NIGHT
Midnight came and went amid sullen darkness, modified only by dim
moonlight and the red radiance that spurted from the motors' exhaust
pipes.
By then we must have climbed to about six thousand feet, although my
log shows no record of our height at this stage. Meanwhile, we were
still between upper and lower ranges of cloud banks.
At a quarter past twelve Alcock took the Vickers-Vimy through the upper
range, only to find a third layer of clouds, several thousand feet
higher. This, however, was patchy and without continuity, so that I was
able to glimpse the stars from time to time.
At 12:25 I identified through a gap to north-eastward Vega, which shone
very brightly high in the heavens, and the Pole Star. With their help,
and that of a cloud horizon that was clearly defined in the moonlight,
not far below our level, I used the sextant to fix our position.
This I found was latitude 50° 7´ N. and longitude 31° W., showing that
we had flown 850 nautical miles, at an average speed of 106 knots. We
were slightly to the south of the correct course, which fact I made
known to Alcock in a note, with penciled corrections for remedying the
deviation.
Most of my "dead reckoning" calculations were short of our actual
position because, influenced by meteorological predictions based on
the weather reports at St. John's, I had allowed for a falling off in
the strength of the wind, and this had not occurred. Having found the
stars and checked our position and direction, the urgent necessity
to continue climbing no longer existed. Alcock had been nursing his
engines very carefully, and to reduce the strain on them he let the
machine lose height slowly. At 1:20 A. M. we were down to four thousand
feet, and an hour later we had dropped yet four hundred feet lower.
[Illustration: THE TRANSATLANTIC MACHINE--A VICKERS-VIMY WITH
ROLLS-ROYCE ENGINES]
The clouds overhead were still patchy, clusters of stars lightening the
intervals between them. But the Vickers-Vimy, at its then height, was
moving through a sea of fog, which prevented effective observation.
This I made known to the pilot in a message: "_Can get no good
readings. Observation too indefinite._"
The moon was in evidence for about an hour and a half, radiating a
misty glow over the semi-darkness and tinging the cloud-tips with
variations of silver, gold and soft red. Whenever directly visible it
threw the moving shadows of the Vickers-Vimy on to the clouds below.
Mostly I could see the moon by looking over the machine's starboard
planes. I tried to sight on it for latitude, but the horizon was still
too indefinite.
An aura of unreality seemed to surround us as we flew onward towards
the dawn and Ireland. The fantastic surroundings impinged on my alert
consciousness as something extravagantly abnormal--the distorted ball
of a moon, the weird half-light, the monstrous cloud-shapes, the fog
below and around us, the misty indefiniteness of space, the changeless
drone, drone, drone of the motors.
To take my mind from the strangeness of it all, I turned to the small
food-cupboard at the back of the cockpit. Twice during the night we
drank and ate in snatches, Alcock keeping a hand on the joystick while
using his other to take the sandwiches, chocolate and thermos flask,
which I passed to him one at a time.
Outside the cockpit was bitter cold, but inside was well-sheltered
warmth, due to the protective windscreen, the nearness of the radiator,
and our thick clothing. Almost our only physical discomfort resulted
from the impossibility of any but cramped movements. It was a relief
even to turn from one motor to the other, when examining them by the
light of my electric torch.
After several hours in the confined quarters, I wanted to kick out, to
walk, to stretch myself. For Alcock, who never removed his feet from
the rudder-bars, the feeling of restiveness must have been painfully
uncomfortable.
It was extraordinary that during the sixteen hours of the flight
neither Alcock nor I felt the least desire for sleep. During the war,
pilots and observers of night-bombing craft, their job completed, often
suffered intensely on the homeward journey, from the effort of will
necessary to fight the drowsiness induced by relaxed tension and the
monotonous, never-varying hum of the motor--and this after only four to
six hours of continuous flying.
Probably, however, such tiredness was mostly reaction and mental
slackening after the object of their journeys--the bombing of a
target--had been achieved. Our own object would not be achieved until
we saw Ireland beneath us; and it could not be achieved unless we kept
our every faculty concentrated on it all the time. There was therefore
no mental reaction during our long period of wakeful flying over the
ocean.
We began to think about sunrise and the new day. We had been flying for
over ten hours; and the next ten would bring success or failure. We
had more than enough petrol to complete the long journey, for Alcock
had treated the engines very gently, never running them all out, but
varying the power from half to three-quarter throttle. Our course
seemed satisfactory, and the idea of failure was concerned only with
the chance of engine mishap, such as had befallen Hawker and Grieve, or
of something entirely unforeseen.
