Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781324050964

Table of Contents

Reviews

""One of the most astonishing moments in aviation history finally gets its due in The Big Hop, a vivid and utterly compelling account of the 1919 contest to cross the Atlantic by plane. David Rooney is an expert storyteller with a big heart, capturing not only the perils faced by the intrepid airmen who attempted the flight, but also their humanity."" -- John Lancaster, author of The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available