The Big Hop

The thrilling story of a pathbreaking 1919 flight and the courageous pilots who risked their lives to make aviation history.

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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, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour journey, made it to Ireland. The Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and Amelia Earhart in 1932 pushed this earlier contest into the shadows, but The Big Hop grants the pioneering airmen of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. Mining evocative first-person accounts, David Rooney traces the pilots’ lives and journeys, transporting readers to the world in which the great contest took place. The transatlantic race offered a welcome distraction—and a surge of inspiration—to a public reeling from the Great War and influenza pandemic. The Big Hop recounts this deeply moving adventure, helping to answer the question of why we took to the skies, and why flights like this one mattered.