Upside Down Over the Atlantic: Alcock and Brown’s Wild Flight

Simon Carver

So, so, so they're in the air, right? June 14th, 1919. This massive Vickers Vimy bomber—basically a flying petrol tank with two Rolls-Royce engines strapped to it—clears the rooftops of St. John's, Newfoundland, by... what, a few feet? And almost immediately, before they even leave the coast, the generator that powers their wireless radio just... snaps off. Tears away, takes a stay wire with it. They are instantly deaf and dumb over the Atlantic, Billy. No radio. No way to call for help. And Arthur Whitten Brown, the navigator... he doesn't even tell the pilot, John Alcock, until they're on the ground in Ireland sixteen hours later.

Billy Galligan - Author

Ah, sure, why not? I mean, why spoil the man's afternoon with details like that? You're already sat in a wicker chair, surrounded by enough aviation fuel to wipe out a small parish, with the cold Atlantic crawling up your trousers. What's the point of telling him the radio's gone? It's not like they could pull over to the side of the road and call the AA, is it?

Simon Carver

Right! Exactly. "By the way, Jack, we're entirely alone in the universe, pass the sandwiches." But then they hit the fog. And when I say fog, I don't mean a bit of mist. This was a thick, black wall of soup. They couldn't see the tips of their own wings. And remember, in 1919, you don't have attitude indicators. You don't have gyros. If you can't see the horizon, you have no earthly idea which way is up.

Billy Galligan - Author

You're flying by the... the, the seat of your pants. Quite literally. You feel a bit of a tug in your belly, a change in the wind on your face... but your inner ear lies to you in the dark, Simon. It-it-it plays tricks. They went into the cloud, completely blind, and after a few minutes of twisting and turning, trying to keep the nose straight... they suddenly realized the petrol was dripping out of the gravity tanks the wrong way. Up toward the upper wing instead of down. They were... they were flying completely upside down, and didn't even know it till the gravity started acting odd!

Simon Carver

Upside down! In a sixty-five-hundred-pound bomber. They're stalling, tumbling through the fog, completely out of control. Alcock is wrestling with the wheel, the engines are screaming, and they plunge out of the bottom of the cloud bank and find themselves... sixty-five feet above the ocean. Sixty-five feet! That's... what, the height of a four-story building? At a hundred miles an hour in the dark.

Billy Galligan - Author

Oh, close enough to taste the salt spray, Simon. You'd see the white caps of the waves coming at you like teeth in the dark. If Alcock's reflexes had been a fraction of a second slower, if he hadn't hauled that great heavy beast of a yoke back with every bit of muscle he had... they'd have been nothing but a smear of oil and some floating spruce wood on the water. It makes my yellow chariot of chaos—my school bus back in Georgia—look like a walk in the park, I can tell you that much.

Simon Carver

But it gets worse. Around three in the morning, they fly straight into a blinding snowstorm. The temperature plummets, and sleet starts freezing over the open cockpits. And now, the radiator shutters and the carburetor intakes on those Rolls-Royce Eagle engines are starting to choke with ice. If those engines starve, they're dead. The instruments—the airspeed indicator, the altitude dials—are freezing solid. They're losing their engine power, Billy.

Billy Galligan - Author

And this... this is the bit of the story that makes your hair stand on end. You've got Arthur Whitten Brown... now, remember, the fella had a bad limp from a wartime crash. He wasn't exactly a nimble gymnast. But he looks at the engines, sees they're choking, and he decides... well, there's only one thing for it. He climbs out. Out of the cockpit. Onto the wet, icy fabric of the lower wing, in a gale-force wind, at several thousand feet up in the freezing dark.

Simon Carver

With no harness! He's just holding onto the struts with one hand, kneeling on a slippery wing, using a pocket knife and his bare hands to chip the ice off the air intakes. His fingers are freezing, he's getting blasted by eighty-mile-an-hour freezing air, and he has to do this not once, but... what, five or six times?

Billy Galligan - Author

Aye, five or six times he went out there! It's just... it's pure madness. It's the kind of thing you only do when the alternative is a very fast, very cold swim to the bottom of the sea. He’s out there on the wing, the wind trying to rip him off like an old leaf, with nothing but a pocket knife and raw nerve. And back in the cockpit, Alcock is just trying to keep the plane steady, probably praying to every saint he can think of, while his mate is crawling around near the propeller.

Simon Carver

It's absolute sensory deprivation. For sixteen hours, they're sitting in these open, freezing cockpits. They only saw the sun or the stars a couple of times. Most of the flight was just... this gray, roaring void. They're surviving on lukewarm coffee from a thermos and stale sandwiches that are probably half-frozen. They can't talk to each other because of the engine roar—they're communicating by scribbling on scraps of paper.

Billy Galligan - Author

Can you even imagine the exhaustion? You're numb, you're deafened by those two roaring beasts of engines right next to your ears, and every muscle in your body is locked tight from the cold and the sheer terror of it. You're just... you're waiting for the engines to make a funny noise. But then, just as the dawn starts to break... the clouds finally split open. The gray turns to blue, and right there ahead of them... two little green spots in the water. Eashal and Turbot islands, just off the coast of Galway. They'd actually done it. They'd crossed the ocean.

Simon Carver

They survived the dark. But as we know, Ireland had one last little surprise waiting for them in the bog. But, man... that night in the clouds. Unbelievable. Anyway, that's the long and short of the flight itself. Good chatting with you, Billy.

Billy Galligan - Author

Good chatting, Simon. Talk soon.