The Big Hop
The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively account, historian Rooney (About Time) explains that aeronautic technology made major leaps forward during WWI, propelling the nascent industry into the forefront of the postwar public's imagination. Nearly a decade before Charles Lindbergh's solo flight, this taste for aerial adventure reached a little-remembered crescendo with the race to become the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. In 1919, three teams of aviators took off from Newfoundland in an attempt to conquer the "Big Hop." Newspapers around the world reported on the contest, fueled by a £10,000 prize (nearly $400,000 today) offered by London's Daily Mail. Anxious for publicity, British aviation companies pushed pilots and navigators to enter the race, despite the dangers of their still rickety products. In open cockpit biplanes, the teams flew more than 2,000 miles through blinding fog, rain, snow, and treacherous winds. Only one made it: the first to embark, a converted Vickers Vimy bomber flown by Jack Alcock and Ted Brown. The second team ditched in the ocean halfway across; the third crashed—twice—during takeoffs; a fourth never left, having learned of the arrival of Alcock and Brown—who themselves nearly died during an out-of-control 5,000-ft. descent that they pulled out of a mere 50 feet above the water. Rendered in Rooney's graceful prose, this makes for a breathtaking tale of bravery, perseverance, and fortune.
