The Vickers-Vimy, although loaded to the extent of about eleven pounds per square foot, climbed satisfactorily, if slowly. Eight minutes passed before we had reached the thousand feet level.
As we passed over St. John's and Cabot's Hill towards Concepcion Bay the air was very bumpy, and not until we reached the coast and were away from the uneven contours of Newfoundland did it become calmer. The eddying wind, which was blowing behind us from almost due west, with a strength of thirty-five knots, made it harder than ever to keep the machine on a straight course. The twin-engine Vickers-Vimy is not especially sensitive to atmospheric instability; but under the then atmospheric conditions it lurched, swayed, and did its best to deviate, much as if it had been a little single-seater scout.
We crossed the coast at 4:28 P. M. (Greenwich time), our aneroid then registering about twelve hundred feet. Just before we left the land I let out the wireless aërial, and tapped out on the transmitter key a message to Mount Pearl Naval Station: "All well and started."
My mind merely recorded the fact that we were leaving Newfoundland behind us. Otherwise it was too tense with concentration on the task ahead to find room for any emotions or thoughts on seeing the last of the square-patterned roof-mosaic of St. John's, and of the tangled intricacy of Newfoundland's fields, woods and hills. Behind and below was America, far ahead and below was Europe, between the two were nearly two thousand miles of ocean. But at the time I made no such stirring, if obvious, reflections; for my navigation instruments and charts, as applied to sun, horizon, sea-surface and time of day, demanded close and undivided attention.
Withal, I felt a queer but quite definite confidence in our safe arrival over the Irish coast, based, I suppose, on an assured knowledge that the machine, the motors, the navigating instruments and the pilot were all first-class.
The Vickers-Vimy shook itself free from the atmospheric disturbances over the land, and settled into an even stride through the calmer spaces above the ocean. The westerly wind behind us, added to the power developed by the motors, gave us a speed along our course (as opposed to "air-speed") of nearly one hundred and forty knots.
Visibility was fairly good during the first hour of the flight. Above, at a height of something between two and three thousand feet, a wide ceiling of clouds was made jagged at fairly frequent intervals by holes through which the blue sky could be glimpsed. Below, the sea was blue-gray, dull for the most part but bright in occasional patches, where the sunlight streamed on it through some cloud-gap. Icebergs stood out prominently from the surface, in splashes of glaring white.
I was using all my faculties in setting and keeping to the prescribed course. The Baker navigating machine, with the chart, was on my knees. Not knowing what kind of weather was before us, I knelt on my seat and made haste to take observations on the sea, the horizon, and the sun, through intervals in the covering of clouds.
The navigation of aircraft, in its present stage, is distinctly more difficult than the navigation of seacraft. The speed at which they travel and the influence of the wind introduce problems which are not easily solved.