The first transatlantic flight

who flew across the Atlantic first yes what pioneering feat of aviation achieved this staggering feat 2,000 miles across iceberg infested waters of icy death well that's the subject for this video which has been sponsored by audible more of that later now if you are a Lindy hoppers swing dancer then you know the answer to this already don't you because you know about the Lindy Hop of why it's called the Lindy Hop is because of the famous headline isn't it Lindy pops the Atlantic in 1927 that headline was on the front of a newspaper and people thought wow it's the spirit of the age yes that's called the latest dance after it because you know they become jazz have you got women wearing trousers and radio and newsreels and jar everything's just so thoroughly modern and so that's how the Lindy Hop got its name and it's named after Charles Augustus Lindbergh Lindy of the headlines Fame and he of course flew across in the spirit of st. Louis I got made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart as some date some years later and so there you go so there's your answer there are two big problems however with this version of events first is that that headline Lindy hops the Atlantic was in fact made up for a comedy sketch performed by the jiving Lindy hoppers who were working in West in Acton in West London and they were part of the revival of the Lindy Hop and they made it up for a sketch they performed then and they haven't had a historian working with them and he and many others have looked for that headline and no one's found it just to think for a moment if that headline did actually exist that would be one of the most famous images of Lindy Hop wouldn't it be on all our posters advertising Lindy Hop events and you haven't seen it why not because it doesn't exist because they made it up for a comedy sketch sorry about that so and yes alright so the legend of how the dance got its name could just be a work of fiction but there is a second also quite big problem with this version of events and that is that Charles Augustus Lindbergh wasn't actually the first person to fly across the Atlantic nor was he the second nor third law a fifth or tenth or fiftieth he was in fact the 92nd person to fly across the Atlantic yes I'll say that again for those of you who completely convinced that he was the first he was the 92nd person to fly across the Atlantic well why is he so famous then well I put it to you that he was very good self publicist that being American probably helped that having a movie made about him starring Jimmy Stewart big movie star probably helped as well also at the time he got filmed doing it and being filmed doing something is really good for spreading the word around the world in 1927 there are cinemas all around the world and people got a lot of their news of course by watching newsreels that were shown in those cinemas because this is before television news and so they saw pictures of a man sitting off and then landing Wow and ticketed parades and all the rest of it so he was tremendously famous and and now people remember that he was the first to fly across the Atlantic even though he most definitely wasn't so who was the first then well I would say that it was a flight done in 1919 but I know that some people gonna say hang on the the Atlantic had been crossed by a plane before that yes it had it had been crossed by plane before that but no one had actually flown across it in one go in a flight so the first flight the first pioneering feat of aviation where you take off from the old world and land in the new flying across the Atlantic 2,000 miles in one go that happened in 1919 but before that a series of flights involving American sea planes and using sea planes frankly cheating these hops landing on land several times I'd love to be able to tell you the route but unfortunately every source that I've consulted has differed really radically about what route was taken even where they ended up on the other side of Manticore chigau was it was it was it Island anyway the point is it took them an awfully long time some of they stopped overs involved 10-day rests and changes of plane and of personnel so I would say that that's not that's not a flight across the Atlantic that's a journey that sort of ended up in the old world eventual involving plane so that doesn't get so instead I put it to you that the first time that the the the Atlantic was hopped in one flight was actually by Alcock and brown in nineteen in June 1919 now they did so in order to win a prize the prize was put up by Lord Northcliffe and Lord Northcliffe was the owner of the British newspaper The Daily Mail and he himself had in 1903 watched at Kitty Hawk the Wright brothers make what some people say is the first-ever heavier-than-air powered flight it sort of not in a number of ways that they were British flights for instance using steam engines that were a long time before that and I've heard tell of many other people using heavier than air craft but it seems that the the Wright brothers were the first people to get filmed doing it and see above that really helps but whether they were the first or not is is not that pertinent perhaps just the leap in technology is more important to think of because this was 1903 just 10 years later he puts up 10,000 pounds for the first person who can fly the Atlantic in one go there was a time limit as well and that's about that's over a million pounds today by the way that's 2,000 miles the first flight that he witnessed went 40 yards so that the leap between 40 yards and 2,000 miles over iceberg infested waters is quite a big leap I think you'll agree and when he put the the prize money up in 1913 he was already