to be the start of a brave new world of flying. It would be eight years before newspapers used the term ‘Atlantic Fever’ to describe public interest in crossing the ocean by plane, propelled by a growing belief that the future of aviation lay with heavier-than-air machines, rather than airships or balloons.

Alcock and Brown – and three rival teams – took on the crossing in 1919 because a set of circumstances converged to persuade pilots and manufacturers that the time was right. The First World War had shown that planes could play a key part in an armed conflict, but when the war ended pilots found themselves jobless. Aircraft makers including Sopwith, Handley Page, and Vickers – manufacturers of the Vickers Vimy, the heavy bomber in which the successful pair flew – faced empty order books. In 1913 Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, had offered a prize of £10,000 for the first plane to cross the ocean non-stop within 72 hours. The prize was suspended at the outbreak of war before anyone had attempted the crossing, but by 1919 it was up for grabs again.

Originally 17 teams had hoped to compete, but accidents and mechanical issues meant that by June 1919, only four manufacturers remained: Handley Page, Sopwith, Martinsyde, and Vickers. Each of the teams who travelled to Newfoundland had close links to the armed services and most to what became the Royal Air Force in 1918. Alcock had flown with the Royal Naval Air Service in Turkey, where he took part in long-range bombing operations, and Brown with No. 2 Squadron Royal Flying Corps as an observer in France. The war offered pilots and navigators experience in some of the most challenging circumstances but also showed them the horror of what could happen when things went wrong.

Alcock, who had a thick Lancashire accent, was born in Manchester in 1892 to a coachman father and a mother who cleaned and served drinks at a local pub. The emerging motor industry offered employment and he ended up working as a mechanic at Brooklands in Surrey, where planes and cars were being developed with equal enthusiasm. Brown had also worked as an engineer in Manchester but was born in Glasgow in 1886 to American parents and was a US citizen. He felt truly ‘transatlantic’ and on his frequent crossings of the Atlantic by ship, either with his family or later as an engineer for British Westinghouse, he would visit the bridge to practise navigation by sun and stars.

The transfer of skills from different industries, whether coal mining or early motor cars, to aviation is an important factor in the development of flying. The pair’s triumphant Vickers Vimy plane was itself transformed from a bomber to an aircraft capable of conquering the Atlantic with the help of Annie Boultwood, who, having originally trained as a bookbinder, led a team of 300 women who sewed the heavy canvas onto the aircraft’s fuselage and its cat’s cradle of bracing wires and control cables.

Alcock and Brown were not the first team to leave Newfoundland when they set off from a field just outside St John’s on 14 June 1919, but they were the only plane to land on the other side of the ocean, in a bog near Clifden, County Galway, 15 hours and 57 minutes later. The Sopwith team, who had been the first to depart, were thought lost at sea but were eventually picked up a few miles off Ireland’s west coast. The Martinsyde team crashed on their first attempt and lost control of their plane shortly after takeoff on their second. After test flights in Newfoundland found problems with the Handley Page’s radiators the manufacturers ordered its crew to abandon their bid.

Rooney’s description of the crossing has all the panache of a Boy’s Own story but this presents its own structural challenge – that the journey itself risks overwhelming the whole book. Rooney avoids this by leaving the pair halfway across the Atlantic, just as the plane appears to be diving towards the waves, to double-back on each man’s experience as a prisoner of war. When Brown was captured after his plane crashed over northeast France, he was shot in the foot. Brown told a journalist he would never recover from the ordeal, but he used his captivity to study aerial navigation. His leg injury makes his repeated efforts to reach out of the cockpit to chip away with a pocketknife at ice forming on the petrol gauge somewhere over the Atlantic even more remarkable. A second flashback finds Alcock ditching a Handley Page bomber in Turkish waters and his subsequent time in a grim POW camp. It was there that he decided to attempt an Atlantic crossing.

Rooney has spent much of his working life at London’s Science Museum and does not attempt to hide his enthusiasm for Alcock and Brown’s achievement. Nor should he. Among the many arresting photos in The Big Hop, one of the ungainly Vimy in its final resting place in the museum is enough to show the enormity of their achievement. But while the pair were feted as heroes, their success did not mean that aviation’s moment had come. It would take flying circuses, usually run by wartime pilots, and the constant search for new records in speed, altitude, and distance to fix air travel in the public’s mind. When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in his sleek Spirit of St. Louis monoplane he heralded the future in a way that Alcock and Brown’s cumbersome open cockpit biplane could never manage. But Lindbergh always acknowledged the inspiration he took from the first Atlantic crossing.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 5 out of 5]

On June 14, 1919 --- the day Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown made an undignified near-crash landing in an Irish bog to become the first aviators to cross the Atlantic Ocean in one “hop” --- my British grandmother was preparing to give birth to her first child.

No, that little fact does not appear in David Rooney’s brilliantly woven aeronautical history, THE BIG HOP, but it’s important for all the reasons why an author as diligent and passionate as he would write such a book in the first place. Rooney’s account covers not just the bold headlines and high-profile media of the time, but also those myriad tiny yet crucial details that continue to inform real lives and relationships to this day.

