When John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made their celebrated crossing of the North Atlantic in 1919, aviation safety statistics were alarming. Emergency landings occurred with an average frequency of one per 800 miles flown; the life expectancy of an Air Mail pilot in the US was a mere four years; and in the years 1920 and 1921 no fewer than 89 aeroplanes crashed, and 19 pilots were killed in the United States alone. Mechanical failure was the cause of many of these accidents, but many, too, were related to the weather.
Against this backdrop, Alcock and Brown were fortunate in the weather they encountered. Moreover, their landing on Derrygimla Bog near Clifden was recognised throughout the world as heralding the era of long-distance air travel. Sadly, Alcock died in France a mere seven months later when his aircraft crashed in bad weather in December 1919. But Sir Arthur Whitten Brown, as he became, lived on to see the great potential of their joint achievement realised. He died, 50 years ago today, on October 3rd, 1948.
It is interesting to compare and contrast Alcock and Brown's historic flight with another aeronautical event that occurred six weeks ago. On August 21st an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle, or UAV for short, landed at South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, having made a flight from Newfoundland lasting some 20 hours on a mere six litres of fuel. The UAV for all the world like a model aeroplane, has a wingspan of about eight feet and, as its name implies, has nobody on board. The aircraft had been launched from the top of a car, and used satellite navigation systems to find its way across the Atlantic. When it was near its destination, ground crew took over manual control and brought it safely in to land on schedule.
Now what, you might wonder, was the purpose of this exercise apart from grown men and women having fun by flying model aeroplanes? The project, it seems, was organised by a consortium that includes several American companies involved in aviation and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It is aimed at testing the possibility of using UAVs to gather weather information about the upper atmosphere safely, conveniently and relatively cheaply.
But the survival record of UAVs seems to be roughly equivalent to that of pilots in the early days of aviation. Apparently three of them were launched in Newfoundland that day: the first just disappeared, they know not where; the second crashed some minutes after take-off; and only the third made it safely across the Atlantic to its destination.