THE BIG HOP

In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in “the Big Hop”: an audacious race to be the first to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.

Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration—and a welcome distraction—to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later.

In The Big Hop, I grant the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, I trace the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.

Mining evocative first-person accounts and aviation archives, I also follow the participants’ journeys: learning to fly on flimsy aeroplanes made of timber struts and varnished fabric; surviving the bloodiest war that Europe had ever yet seen; and battling faulty coolant systems, severe storms, and extreme fatigue while attempting the Atlantic. I transport readers to the world in which the great contest took place and trace the rise of aviation to its daredevil peak in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Recounting a deeply moving adventure, The Big Hop explores why flights like these matter, and why we take to the skies. Available to pre-order now, wherever you get your books.