“We had plenty of reserve fuel left, using only two-thirds of our supply.
“The only thing that upset me was to see the machine at the end get damaged. From above the bog looked like a lovely field, but the machine sank into it to the axle, and fell over on to her side.”
Alcock Has Spent 4,500 Hours in Air
There are few fliers, living or dead, who have passed as many hours in the air as Captain John Alcock, the twenty-seven-year-old pilot of the first aeroplane to make a non-stop flight across the Atlantic. This officer of the Royal Air Force has flown more than 4,500 hours. The one man who is known to have passed more time in the air is Captain Roy N. Francis, U. S. A.
Big, blond, and ruddy, Captain Alcock is typically English in appearance, voice, and mannerisms. His eyes are blue, and his hair, brushed straight back, is almost flaxen. He is more than six feet in height and heavy of frame. Powerful wrists and forearms attest to many hours of tinkering with heavy machinery.
Alcock, who was born in Manchester in 1892, was apprenticed at seventeen to the Empress Motor Works, a firm interested at that time in the development of an aeroplane engine. Alcock helped to build the first aero engine made at that plant, and meanwhile developed the flying fever.
Then he started experimenting with gliders, and in 1911 began to fly. He earned his certificate the following year, and in 1913 won the first race in which he ever had entered. Shortly afterward he took second place in the London to Manchester and return competition, at that time one of the most famous air-races.
In one of those early competitions Alcock beat Frederick Raynham, the pilot of the Martinsyde which was injured in trying to get off for the transatlantic flight with Hawker, whose effort to cross the ocean in a Sopwith ended in mid-ocean a few weeks ago.
From the fall of 1914 to the fall of 1916 Alcock was an instructor of flying at Eastchurch, where he trained some of the best-known fliers of England. One of these was Major H. G. Brackley, pilot of the Handley Page bomber, which has been sent to Newfoundland in the hope that it could get away first on the “hop” across the Atlantic.
From Eastchurch Alcock went to the Dardanelles. There he won the Distinguished Service Cross as an ace, and it is the gossip of the air force that if he had not fallen prisoner to the Turks his rank would have been much higher. He has seven enemy planes to his credit.