looking forward he was thinking I could sell my newspapers in New York I could print them in Britain and I could get them across the plant get sell them in New York the same day possibly that's what he was thinking about and of course it's a great way to publicize his newspaper but it was impossible in 1913 the the aircraft technology just wasn't there but he did attract a lot of attention but then will he know what happened in 1914 don't you yes world war one started and that distracted people for four years but it also enormous Lee increased aircraft technology by the end of World War one Vickers had developed the Vimy bomber and at least in theory this was capable of flying the Atlantic so at the end of World War one now there was a possibility and they were the men around of course to give it a go because they're an awful lot of pilots being trained up during the war and - such were Arthur Witten Brown and John Alcock both of whom had been captured Brown spent two years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany and Allcock spent about a year as a prisoner in Turkey after setting the world record for the longest distance bombing flight and both these men supposedly whilst incarcerated hatched plans for flying the Atlantic it was an ambition that they both had and they met appropriately enough at Brooklands racecourse it seems a lot of people who are into long-distance flying and aviation in general were also into racing cars first and that's where they met and they formed a team and if we're going to have a go at this but they weren't the only people to have a go at it there were at least two other rival teams there was another British team using a Sopwith bomber and they which they called to slightly ominous leave the Atlantic and there was an American government backed project using a plane called the Remo and all of these gathered between April and June on Johns Island Newfoundland which is a convenient place because it makes the the hop across the Atlantic fairly short but it's still 2,000 miles and you're so far north that you're doing it over very icy waters so if you do end up in the drink you're probably going to die so they arrived there having shipped there dismantled aircraft across and themselves made it in passenger liner looking at the weather the whole time and studying the weather and finding it quite ominous they were used to Western European and Turkish flying conditions and they saw there an awful lot of fog and storms over that part the Atlantic but never mind never mind they they we decided that we can do this anyway so they arrived on the island and the when they arrived they found that the other teams had got their head of them and nabbed the best takeoff spots and I wasn't totally sure why they couldn't share Lantern takeoff strips but apparently they couldn't so they had to employ 30 men to blast away rock and create a 400-yard takeoff strip this was a 400 yards of very bumpy rocky not really terribly good but nevermind it'll just have to do takeoff strip and then the various teams made their preparations lots of test flights last-minute adjustments redesigns and so forth but the main thing was waiting for the weather so there you are on this island and you're with rival teams and everyone wants to be the first yeah I mean to do it you're the quickest that's not that that's what people can remember it's the people who do it first are going to be remembered or at least they thought will give your man but apparently Charles Augustus Lindbergh is the one that everyone remembers them but never mind so do you wait for the perfect weather and then take off to give yourself the best chance of getting across or looking across at your rivals do you think even though the weather's not very good we better take off now because well whilst we're crossing the Atlantic the weather's gonna change anyway and we've got to be there first and the first team who who's whose nerve broke was the Atlantic and they set off into the unknown and then the rain more two hours later thought right we've got to go now if we're gonna be first we could have to take a good take off now take the risk the weather is not very good but we've got to overtake them we've there are two hours ahead of us now come on that stir everything into the plane and go and they overload a bit and they crashed on takeoff and got nowhere so what happened to the Atlantic well actually the Atlantic also ran into very bad weather and ended up ditching in the sea but fortunately they were rescued by a ship so they didn't die but they had no radio or rather the radio they had didn't work which meant that nobody knew that they'd been rescued so as far as Volcom Brown were concerned the had just taken off and disappeared so uncle can Brown then waited for the weather to improve which it did much it improved a little and eventually they decided right okay tomorrow we're going to go so they had an early night went to bed at 7 in the evening and at 3:30 they were ready to go but unfortunately the weather wasn't there was a very strong crosswind which made takeoff ridiculously dangerous so they waited hand they waited in the waited they had one last meal sheltering from the rain underneath the wings of their aircraft and eventually that afternoon they decided ok the weather's still not great but at least the the weather the wind has swung around and now it's a headwind not a crosswind so that's better for taking off so that's it we're going so they packed up the aircraft it was a bomber now normally the bomber had a crew of three and Bombay for the bombs obviously they weren't gonna take any bombs so the bomb bay was filled witnessed and with fuel and they had realizing the the risk of