Flying the Atlantic in Sixteen Hours: With a Discussion of Aircraft in Commerce and Transportation

The dream of flight is as old as humanity itself - every religion has heavens reachable through the air, every mythology teems with winged beings. But it took until 1919 for that dream to become transatlantic reality. Sir Arthur Whitten Brown and pilot Sir John Alcock climbed into a Vickers-Vimy bomber in Newfoundland and pointed it toward Ireland, knowing they might never arrive. This is Brown's own account of that sixteen-hour ordeal: the bone-deep cold, the fog, the terror of navigating over nothing but black ocean, the moment they glimpsed Ireland through clouds and knew they'd done the impossible. But this book is more than adventure narrative. Brown writes with quiet philosophical weight about what their flight means for human connection, for commerce, for a world about to become dramatically smaller. The barriers that have kept nations and peoples apart will tumble, he predicts, and the sky becomes the great highway.