Thirty-one years later, that post-WWI British baby would become my father, a young and ambitious London-based employee of the iconic British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). Back then, passenger flying was held in such esteem that even entry-level travel agents wore uniforms with epaulets and peaked caps that made them look like airplane pilots.

Alcock, Brown and their daring male and female peers (women are centrally mentioned in THE BIG HOP as investors, engineers, designers, builders, instructors and even test pilots) made it all possible. But they likely foresaw little of how aviation would evolve after them. Their groundbreaking efforts nearly became lost to history in the wake of Charles Lindbergh’s successful solo crossing in 1927 with a much more sophisticated plane. To his credit, Lindbergh repeatedly tried to preserve their achievement by mentioning it in interviews.

Where THE BIG HOP stands out significantly from the majority of historical works of this kind is in its deftly balanced attention to multiple backstories that contributed to an achievement that would have enormous ongoing results. Yet one never loses the thread of key events culminating in that first successful flight from the rocky shores of Newfoundland, then an autonomous British colony.

In fact, the book opens at a critical and perilous point over the stormy mid-Atlantic in which Alcock and Brown are fighting to keep their unwieldy Vickers Vimy craft in the air. In their later recollections, both expected imminent death.

With the brave duo literally suspended on the page, Rooney makes an abrupt literary U-turn back to how everything began. It takes immense narrative skill to pull off such a disruption, but he does it as triumphantly as his protagonists managed to complete their journey --- steadily, always focused, and with a few humbling bumps along the way.

Rooney delves into the personal biographies and direct words of not only Alcock and Brown, but dozens of their peers and colleagues. He also weaves into THE BIG HOP some fascinating contextual social and cultural history, economic changes, industrial competition (with a few subtle suggestions of espionage), political movements, the emerging realignment of traditional gender-based career options, the lingering effects of WWI and the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the increasing threat of another major war just over the horizon.

In many respects, these young early 20th-century men and women who first became fascinated by, and then feverishly adept at, the technologies of flight lived in the moment. History gave them an unprecedented explosion of opportunities that cut across class and gender barriers as no movement had ever done before. They worked, played, innovated and even died in relentless pursuit of the seemingly impossible --- long-range flight in heavier-than-air machines. Perhaps the only worthy comparison would be the heady period of the 1960s and ’70s when the Space Race was going full tilt.

Just 35 years after Alcock and Brown’s harrowing, storm-buffeted flight from a makeshift runway in Newfoundland to Galway, Ireland, I made my first flight from Canada to England as a four-year-old. By then, the Big Hop of the 1920s had become the North Atlantic Crescent Route, a series of “hops” that on my trip went from Toronto to Gander (NL), Gander to Prestwick (Scotland), and Prestwick to Gatwick. Instead of a flimsy canvas and wood biplane with its cockpit open to the elements, my flight involved (if memory serves) three different aircraft: a DC-9, a luxurious Stratocruiser (BOAC’s coveted flagship), and a Constellation.

For about another generation after my maiden trip to the UK, flying remained an idealized, romanticized mode of travel in which comfort, service and safety were the hallmarks of a highly respected industry. As Rooney gently laments, this is no longer the case. After my own inaugural flight, I did not travel by air again until long after the glory days of flight as an experience in and of itself were past. There will never be another flight like that first one --- Alcock and Brown’s, or my own.

Thanks to David Rooney’s elegant, passionate and meticulous retelling of what went into that first “Big Hop,” we can experience in words so much of what it must have been like to be a part of it. THE BIG HOP may be the finest aviation history you ever get to read.

Reviewed by Pauline Finch

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

The plane was flying at 3500 ft. above the vast Atlantic Ocean.

“Then, just as he was looking at the needle of the air-speed indicator, it froze in front of his eyes. He could smell smoke. Its sensor, mounted above his head, had become packed with sleet and jammed. The indicator was now useless. The turbulent wind made the aircraft sway and judder…To try to get his equilibrium back, he drew back the control column, hoping to pull the nose up. The aeroplane hung motionless for a second. Then it fell into a steep spiral dive.”

Charles A. Lindbergh in a single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in May 1927, trying to complete the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight?

Negative.

It was eight years earlier in May 1919. The courageous pilot was Jack Alcock, a British aviator flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines. Alcock was trying to complete a nonstop flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland. Accompanying him as navigator was Arthur Whitten Brown. Brown, nicknamed “Teddy,” was born in Glasgow, Scotland, though his parents were Americans.

I’ve admired Lindbergh since I was a child, thrilled at his derring-do, self-reliance and a triumph of will against the odds. (Yes, I know he also had some less than admirable qualities) On a trip to Hawaii as an adult, I even made a special trip to visit his grave at the end of the road to Hana under the shade of a Java plum tree at Palapala Ho‘omau Church on Maui. I’ve read multiple books about Lindbergh, who became a sensational and lasting celebrity, and I always thought, as most Americans likely do, that he was the first to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight.

Then I came across a fascinating, dramatic, fast-paced book published in 2024, The Big Hop, by David Rooney.

