The Big Hop
The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Future
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
The Big Hop
Pre-order for $17.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Jeremy Clyde
-
By:
-
David Rooney
About this listen
The inspiring story of a pathbreaking 1919 flight and the courageous fliers who risked their lives to make aviation history.
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. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.
Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration―and a welcome distraction―to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.
©2025 David Rooney (P)2025 Penguin Audio