the author notes, “I’ve come across various estimates of exactly how many men crossed the Atlantic before Lindbergh, ranging from the high 60s to the low 90s. I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list anywhere–and I’ve been looking on and off for years. I decided to compile my own list and came up with 84 men: 18 by airplane and 66 by airship. There may be others I don’t know of.”
There is a book about this exact subject - it’s called The 91 Before Lindbergh, written by Peter Allen, and published by Airlife Publishing in 1984. (ISBN 0-906393-37-X).
As you can tell by title, Allen writes that 91 men flew the Atlantic prior to Charles Lindbergh. One major difference from the list given is that the Straight Dope writer writes:
“In 1922, Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral of the Portuguese Navy flew most of the way from Portugal to Brazil with several stops in three different flying boats. However, they fell several hundred miles short of completing the longest leg of the trip, from the Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul to the Island of Fernando de Noronha, and were rescued twice.”
According to Allen however, the two Portuguese aviators actually did complete their trip on June 5, 1922, with a third Fairey IIID seaplane (not flying boat) which was flown out from Portugal.
Others missing from the Straight Dope list are four Brazilians who flew from Genoa to Natal in April/May 1927 using a Savoia-Marchetti flying boat, and four talains who flew from Caligari to Argentina in February 1927 using a Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boat.
Wow, I wish I had known about that book before. It would have made my research a whole lot easier. I see several places online that are selling the book used, so I’ll probably buy a copy.
The case of Coutinho and Cabral is complicated. Many authorities do count them as having successfully crossed the Atlantic. From what I know of the flight, and from my totally subjective opinion of what should and what shouldn’t count, I would say close but no cigar.
As I understand it, they made it as far as The Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul safely. They made it part of the way from there to the Island of Fernando de Noronha, but had to be rescued by ship. Then starting with a new plane they set out from Fernando de Noronha and headed back toward the Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul (so they couldn’t be accused of skipping that leg of the journey). But they had to be rescued yet again. So they flew part of that leg the westward in one plane and part of the leg eastward in another, but they never really flew that whole leg. Now it’s been several months since I read up on this, so I could be misremembering the details. There is no doubt that they successfully completed the last two legs in a third plane, from Fernando de Noronha to Rio de Janeiro.
The Feb. 1927 flight you refer to is, I think, that of Francesco de Pinedo. I found a reference to this flight after I wrote the report, but I haven’t found any detailed descriptions about it that I would consider trustworthy. I have been intending to look it up in the New York Times the next time I go to a library that has the NYT on microfilm that far back.
The flight in April/May 1927 doesn’t hring a bell. A Google search turns up reference to João Ribeiro de Barros as leader of the expedition. I’ll have to do some more reseach on this too.
Thanks for the information. I will have the report updated after I do some library research, probably in the next week or two.
Eh, so what? Solo flights were on the way out anyway. Airtravel only makes sense if you can sell it like they sold sea travel during the era of the Grand Liners.
I’ve always thought that Lindbergh was overhyped and basically irrelevant. He did what many had done before and many have done since, and he did it an a fundamentally nonsensical way.
I think that Fear Itself is correct in noting that the fact that Linbergh flew alone created an aura of romance that was not present in the other flights. That, coupled with his flying between two major metropolitan areas, rather than the rural take off and landing spots of Alcock and Whitten-Brown (Newfoundland and Ireland), made his flight much more interesting to the general public. From a strictly aviation standpoint, however, the flights of the NC-4 (the first Atlantic crossing by air of any kind), and Alcock and Brown (the first direct Atlantic crossing) are probably more significant. The major impact of Lindbergh’s flight was that it sparked interest in aviation like no other event, before or since. Alcock and Brown and the NC-4 crew were, however, well-known in their day. Alcock and Brown were knighted, their plane has a prominent place in London’s Science Museum, and there is a statue of the two outside Heathrow airport in London. Alcock was killed in a flying accident soon after the Atlantic flight and Whitten-Brown gave up aviation, so that may have contributed to them being less well-remembered.
Most Britons are aware that Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic before Lindbergh, but national orientation wouldn’t explain why most Americans are unaware of the NC-4 flight, since that was made by the US Navy. I think all three of these pioneering flights deserve credit.
Glad to be of help - I hope you find a copy of the book; it’s well worth reading.
Your account of the Coutinho and Cabral is correct; I agree that it’s a judgement call, but since they did actually complete the leg back from Fernando de Noronha to the Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul, and were forced down on the return flight, they did actually complete the entire distance by air, albeit partly in the wrong direction. Using three different planes to complete the journey is a bit excessive, though.
I think they count as making it, although I understand why others wouldn’t agree.
The April/May 1927 flight was indeed by João Ribeiro de Barros and three others. This again was a flying boat trip that took quite a long time, and suffered several accidents. It left Genoa on October 17, 1926, reached Gibraltar by October 19, and flew to Porto Praia by November 9. Here a dispute occured between de Barros and Artur Cunha, his co-pilot. Cunha quit, forcing de Barros to have a new co-pilot shipped by sea from Brazil. At the same time, de Barros returned to Italy to obtain spare parts.
The flight resumed on April 27, 1927, and was forced down by fuel line troubles near Fernando Noronha. The aircraft was repaired, and reached the Brazilian mainland on May 14, 1927, just a few days before Lindbergh took off.
