Travellers' Checks | Remembering the world’s first transatlantic flight that crash-landed in Ireland 100 years ago
Also, new art deco hotel in quirky Otaru offers stylish alternative for exploring Sapporo region and Caribbean cruise by Moody Blues frontman offers raft of ripe rockers for seven nights of old-school entertainment
At about 8.40am on June 15, 1919, a modified bomber aircraft crash-landed in a boggy field near the town of Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland. Battered and dazed, pilot John Alcock and his navigator, Arthur Whitten Brown, had become the first men to fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, having taken off in Newfoundland, Canada. The British pair were knighted by King George V within the week.
On June 16, sensational headlines and both men’s photos dominated front pages, from The New York Times to the Daily Mail, whose £10,000 prize they had just won. The news was slow to reach Hong Kong and, when it did, coverage was slim. On June 18, The Hongkong Telegraph ran eight lines from Reuter’s Pacific Service noting the completion of the flight, but not its significance. The next day the paper ran a more substantial paragraph, having realised the possibilities for Hong Kong travellers, wondering, “who’ll be the first Hongkongite to fly home?”
In his book One Summer: America 1927 (2013), author Bill Bryson wrote that perhaps “never have flyers braved greater perils in a less substantial craft [...] There really has never been a more hair-raising, seat-of-the-pants-flight.” Yet when he found Graham Wallace’s “classic” The Flight of Alcock & Brown (1955) in the renowned London Library, in St James Square, he was the first person to borrow it in 17 years. It took twice that long for a statue of Alcock – who died in a plane crash six months after the crossing – and Brown to be commissioned and installed at Heathrow Airport.
That statue has just been moved by road to the grounds of the grand Abbeyglen Castle Hotel in Clifden – not far from the original crash-landing spot – as part of the Alcock & Brown 100 Festival, which runs from June 11 to 16. A timely new book titled Race Across the Atlantic: Alcock and Brown’s Record-Breaking Non-Stop Flight, by Bruce Vigar and Colin Higgs, is published this month by Air World.
Unwind Hotel & Bar Otaru opens in Hokkaido, Japan
