Ninety one years ago today, two pilots mistook a green patch of land on the west Galway coast for a field and landed their plane on it. Alas, the weather was much worse that morning than it was this morning and visibility was poor. The ‘green field’ was actually a bog, so the landing was quite bumpy and their plane was wrecked. Still a good landing is one that you can walk away from , and the two pilots walked away from that one to a 10,000 pound prize and, a few days later, a knighthood each from King George V. John Alcock was dead before Christmas – killed in an air accident – but Arthur Whitten Brown spent the next few decades working in the aero industry – on a wall in his office hung one of the propellor blades from the Vickers Vimy plane that had made the crossing. The plane itself was rebuilt and is now in the Science Musuem (pictured above).
The plaque by the plane in the museum mentions that one of the pilots reported feeling disoriented after the fourteen and a half hour flight nonstop across the Atlantic. He had experienced what would later be called “jet lag” – nearly 32 years before a jet would make a non-stop crossing of the Atlantic¹. A memorial near Clifden marks their crossing today.
¹Brown died in October 1948, just three months before the first jet crossing of the Atlantic [it was not non-stop, however].