One Summer: America, 1927

wiping Alcock’s goggles since Alcock couldn’t for a moment relax his grip on the controls. Flying through cloud and fog, they lost all orientation. Emerging into clear air at one point, they were astounded to find that they were just sixty feet above the water and flying sideways , at a 90-degree angle to the surface. In one of the few spells when Brown was able to navigate, he discovered that they had somehow turned round and were heading back to Canada. There really has never been a more hair-raising, seat-of-the-pants flight.
    After sixteen hours of bouncing disorder, Ireland miraculously appeared beneath them, and Alcock crash-landed in a boggy field. They had flown 1,890 miles, only slightly more than half the distance from New York to Paris, but it was still an astounding achievement. They emerged unhurt from their mangled plane, but struggled to get anyone to grasp quite what they had just done. Word of their departure from Newfoundland had been delayed, so no one in Ireland was expecting their arrival, removing all sense of excitement and anticipation. The telegraph girl in Clifden, the nearest town, was not terribly good at her job, it seems, and could only manage to transmit short, mildly befuddled messages, adding to the confusion.
    When Alcock and Brown managed to get back to England, they were given heroes’ welcomes – medals were bestowed, the king gave them knighthoods – but they quickly returned to their quiet previous lives, and the world forgot all about them. Six months later, Alcock died in a flying accident in France when he crashed into a tree in fog. Brown never flew again. By 1927, when flying the Atlantic Ocean became an earnest dream, their names were hardly remembered.
    Entirely coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time that Alcock and Brown were making their milestone flight, a businessman in New York who had no connection to aviation at all – he just liked planes – made an offer that transformed the world of flying and created what became known as the Great Atlantic Air Derby. The man’s name was Raymond Orteig. He was from France originally, but was now a successful hotelier in New York. Inspired by the exploits of First World War aviators, Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to the first person or persons who could fly non-stop from New York to Paris, or vice versa, in the next five years. It was agenerous offer but an entirely safe one since it was patently beyond the scope of any aeroplane to cover such a span in a single flight. As Alcock and Brown painfully proved, just flying half that distance was at the very bounds of technology and good fortune.
    No one took up Orteig’s offer, but in 1924 he renewed it, and now it was beginning to seem possible. The development of air-cooled engines – America’s one outstanding contribution to aviation technology in the period – gave planes greater range and reliability. The world also had an abundance of talented, often brilliant, nearly always severely underemployed aeronautic engineers and designers who were eager to show what they could do. For many, winning the Orteig Prize wasn’t merely the best challenge around, it was the only one.
    The first to try was the great French aviator René Fonck, in partnership with the Russian émigré designer Igor Sikorsky. No one needed the success more than Sikorsky did. He had been a leading aeroplane designer in Europe, but in 1917 had lost everything in the Russian Revolution and fled to America. Now, in 1926, at the age of thirty-seven, he supported himself by teaching chemistry and physics to fellow immigrants and by building planes when he could.
    Sikorsky loved a well-appointed aeroplane – one of his pre-war models included a washroom and ‘promenade deck’ (a somewhat generous description, it must be said) – and the plane he now built for the Atlantic flight was the plushest of all. It had leather fittings, a sofa and chairs, cooking facilities, even a bed – everything that a crew of four could possibly want in the way of comfort and elegance. The idea was to show that the Atlantic could not simply be crossed, but crossed in style. Sikorsky was supported by a syndicate of investors who called themselves the Argonauts.
    For a pilot they chose René Fonck, France’s greatest war ace. Fonck had shot down seventy-five German planes – he claimed it was over 120 – an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he had flown only for the last two years of