Overview

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.

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David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London. Jeremy Clyde is an English actor and musician. He and musical partner Chad Stuart formed the popular 1960s duo Chad and Jeremy, and continue to work together today. As an actor, Clyde has appeared in many films and television series, including The Iron Lady, Downton Abbey, the British television miniseries version of Doctor Zhivago, and many others.

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