The first transatlantic flight is 100 years old

When on June 14, 1919, the captain John Albad and the lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown They were launched aboard a British twin-engine Vickers from the island of Newfoundland. The Atlantic Ocean had already been crossed by the air, but never at any one time.

In May 1919, three American seaplanes left New York to cross the ocean in stages. Pbading through Newfoundland, the Azores, Portugal and finally England, one of the aircraft managed to end the trip, covering 6,000 kilometers in three weeks.

Albad and Brown wanted to cross the North Atlantic without stopping, in its narrowest area: the 3.000 kilometers separating Newfoundland from Ireland.

They had in sight of a juicy reward, proposed by the British newspaper Daily mail, 10,000 pounds for those who managed to unite the American continent to the British Isles in less than three days.

Two other aircraft tried in vain to achieve the feat, Newfoundland in May 1919: one had to love in the ocean and had been taken over by a freighter, the other s & # 39; 39, was crushed on takeoff.

On June 14, between the sound of its two Rolls-Royce engines, Albad and Brown's biplane, loaded with 4,000 liters of fuel, barely managed to take off from the Canadian island.

The curious were crowded in the boundary of the airfield near San Juan de Terranova, and "they have already cried disaster when, at the right moment, Captain Albad activated the controls," says the correspondent of the London newspaper. The weather.

The Vickers managed to take off, shaving the trees at the end of the trail and heading east. Brown will forever remember this takeoff: "Several times, I held my breath, fearing that our badpit would touch a roof or the top of a tree."

From a thick mist to a blizzard and frost, the weather was bad, especially if it was considered that it was an open cabin.

At night, the plane, shaken by gusts of wind, lost altitude and almost fell into the ocean. Albad recovered the flight in extremis.

"The salty taste we felt later on the tongue came from the moss," said the pilot. "I think we were only five or six meters from the water."

Then came a storm of snow and hail. The ice almost blocks the controls and engines. Brown had to do acrobatics to remove the layers of frost with his hands.

On the morning of June 15, Ireland began drawing in the distance. The aircraft landed on what they thought was a meadow and ended up being a peat bog. The wheels sank and the plane braked hard. The two men went out without any scratches. They had managed the feat after more than 16 hours of flight.

The exploit copied the newspaper covers and the news spread quickly. The New York Times He published Captain Albad's epic tale: "Our journey was horrible, the miracle is that we have arrived, we have barely seen the sun, the moon or the stars …"

The two men were hailed as heroes in Dublin, then in London, where they received the award of Daily mail Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Air Force.

However, his fame is short-lived: the solo act of American Charles Lindbergh on May 20, 1927, between New York and Paris, eclipses the odyssey of the two British.

Albad died in December 1919 in Normandy, aboard another Vickers, and Brown died in 1948 from an overdose of barbiturates.