Great Airplanes 6: Vickers Vimy

By Andrew Herd (19 March 2005)

On June 15, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown flew a modified Vimy IV non-stop across the Atlantic, in sixteen hours, twenty seven minutes. They returned to claim Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail newspaper prize of £10,000, presented by Winston Churchill who at the time was Britain's Secretary of State, and shortly after both men were knighted at Buckingham Palace by King George V.

I retrospect, it doesn't seem like much. Thousands of people cross the Atlantic by air every day, reading books, watching in-flight movies, trying to survive airline catering and ogling the stewardesses. But in 1919, the only creatures that had flown the Atlantic direct were birds and powered flight was still in its infancy, the Wright brothers having made their first tentative hops barely fifteen years earlier. To all intents and purposes, the ocean formed an impassible barrier to flight - and though many West-East flights followed Alcock and Brown's pioneering journey, it is a sobering thought that it took nine long years before anyone succeeded in crossing the other way.

In many respects, the flight was a typically British affair. The pair were experienced flyers, thanks to the First World War, and they converted a Vickers Vimy bomber and shipped it across to Newfoundland with so little fuss that the majority of people in Britain were unaware of the attempt until they arrived in Ireland. It took them three weeks to assemble the plane, test it and search for a suitable takeoff site, a fruitless task, which ended up with them using the place they first thought of, Lester's Field near St. John's.

The Vimy was the best plane they could find, which isn't saying much. Powered by two Rolls Royce Eagle IIIs, it was flat out at 85 knots, which translated into a 22 hour journey in still air - leaving them little margin for error should their weather reports prove incorrect. It was, however, one of the most modern aircraft available, having been designed in 1917 and only just entered service with the RAF. The Vimy was a strategic bomber, a role in which it never really served, but which made it ideal for a transatlantic attempt. Apart from its relatively low cruising speed, the major problems with the plane were lack of torsional strength (in turbulent conditions, deflections of the control surfaces were often cancelled out by twisting of the fuselage and flexing of the wings) and its complete lack of any form of blind flying instruments or de-icing equipment, inventions which lay far in the future. Alcock and Brown literally flew by the seat of their pants, with the dubious aid of a pair of clinometers, an airspeed indicator, an altimeter and a clock.

At 13:40 on 14th July, an overcast day despite a good weather forecast, Alcock turned the Vimy into the westerly wind and opened the throttles wide. It picked up speed very slowly at first, getting faster and faster until a collision with the pine forest at the end of the field seemed inevitable, but at the last second, it lifted, the wheels skimming the tops of the trees, according to Brown. Alcock's laconic observation was the concise: "At 1:45 PM we were airborne". Cheered by the sirens of ships in St. John's Harbor, they scraped up to a thousand feet before Alcock turned the aircraft eastwards, towards Ireland. As the coast of Newfoundland was left behind, they slowly gained height, reaching a heady 1,300 feet as they passed out of sight of land.

Apart from the takeoff, the first three hours were uneventful, but at 17:00 a bank of fog appeared, blocking their path. Climbing over it was impossible and when Brown worked out their position he recorded the wind speed as nil (though in fact it can't have been, as you can't get fog without a light breeze). An instant later, the Vimy plunged into fog so thick that they couldn't see the propeller blades and even the engine noise was muffled. An hour later, they were still flying completely blind and Alcock inched the Vimy higher in the hope that Brown might be able to take one more sextant shot before dark. While he was doing this, a violent clatter broke out from the right hand engine and it began to spit flames towards them into the slip-stream; an exhaust fitting had cracked, and all they could do was watch it melt in the fierce heat. Their ears under assault from the unsilenced Eagle, a new problem became apparent, which was that the battery used to heat their flying suits had run out unexpectedly early. They froze.

They finally broke clear of the fog, only to discover an overcast and a frontal system dead ahead, so close that they couldn't avoid it. It was as if the Vimy had been thrown into a cement mixer and Alcock temporarily lost control - they lost 3,900 feet before he could recover, levelling out a hundred feet above the waves. When Brown recovered enough to see how Alcock reacted to this nearly fatal plunge, his friend just grinned, opened the throttle wide, reversed course (they had exited the spiral facing the wrong way) and began slow climb back to 7,000 feet. Then, communication being impossible over the racket of the engine, he opened his mouth and pointed, until Brown realised that his pilot wanted something to eat. They shared sandwiches and a bottle of beer, which they tossed overboard.

