4o6 : The Atlantic 



Glenn Curtiss. This class o£ ship was designated as the NC, standing 

 presumably for "Navy-Curtiss" boats. Four of them were built and 

 given number designations. In May of 1919 three of them took off 

 from Trepassy in Newfoundland on a course that was to carry them 

 to Europe by way of the Azores. Navy vessels patrolled the coarse 

 and a world relaxing from the war took a sportsman's interest in the 

 outcome. Only the NC-4 succeeded in completing the crossing. 



Also starting from Newfoundland, H. G. Hawker made a valiant 

 effort to complete the flight from Newfoundland to the British Isles. 

 The first successful flight was also made in this season by Captain 

 J. Alcock and Lieutenant A. Whitten-Brown. They ran into foggy 

 and difficult weather and finally succeeded in reaching the west 

 coast of Ireland and in landing their machine in a bog. The flight 

 lasted sixteen hours and was the first nonstop flight across the Atlan- 

 tic. Thus, they qualified for the $50,000 prize. 



A few weeks after the completion of the Alcock-Brown flight a 

 large British dirigible known as the R-^4 flew from Edinburgh to 

 New York and back to England. Naturally a flight such as this of 

 a dirigible carried across the ocean many more people than were rep- 

 resented in all the early flights of heavier-than-air machines. A num- 

 ber of dirigibles had been developed not only in England but also in 

 Germany and the United States. Atlantic crossings to North and 

 South America of dirigibles were fairly common up to the time of 

 the disastrous burning of the great German airship Hindenburg which 

 took place in 1937. 



One notable flight of this class was that made by the airship Los 

 Angeles in 1924. This ship, in command of Dr. Hugo Eckener, made 

 a flight of 5,066 miles from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst 

 in New Jersey. This was also the year in which United States Army 

 planes completed a flight around the world. They met with many 

 delays and difficulties but their flying time was 371 hours. 



By this time it had been fairly well established that flights could 

 be made across the Atlantic from Europe to North America or 

 Europe to South America. In 1926 aviators began to turn their atten- 

 tion to polar exploration. In May of that year there was a race on to 

 see what man, in what kind of machine, could first get to the North 

 Pole. On May 29 the honor went to Lieutenant Commander (later 

 Admiral) Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett when they flew an 

 airplane from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and returned by the 

 same route. It was only a few days later that the semi-rigid airship 

 the Norge carried Ronald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and General 



