Vickers Vimy

They trusted each other with the particular economy of men who had each been through enough to understand exactly what trust costs.

Their aircraft was a Vickers Vimy, originally designed as a heavy bomber intended for raids on Germany, built just a little too late for the war it was designed to fight.

The Vimy had a wingspan of sixty-eight feet and two Rolls-Royce Eagle 8 engines, each producing three hundred and sixty horsepower.

The bomb bay had been modified to carry additional fuel tanks.

The temperature dropped as they climbed back up, and ice came.

This is the piece of the story that stops people when they really hear it.

The fuel flow indicators on a Vickers Vimy were small glass tubes mounted on the engine, nacelles visible from the cockpit if you leaned well out into the slipstream.

In icing conditions, those tubes accumulated ice and became unreadable.

Separately, neither one had the full kit.

The airplane was the Vickers Vimy.

It was a big twin-engine biplane designed in 1917 as a heavy bomber meant to strike targets deep in Germany from English airfields.

The war ended before it flew in combat, and Vickers had converted a production airframe specifically for this attempt.

When he joined Alcock, they were paired before they had much chance to know each other, but the combination was exactly right.

The aircraft was a Vickers Vimy.

Let me describe this thing so you can picture it.

The Vickers Vimy was a World War I heavy bomber.

built to reach Berlin, though the war ended before it ever made that run.

It was a biplane with a wingspan of just over 68 feet and a fuselage that sat crew and bombs in open cockpits with nothing but a windscreen between you and the slipstream.

It was not a field.

It was Derry Gimla Bog.

And so with Sopwith, it seemed, out of the race, and with Martinside, because of what happened to them, very definitely out of the race.

It was now switching attention to Handley Page in a huge biplane bomber with four engines, with Mark Kerr at the helm, and the smaller Vickers twin-engine heavy bomber, known as the Vickers Vimy, uh, with Alcock and Brown.

Who would be next away? And, uh, in the end, one of those two teams managed to get off the ground.

Again, only just.

Um, I think, I think Ted Brown bumped his nose a little bit, but they were both fine.

But the real problem with that was they'd just made history, but what John Alcock had always intended to do was to land in Ireland and win the prize, check over the airplane, and then take off straight away, perhaps with some extra fuel, and then fly over to England to fly to Brooklands and land at Brooklands because that's where the Vickers factory was.

The men and women who'd made the Vickers Vimy he'd just flown, he wanted to land there and share the joy of having made this great achievement with the workers of Vickers, and he wasn't able to do that because it was too damaged, uh, in that, in that s- semi crash landing in the bog in Ireland.

He later said that he could have cried when he thought he might have let down the workers w- who, who he cared so much about.

It should be remembered, and it's often forgotten, that he wasn't the first man to fly across the Atlantic.

That honour belonged to a couple of Englishmen, ex-wartime aviators called Alcock and Brown, and they flew across in a large bomber, a Vickers Vimy, it was called, a very cumbersome and ugly-looking aircraft.

They started their flight in Newfoundland, and they flew and landed in a bog in Ireland.

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