With seven o'clock approaching, the sun put in an appearance, directly behind them. Brown grabbed his sextant and took a fix, which, in further testimony to Alcock's skill as a pilot, showed they were only a few miles south of their planned route. Then with equal suddenness, they were back into cloud. Midnight passed and although Alcock climbed to 6500 feet, they were still trapped in the murk.

Fifteen minutes later, the veil was swept aside and Brown was able to take a star shot. Consulting the air tables and scribbling furiously on his pad, he worked out that they had flown 850 nautical miles, leaving a thousand more ahead. But most important, their average speed was 106 knots, which meant that they were going to make it.

They had three hours of relative peace, apart from the engine, when they flew smack into another cu-nim, if anything worse than the last one. The Vimy was thrown violently about, lashed alternately with rain, snow and hail and the airspeed indicator quit as the plane went out of control again. Alcock yanked the throttles to slow their descent and somehow managed to regain control, although there was a moment when the Vimy was in an absolutely vertical descent. "The salty taste we noted later on our tongues was foam," Alcock was later to report. "In any case the altimeter wasn't working at that low height and I think that we were not more than 16 to 20 feet above the water." But there was a new threat now.

Virtually every part of the plane was affected, including the control surfaces, so that Alcock needed all his strength even to move the rudder (an essential control for coordination of turns in planes of that era). The engines began to run rough, snow was piling up in the cockpit, and both men were bitterly cold in the open cockpit. Snow was collecting on the carburetor air filters and ice on the engine inlet connectors, so Brown found a knife and climbed out onto the nose. Alcock tried to prevent him going out on the wing, but Brown pulled free and fighting an 85 knot blizzard in pitch darkness at 8000 feet, crept out to the engine, despite a stiff left leg, the legacy of a war injury. He cleared the air filters, the inlets and the fuel inspection windows - before climbing back over the nose to do the same to the other engine. Brown would repeat this four more times before dawn.

Just after 07:00, an hour after the ailerons had iced up completely, the "Vimy" was cruising at 12,000 feet when the clouds parted enough to let Brown take his last fix. They were still on course and they were close to land, but there was a thick layer of cloud beneath them. With the ailerons frozen, Alcock knew they had little chance if they encountered turbulence, but they had no choice, so he took them down, but as they neared 3000 feet, the snow in the cockpit began to melt, leaving them sitting in a puddle. At a thousand feet, Alcock, his eye on the rough ocean beneath, cautiously opened the throttles and the Eagles picked up smoothly. Twenty minutes later, they sighted land. Brown identified the town of Clifden in Connemara and they headed for a lush green field beyond the radio station. The pair were dog tired and they misinterpreted the warning waves from the station's staff, for they were on short final to a bog, shortly to become the most famous one in Ireland. The Vimy only ran a few yards before pitching violently up onto its nose, leaving the adventurers hanging in their belts.

It took some time for their rescuers to pick their way across Derrygimla Moor. A man by the name of Taylor shouted up: 'Where are you from?'

'America,' came the laconic reply. It is typical of the pair that they insisted the Vickers and Rolls-Royce mechanics who had helped them ready the plane should receive a £2,000 pound share of the prize money. Though he did not know it, John Alcock, arguably one of the bravest pilots who ever lived, was not fated to live much longer, because he was killed in a flying accident in December 1919, only three days after he had presented the salvaged Vimy to London's Science Museum.

FS2004 comes with a brace of Vimys, as the transatlantic flight inspired record breaking journeys from England to Australia and South Africa by other flyers. As with all the 'Century of Flight' planes, the Vimy is a classy piece of coding, the one problem being that the compass was screwed to the floor of the original aircraft, which means that it isn't exactly easy to see in the virtual cockpit of the simulation. Fortunately, Microsoft have provided a pop up substitute, allowing the plane can be flown entirely from the VC. So, after you have enjoyed the ponderous takeoff roll and inched your way up to 4,000 feet, I would like you to load the 'heavy snow' theme, reduce the vis to one sixteenth of a mile, turn icing up to 'moderate' and turbulence up to severe, and go fly.

I hope you do better than I did, but this is precisely the conditions in which Alcock turned and grinned at Brown.

Andrew Herd