ditching in the sea they had modified one of the fuel tanks so that if it emptied first they would be able to use it as makeshift life raft and there was also a survival a package with some food and so forth in the tail plane assuming the tail plane would float and they took their lucky mascots and they had enough fuel they reckoned for 2,400 miles this is a 2,000 mile flight so that's not a huge amount of contingency but the more fuel you carry and the more weight you're carrying and they were all at they were carrying five tonnes now five tonnes today doesn't sound like very much but don't forget that people not many years before thought that heavier than than than air flight was impossible and carrying five tonnes was a new thing they had never tested this plane with five tonnes aboard it before and so that room they were taking a bit of a risk there but they had to get as much fuel on as they possibly could and then they revved up the engine and Ford they went along the bumpy way now a lot of people had gathered to watch them and people were shouting at them not to go because they would almost than what they would certainly these people were shouting be killed I'm sure people were saying you're going to die I'm sure when they said that it was well meant but what they were doing was in many people's opinion impossible it was certainly unprecedented and was definitely extremely risky and eyewitnesses to the take-off say that it went the whole 400 yards apparently with no that was no willingness at all to take off and to the people watching on the bias never going to get airborne but right at the end of the runway Olcott altered the flaps and he altered the angle of the aircraft caught the headwind and the thing just leave itself into the air so that was the start of the flight so what happened next well obviously I will be telling you that but not until I told you about my sponsor that would be wrong in case you don't know all them all is a massive online website online website I think you'll find that all websites are online it's a website which has on it many audiobooks which you can download and listen on devices now I am so old I'm really not entirely sure what devices means I mean surely at in open there is a device but I don't think you can listen to any of their audiobooks on a tin-opener but but you have devices like like like computers and laptops which is a type of computer and a telephone which these 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the birth of British aviation which has I would say a rather pessimistic subtitle which is prisoners of hope hope it's not the greatest of subtitles although actually it does put me in mind or something this is totally irrelevant by the way but I did see this just the other day and this is this is a sports shirt that I saw a young lad wearing the the sponsoring company is apparently a company which supplies window blinds but to me to me this this just seemed like a a demotivational slogan yeah aspiration blinds so so don't even try yeah don't build your hopes up because you'll go blind aspiration blinds that's yeah if you're a company that sells blinds maybe you should you think that you know that actually works as a verb as well so what's that deliberate I don't think it was if you're a supplier of hampers as well you know don't do it don't don't just hey you know like Fortnum's hampers does it I don't know anyway sorry that was wrong real irrelevant so there we go just audible you download books there's an offer and I've given you the details so and you can make yourself a better you that's that's the phrase they're saying you can because books are improving and Lord your book could make you better so back to the flight so they just take it off but they were not out of danger yet because they were between quite steep high hills either side in this 40 mile an hour headwind and there were eddies of wind all over the place and they were they were skimming the treetops just managing to get airborne but fortune be all was an experienced pilot and he did the things that experienced pilots are able to do and got them safely out over the water as the people cheered them on their way most of them some of them still saying probably die anyway so it wasn't a smooth flight they that they get across the Atlantic and land no it wasn't it wasn't actually tremendously smooth quite a few things went wrong quite early on in the flight for instance a vital propeller snapped this was the propeller which went round around around in the wind which powered the generator which created the the electricity supply for the plane which heated their suits and powered the radio and you know stuff like that having no radio was pretty serious because they couldn't radio their position to anyone they couldn't then receive corrections to their position from anyone if they ditched in the sea they wouldn't be able to rescue a radio any ship so the chances of rescue were then once their way out over the Atlantic we're approaching zero so that I imagine was a concern also it was very very cold now this is before the days of heated or even sealed cockpits so they were in an open cockpit just wearing you know and good very wrapped up warmly with Kempton and so forth but they're there sitting shoulder shoulder with the wind they very very cold wind hitting them straight in the face and it was very difficult to talk to each other as well there was an intercom system but that didn't work for reasons that weren't going to and they're right next to each other so you think you don't need an in-car intercom you just these right there just talk to the man or just shout to him the thing is though that you've got you've got of 118 mile an hour wind hitting