FIRST ACROSS!
The U. S. Navy's Transatlantic
Flight of 1919

RICHARD K. SMITH

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS: ANNAPOLIS
1973

First edition. Signed and inscribed.

First Across is the exciting story of the first transatlantic flight. The flight, made in 1919, took a six-man crew nearly three weeks to complete.
Several million people will fly the Atlantic this year, and every plane in those busy air corridors— whether a Vickers VC-10, Ilyushin II. 62, or Boeing 747 —flies under a system of radio communications, weather intelligence, and air-sea rescue that is a legacy of the U. S. Navy's 1919 flight operation which culminated in the transatlantic success of the NC-4. This book describes in detail the entire operation, the planning, the men and their aircraft, the primitive radio communication and method of air navigation.
Man had been flying for less than two decades when the London Daily Mail offered a £10,000 prize for the first plane to cross the Atlantic. Government planes were excluded from the competition but the U. S. Navy was in a unique position to win the honor if not the prize.
Before the end of the First World War the Navy had requested an aircraft which would meet the twofold wartime requirement for long-endurance antisubmarine warfare patrol planes with a capacity for transatlantic crossings to relieve a critical shortage of merchant ships.
The Daily Mail prize started a flurry of transatlantic competition and though the Navy's planes came too late for the war they did arrive in time for the race.

Three big Navy Curtiss flying boats were prepared for the flight and took off from Newfoundland, but due to engine trouble and bad weather two landed at sea in the vicinity of the Azores and were not able to take off again. All hands survived but both planes were lost.
The NC-4, on 27 May 1919, after what seemed interminable delays, completed the long, twenty-day up-and-down-and-up-again flight to Portugal.
The author points out the remarkable fact that man's use of power and transportation has undergone a new stage of development every half century: 1769, steam power harnessed; 1819, steam power used in a ship crossing the Atlantic; 1869, steam-powered transportation connected both coasts of the U.S.; 1919, men flew between the continents; 1969, the first men landed on the moon.
Of these developments, it was the NC-4 flight which "makes aircraft the first universal means of transportation and . , . opens a new era of civilization. ..." Here, for the first time, are the complete details of how the U. S. Navy, as a result of efforts to meet a novel requirement of antisubmarine warfare coincidentally opened up a new era in world aviation.

In First Across, Richard K. Smith has used photographs, cartoons, and even advertisements of the era to help evoke that spring of 1919, an important moment in the history of transportation and civilization.

23 x 15 cm. 279 pp + photo plates. Map endpapers.

Very good condition. Dust jacket faded on the spine and worn at the corners. Some spotting to the cloth covered boards and with the title chipped on the spine. A little foxing to the page edges. Signed and inscribed by the author to the noted technical illustrator John Batchelor, on the title page; also with a correction by the author to the map endpaper.