Something entirely unforeseen did happen. At about sunrise--3:10 A. M.
to be exact--when we were between thirty-five hundred and four thousand
feet, we ran into a thick bank that projected above the lower layer of
cloud. All around was dense, drifting vapor, which cut off from our
range of vision even the machine's wing tips and the fore end of the
fuselages.
This was entirely unexpected; and, separated suddenly from external
guidance, we lost our instinct of balance. The machine, left to its own
devices, swung, flew amok, and began to perform circus tricks.
Until we should see either the horizon or the sky or the sea, and
thus restore our sense of the horizontal, we could tell only by the
instruments what was happening to the Vickers-Vimy. Unless there be
outside guidance, the effect on the Augean canal in one's ears of the
centrifugal force developed by a turn in a cloud causes a complete loss
of dimensional equilibrium, so that one is inclined to think that an
aëroplane is level even when it is at a big angle with the horizontal.
The horizontal, in fact, seems to be inside the machine.
A glance at the instruments on the dashboard facing us made it obvious
that we were not flying level. The air speed crept up to ninety knots,
while Alcock was trying to restore equilibrium. He pulled back the
control lever; but apparently the air speed meter was jammed, for
although the Vickers-Vimy must have nosed upwards, the reading remained
at ninety.
And then we stalled--that is to say our speed dropped below the minimum
necessary for heavier-than-air flight. The machine hung motionless for
a second, after which it heeled over and fell into what was either a
spinning nosedive, or a very steep spiral.
The compass needle continued to revolve rapidly, showing that the
machine was swinging as it dropped; but, still hemmed in as we were by
the thick vapor, we could not tell how, or in which direction we were
spinning.
Before the pilot could reduce the throttle, the roar of the motors
had almost doubled in volume, and instead of the usual 1650 to 1700
revolutions per minute, they were running at about 2200 revolutions per
minute. Alcock shut off the throttles, and the vibration ceased.
Apart from the changing levels marked by the aneroid, only the fact
that our bodies were pressed tightly against the seats indicated that
the machine was falling. How and at what angle it was falling, we knew
not. Alcock tried to centralize the controls, but failed because we had
lost all sense of what was central. I searched in every direction for
an external sign, and saw nothing but opaque nebulousness.
The aneroid, meantime, continued to register a height that dropped
ever lower and alarmingly lower--three thousand, two thousand, one
thousand, five hundred feet. I realized the possibility that we might
hit the ocean at any moment, if the aneroid's exactitude had been
affected by differences between the barometric conditions of our
present position and those of St. John's, where the instrument was set.
A more likely danger was that our cloud might stretch down to the
surface of the ocean; in which case Alcock, having obtained no sight of
the horizon, would be unable to counteract the spin in time.
I made ready for the worst, loosening my safety belt and preparing to
salve my notes of the flight. All precautions would probably have been
unavailing, however, for had we fallen into the sea, there would have
been small hope of survival. We were on a steep slant, and even had we
escaped drowning when first submerged, the dice would be heavily loaded
against the chance of rescue by a passing ship.
And then while these thoughts were chasing each other across my mind,
we left the cloud as suddenly as we had entered it. We were now less
than a hundred feet from the ocean. The sea-surface did not appear
below the machine, but, owing to the wide angle at which we were
tilted against the horizontal, seemed to stand up level, sideways to us.
Alcock looked at the ocean and the horizon, and almost instantaneously
regained his mental equilibrium in relation to external balance.
Fortunately the Vickers-Vimy maneuvers quickly, and it responded
rapidly to Alcock's action in centralizing the control lever and rudder
bar. He opened up the throttles. The motors came back to life, and the
danger was past. Once again disaster had been averted by the pilot's
level-headedness and skill.
When at last the machine swung back to the level and flew parallel with
the Atlantic, our height was fifty feet. It appeared as if we could
stretch downward and almost touch the great white-caps that crested the
surface. With the motors shut off we could actually _hear_ the voice of
the cheated ocean as its waves swelled, broke, and swelled again.
The compass needle, which had continued to swing, now stabilized itself
and quivered toward the west, showing that the end of the spin left
us facing America. As we did not want to return to St. John's, and
earnestly wanted to reach Ireland, Alcock turned the machine in a wide
semi-circle and headed eastward, while climbing away from the ocean and
towards the lowest clouds.