you in the face and just there and just there or enormous rolls-royce engines which are just open they're just then there's nothing other than air between you and them and they made a tremendous racket so even though these men were right next to each other shivering away they had to communicate with hand signals and written notes to each other all the pilot never throughout the entire flight took his feet off the pedals or both hands off the stick here so he only ever had one hand to do everything else like eat drink write and make signals and Braun was the navigator ever experienced navigator who did a tremendous job as we'll find out but he was somewhat up against it because for almost the entire flight they were flying through cloud or according to some versions fog or fog and cloud which I find very strange because fog is cloud if you're in a cloud that's what fog is fog is being in a cloud so I think that all the various writers who have made distinctions between fog and cloud should just not because when you're in a plane for cloud it's all the same anyway the point is they couldn't see anything and if you can't see anything it's really difficult to navigate but don't worry in front of them they had you're an advanced instrument panel which told them exactly with no there's no GPS there's no artificial horizon that they did have a spirit level so you could to hold a spirit level as the plane bucks around in the eddying wind and try to work out roughly where the horizon is but doesn't tell you whether you're climbing or diving it doesn't really tell you a huge amount information but if they had a spirit level and they had a compass a very primitive simple compass but you know that would give you a rough bearing and they had a sextant for making observations of the Sun and the stars and so forth which is completely useless when you're in cloud which they were I think I mentioned before almost all of the time so what you do when you're in cloud well first you panic a bit when you hear one of the engines making a sound like a machine gun and then you see on your starboard side a large bit of exhaust pipe fly off into the cloud behind you and then you can see flames coming out of three of the cylinders to your right making even more noise than they were making before so that was a little bit disconcerting but they just put up with it so no power freezing-cold the suits of heat is heaters don't work they've lost the radio but they'll be fine right well because they had RAF training and experience so they flew through the cloud which got darker and darker and darker as they they tried going up and climbing in the cloud but as soon as you with climb you then got condensation and icing which was on an aircraft of this sort which is only just managing to stay airborne really deadly and if something freezes solid you lose control so that was a problem but it was still worth going up trying to see if they could get some glimmer of light from the and they did now when the Sun shines onto a cloud of course and you're in that cloud the light appears to be coming from everywhere and you don't see any shadows but they manage to get high enough so that they looked down they could just see a darker patch of cloud that way so that must be the shadow of the aircraft and so they could get a rough bearing off that and Brown made some calculations and reckoned that they were actually pretty much on course despite the fact that they couldn't see where they were going now you may have heard that a blindfolded man in a flat field and told to walk in a straight line will go in a circle and and people have tried this with cars as well on the big flat plane blindfolded driver and you'd think well you hold the wheel straight and you go in a straight line but apparently people don't they go round around in circles and there is a great danger when you're flying in just cloud of going round and round in circles or of course getting too low and hitting the drink but this they promptly didn't do darkness fell and they're now flying at night and they can't see the stars because it's so flippin cloudy again they try climbing high and again icing problems and icing problems were quite severe because they couldn't read the fuel gauges now the fuel gauges were not on the dashboard in front of them the fuel gauges were actually on the engines themselves but it's alright you've got an open cockpit you just look at look across to the engine and read the fuel gauge but it had iced over so they couldn't now you have to be able to regulate the flow of fuel to the engines and watch those gauges like a hawk and they didn't have much fuel to to to waste remember so Brown despite the fact that you still lame in one leg from a war injury climbed out holding on to the struts went along the wing and with a knife straight away the ice took a reading by torchlight and then made his way back to the cockpit again he had to do this several times he himself later later made light of this but Allcock thought that was flippin brave so why that means he was able to keep her a watch over the fuel and the fuel situation seemed at this stage at this stage to be all right but it was really amazingly dark and the the darkness is one that make the main themes are you reading accounts of it is just the unending flying through cloud not with knowing where you are and then a storm hit them and they were bucking and rearing around the place and going a crazy angles and at this point you lose all the sense of direction and even which way is up as there were they were they were being thrown around in the aircraft it was just the pressure on all cops back that he was using according to his later accounts to work out whether he was