At a time when there seems to be few real heroes, Rooney’s compelling account reveals that Alcock and Brown, both veterans of WW I, were among a hardy group of men who took on the challenge of a contest sponsored by Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Daily Mail newspaper. Northcliffe offered a £10,000 prize to the first aviators to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.

Alcock and Brown were no strangers to peril. Alcock had fought in multiple terrifying dogfights during WWI, earning a Distinguished Service Cross. Brown, captured by the Germans in 1915 after crashing his Flying Corps B.E.2c biplane in northeastern France during WWI, endured atrocious conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps. The camps, often run by sadistic commanders, offered scandalously meagre food rations, were often freezing, swarming with rats and mice, and were inattentive to the multiple injuries and health issues suffered by POWs.

To be eligible for Northcliffe’s prize, competitors had to comply with three basic conditions: the flight had to be between any point in Great Britain and any point in Canada, Newfoundland or the United States; the flight had to be non-stop; the flight had to be completed within 72 hours.

Three teams joined Alcock and Brown in Newfoundland to make the attempt at a continuous Atlantic crossing:

Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve in a single engine Sopwith Atlantic
Frederick Raynham and C. W. F. Morgan in a single-engined Martinsyde Raymor
A team led by Mark Kerr in a four-engined Handley Page V/1500 bomber Atlantic

Hawker had a successful takeoff and managed to fly about 1000 miles, but the Sopwith’s engine failed and the plane went down in the ocean about 750 miles from Ireland. Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve were rescued by a Danish steamer, the SS Mary.
Raynham and Morgan’s plane crashed on takeoff on Newfoundland, likely due to a heavy fuel load and rough terrain.
Mark Kerr’s team abandoned their attempt at a transatlantic crossing after Alcock and Brown successfully crossed the Atlantic.

Alcock later said that when his modified Vickers Vimy bomber fell into a steep spiral dive during the transatlantic flight, the plane “began to perform circus tricks”—plunging toward the ocean while he fought desperately to remain aloft. One moment the altimeter read 1,000 feet, the next only 100. When they were just 65 feet above the waves, he succeeded in regaining control.

On 15 June 1919 a telegram from Alcock and Brown arrived at the Royal Aero Club with the message: ‘Landed Clifden, Ireland, at 8.40 am Greenwich mean time, June 15, Vickers Vimy Atlantic machine leaving Newfoundland coast 4.28 pm GMT, June 14, Total time 16 hours 12 minutes. Instructions awaited.’

As David Rooney wrote in The Big Hop, “Today, a transatlantic flight is an unremarkable part of everyday life. It is almost a chore. But somebody had to go first.”

The Vickers Vimy that Alcock and Brown flew on display in the London Science Museum.

[Sugarpuss O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book. Granted, I'm a sucker for anything early aviation, but this book did not disappoint. It tells the story of the high-stakes contest of the first flight across the Atlantic. And what a story it is. Originally slated for 1913, it would take a World War to stop these men from attempting the Big Hop, but come 1919, the race was on. The trials and tribulations these men face are awe-inspiring to say the least. And while we take for granted flying across the Atlantic today, just 20 years after the Big Hop, TWA embarked on the first commercial flight across the Pond. Without the bravery and determination of these men, the commercial aviation industry may have never gotten off the ground. Can't wait to take my own Big Hop to see the plane that started it all. Many thanks to Mr Rooney for bringing these men back to life.

[Maria Lyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fabulous. Hugely readable regardless of how much you do (or don’t) know about the subject. If they haven’t done an episode on The Rest is History about this already, then the producers need to get the author on speed dial as it would work a treat. He wears what is obviously a huge amount of research very lightly and deftly mixes human interest stuff with the technical details of the scale of the challenge. Thank goodness for the adventurous spirits that this book captures - they lead to many of the massive leaps forward that we come to take for granted.

[Dawn Tyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a very well structured book with an excellent blend of biography and technical detail. It was an exciting read too, the attempts to cross the Atlantic for the first time by air are vividly described and I was left feeling devastated for the aviators who fell short and then exhilarated for those who succeeded. The names Jack Alcock and Ted Brown should be so much more widely known - theirs was truly a remarkable achievement. I’m just so grateful to David Rooney for bringing their story to light.

[Roger Smitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost anything about the people started flying is interesting. This book tells us the event that most of us knew about the early flying thing. I call the "flying" word(s) are very interesting. Sometimes there are long pages that go through a long story that made the airplane a very new thing at those times. I thing there changes about flying is still going.

[Erik Lindstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed account of leading pioneers on the frontiers of aviation, its feats and foibles. Helps a reader realize the precarious nature of early aviation, we so easily now take for granted what was once a formidable dream.

[Gary Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written account of the first flights across the Atlantic in 1919. Hard to comprehend these days just how challenging those flights were, even though some did not succeed they still gave their all attempting it!

[Linda]

Maybe just not in the mood for this story right now🤷🏻‍♀️

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring. So much detail. Listening while driving, almost fell asleep

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on the first flight across the Atlantic in 1919 by a 2 man crew. Reads like a thriller.

[Artie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great unknown story that's told quite well.