The Pinedo round-trip flight of February 1927 also had its problems. To quote Allen,
"Pinedo had intended to fly the South Atlantic in one stage from Bolama to Natal but the difficulties of take-off were too great - seven attempts to take off with enough fuel to reach the Brazilian mainland had failed - so the Italians flew back to Dakar on February 18 and then to Porto Praia in the Cape Verde Islands on February 19 to shorten the transatlantic stage.
“At Porto Praia the difficulties of take-off continued and several attempts failed. At last after reducing their fuel and food to a minimum they got away about 1 AM on February 22. They had a grim flight of 15 hrs and 15 min as on reaching the coast of Brazil they could not put down because of storm conditions and rough seas and had to go back to Fernando Noronha…on February 24 they got across to Port Natal and Recife.”
Their troubles weren’t yet over. The aviators flew up the continent to the US to fly the return leg, and on April 5 the flying boat was at Roosevelt Dam in Arizona. As it was being refuelled, two local boys approached in a rowing boat and threw a burning match over the side, which ignited some spilled fuel on the water; the resulting fire completely destroyed the airplane.
The US Government was aghast at this, and offered a replacement aircraft, but Pinedo preferred an identical S.55, and had one brought all the way from Italy; they landed back in Rome on July 16, after Lindbergh had flown to Paris.
Excellent report. And very useful additions by backlightning. I found this forum while searching for the Allen book.
Wether it is 84 or 91 seems to be a matter of taste. Anyhow it is very good to have them all listed together with all your comments for or against.
Just one minor item.
Hugo Eckener was not Captain of the Hindenburg on its last flight. He was flying the Graf Zeppelin back to Europe from Recife, Brazil to Friedrichshafen. They landed May 8th, the day after the Hindenburg accident.
Captain of the Hindenburg on its last flight was Max Pruss. He was also on board LZ 126 October 1924. Captain Pruss did not survive the accident.
end quote
I’m with Derleth on this - I can’t see that doing something alone adds hugely to the achievement, and I suspect that thousands mobbed any aviator who completed a spectacular event in those days (so long as they landed somewhere accessible)
After all, there were several solo powered heavier-than-air flights before the Wrights, and noone remembers those. The Wrights were the first to achieve effective controlled flight, but they were not half as influential as, say, Santos-Dumont. If they had never existed the history of aviation would have been basically unchanged.
I think that what we are talking about here is not related to actual history (though determining that is pretty tricky), but rather what stories have become passed down through the media. Americans, for instance, seem to be routinely taught that Lindburg was the ‘first to fly the Atlantic’. and that the Wrights ‘invented the aeroplane’. I understand the Brazilians are taught about Santos-Dumont. The Americans have got a bigger English-speaking media output - that is why their version is the one we hear about. So the issue of later fame is not one of what happened at the time - it’s to do with who interprets the stories later.
Captain Max Pruss did survive the Hindenburg, and died around 1960.
It was his colleague, Captain Ernst Lehmann, who died from burns.
Lehmann was travelling to the US as a representative of the Zeppelin Company (supposedly to try to buy helium form the US government).
They got a patent* for this, and sucessfully defended it in Court against people who copied them.
*#821,393, issued May 22, 1906
Yes - my point exactly. They got a patent for wing-warping, not for inventing the aeroplane. If you were to give this to anyone, it would probably be Sir George Cayley.
It is hard for the rest of the world to understand the American love of litigation, but this is bound up with the reason the Wrights were not influential in the early history of flight. They carried out their experiments with few observers, and seem to have wanted to make their fortune by controlling all future aircraft development, unlike Santos-Dumont, and many other researchers, who made their discoveries freely available.
The Wrights got a patent for wing-warping as a directional control, a technique which was superceeded almost immediately by Bell’s ailerons. Quite why a patent should be taken as a proof of anything escapes me, given the current patent mess in IT, but it is worth noting that the Wrights then lost it again. The cite I give above indicates another issue with the legislative approach to invention - the Smithsonian is only able to hold onto the Wright Flyer so long as it conforms to the following agreement:
" Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Airplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."
This effectively binds much of the scientific and historic establishment in the US.
I thought this thread was about Lindenburgh and Fame, but the above exchange also indicates the processes which may be used to influence or change history.
As the American Scientist article says, the Wrights were the first to be powered, piloted, sustained, controlled, and heavier than air. Until you have all of those, you don’t have airplanes.
As the American Scientist article says, the Wrights were the first to be powered, piloted, sustained, controlled, and heavier than air. Until you have all of those, you don’t have airplanes.
End Quote …
Not the case at all. When you have a machine in the air you have an aeroplane. When it is heavier than air, you have a heavier than air aeroplane. When it has an engine it is powered, and so on. Quite how you measure ‘sustained’ and ‘controlled’ must be questionable - in any case, the article points out that:
"… one might reasonably wonder why a flight must be sustained or achieve control to count for a “first.”
and goes on to say that picking the Wright’s flight is an arbitary point ‘but it does make for a good national party’. Perhaps you might also want to include a line saying that a true aeroplane must land with all the parts it took off with - I believe the Flyer dropped its wheels on take-off?
But all this is moving further from the thread, and not even answering my point in the previous post. I said that there were several solo, powered, heavier-than-air flights before the Wrights, and I specifically avoided mentioning issues like controllability (which only became an issue later with the wing-warping patent debacle which set America back so badly in early aviation), because I was not trying to cover the issue of first flights. The thread is about Lindbergh and Transatlantic flights, and I was talking about the nature of later attribution and fame.