being thrown backwards or forwards what angle he was in the aircraft essentially it just trying to work out how much white weight am i feeling on my back and how much of my seat and how much elsewhere so he was just using that because he had no no horizon to look at and he went into what must have been utterly terrifying he went into a spiraling nosedive now the start of World War one spiraling nosedive was fatal if your aircraft went into aspiring nosedive there was no way out of it you were going to die you would crash into the ground and die and during the war a way of piloting it to get out of the spiraling nosedive was discovered and people were trained in it and obviously Olcott would have known this but even so he doesn't know how high he is and he can't see the ocean it could be that the the cloud goes all the way down to the water and he's going to crash into the ocean before he sees it fortunately at about 100 feet they came out of cloud and there was the ocean at the craziest of angles and 100 feet when you're in a spiraling nosedive isn't very far but he did what was necessary and jiggle around with the sticks and and the controls and he pulled out over the water at such a low height that they the men reported that they could actually hear the waves they actually hear the ocean they got so close to it given that they couldn't actually hear each other sitting next to each other what would the roar of the engine and all the rest of it I wonder if that was literally true but they certainly felt or in this reporter that they we felt that they could hear the ocean that's how close they got through them they pulled out and then tried to work out where they were and after a while worked out that they were actually flying towards America which was somewhat counterproductive so they turned around but they weren't actually that far out position even now even having done so much dead reckoning flying through dense cloud and a later point they said well is that land is that land we're overland they saw a land and then oh then they're oversea again in fact what they've done is they'd flown over a couple of very small islands west of Ireland but at 8:15 at a height of a thousand feet the following morning they sighted Ireland and after a while the three masts of the Marconi's Wireless station came into view they fired off some flares which nobody saw and looked around for a landing place in this is 1919 so Ireland is not a tremendously friendly place to be a an RAF pilot at this point but they looked around for somewhere to land and they saw excellent perfect they saw smooth flat emerald-green landing landing place and thought perfect okay well to set it down on that that that beautiful flat pasture there and all cargo a great pilot was able to execute a smooth landing that touched down the wood yeah the the plane it was a bog it was a bog from the sky it was flat box tend to be flat and it was green they tend to be green certainly in Ireland but unfortunately it was a bog and so they ticked forwards and did the sort of handstand neither man was hurt but unfortunately the fuel lines ruptured and there was fuel coming into the cockpit all around them so they had to get out of the plane pretty quickly and look about them and they saw running towards them armed men there were Irish soldiers coming towards them with rifles and a load of workers from the Marconi factory but there was a well all right it was fine they were so where are you from where are you from well we've flown here from America they claimed and of course they nobody believed that because well that's never been done before almost certainly impossible you can't fly from America that's 2,000 miles away you foolish but they were able to show something that they had brought with them because loaded into the plane was the world's first airmail yes they had with them 300 letters of course ml stamps didn't exist at that point so the the the the Newfoundland post office had to improvise a bit but they had letters from America with them and they were able to show these and convince the these Irishmen that they had indeed flown the Atlantic and they went spies or anything so it was an amazing fact it was another first for Britain the first transatlantic flight and it was another first for Britain the first intercontinental airmail and another first for Britain was that they had the world's first jet lag I don't know if they were feeling it in the form of jet lag as we know today but they had actually overtaken the Earth's rotation by three hours so there you go that's another first for Britain nohow so you can imagine they were heroes of the day they were taken to London where they were just mobbed and a chap called Winston Churchill handily with a check for 10,000 pounds they've given a few more prizes and he told on that they were required to go the next day to a Windsor Castle to meet his majesty Burger King where they were decorated and they were they've taken there in a carriage they were given though works so there you go to a tremendous heroes of aviation Alcock and brown remember their name yes the Charles Augustus Lindbergh pretty a pretty significant aviator in his way but he wasn't he was not the first to fly across the Atlantic no that was all cockin brown yeah [Music] the man [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 230,121

Rating: 4.8979645 out of 5

Keywords: aviation, flight, non-stop, atlantic, trans, transatlantic, intercontinental, aircraft, aviators, alcock, brown, lindbergh, lindy hop, first, record, flying, vimy, race, pilot, airmen, british, pioneers, aeroplane, airplane, RAF, RFC, navy, military, ww1

Id: Yk56nBcSalg

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018