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Home : Media : News
NEWS | May 6, 2019

Carderock celebrates 100th anniversary of historical flight of founding father’s ‘flying boat’

By By Benjamin McKnight III, NSWCCD Public Affairs NSWC Carderock Division

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the first transatlantic flight by air. On May 8, 1919, three Navy-developed aircraft, or flying boats, took off from Rockaway Naval Air Station in New York en route to Plymouth, England.

 

Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division’s Eric Silberg, an aeronautical engineer with the Sea-Based Aviation and Aeronautical Branch (Code 882), is well-versed in the history of the plane that made this flight, and the people behind it.

 

Silberg presented “Developing the Navy’s NC Flying Boats: Transforming Aeronautical Engineering for the First Transatlantic Flight” on April 11 at the Rear Adm. David Taylor Naval Architecture Lecture series at Carderock’s West Bethesda, Maryland, headquarters. He provided an in-depth historical lesson on the impact of these historic flying boats and how they have helped to shape current naval engineering, technology and aircraft.

 

Only 14 years after the Wright brothers proved the concept of powered flight, the world was in the midst of World War I and quickly learning how to use aircraft in combat. The United States, meanwhile, was struggling to combat German U-boats’ ability to sink ships. Aircraft were capable of this mission, but the need to transport them via ship to Europe made them susceptible to U-boat attacks.

 

“Not only was this inefficient, but airplanes are by necessity low density and make poor use of limited cargo space,” Silberg said. “These ships are being sunk by the very threat that some of these planes are intended to combat.”

 

Rear Adm. David Taylor, at the time chief constructor of the Navy heading the Bureau of Construction and Repair, decided the best way to address this issue would be to build a large flying boat, a type of seaplane with a seaworthy hull for a fuselage so they could sustain themselves both in the air and on the water. He sent a memo to his assistant on Aug. 25, 1917, and within two months a prototype design was ready to be tested.

 

“It was gigantic by the day’s standards, with proposed capabilities that were game changing. Of course, this was the first design and would undergo significant changes over the next year and a half,” Silberg said.

 

Taylor, considered the founding father of Carderock Division, and four other aviation pioneers spearheaded the design and construction: Lt. Jerome Hunsaker, the first aeronautical engineering Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cmdr. Holden Richardson, the Navy’s first engineering test pilot; Cmdr. George Westervelt, the designer of Boeing’s first airplane; and Glenn Curtiss, one of the premier aircraft manufacturers at the time.

 

Officially called the NC (for Navy Curtiss) flying boat and nicknamed the Nancy, the prototypes underwent many rounds of testing in the Navy’s Experimental Wind Tunnel and Experimental Model Basin to prepare for battle. These aircraft needed to be able to fly across the Atlantic Ocean while maintaining combat readiness, survivability, maintainability and the ability to deploy.

 

“Crossing the ocean was a means to an end, not it’s reason for being,” Silberg said. “It was a warplane and once it got to Europe, it needed to be ready to fight.”

 

By 1919, the final product was a seaworthy aircraft with a wingspan nearly as long as the Navy’s current anti-submarine vehicle, the P-8 Poseidon. However, by the time the NC flying boat was ready for battle, the war was over and the aircraft’s primary mission ceased to exist. Determined to not let their efforts go to waste, Silberg said that the Navy decided to prove the capability of the aircraft’s design by completing the world’s first transatlantic crossing by air.

 

To complete this trial, the Navy commissioned the NC Seaplane Division 1 and on May 8, 1919, NC-1, NC-3 and NC-4 took off from the Rockaway Naval Air Station in New York, planning to stop in Trepassev Bay, Newfoundland, before flying across the ocean for the transatlantic attempt. NC-4 faced immediate issues that delayed its arrival to Newfoundland and almost prevented it from continuing the voyage with the other flying boats. The division had a series of stops planned throughout the trip, including the Azores islands and the coast of Portugal, before the final stop of Plymouth, England.

 

“We take for granted the ability to navigate over long distances, but in 1919, new techniques had to be devised,” Silberg said. “The NCs were equipped with new radio navigation gear and a line of 53 ships were positioned along the flight path shooting flares at night and making smoke during the day.”

 

Even with the aforementioned precautions, the journey was a mixed bag of successes and failures. NC-4 made it to Plymouth after a total 52.5 hours of flying spread over 19 days. Unable to find the Azores, the NC-1 and NC-3 landed to conserve fuel and find their position but were damaged in the heavy seas. NC-1 was found by a passing freighter and while they tried it tow it in, it was lost at sea when the lines broke. NC-3 landed 200 miles from the nearest island and was forced to sail itself to port, surviving 30- to 40-foot waves and gale-force winds. Through the challenges, though, all crew members made it to the end of the journey safely.

 

“Not one crew member of the transatlantic flight was lost, and that is a testament to the design of their planes,” Silberg said.

 

He referenced the latter two aircraft as “successful failures,” as they proved the ruggedness of the NC design, even though they failed to achieve their desired goal or reaching Europe. These efforts and lessons from the first transatlantic attempt helped shape aviation’s future.

 

On the day the NC flying boats departed Rockaway for Europe, one of the spectators was a young man named Juan Terry Trippe. He would go on to found Pan American World Airways and, 20 years after the flight of NC Seaplane Division 1, his company would complete the first commercial transatlantic flight along the same route taken in 1919.

 

“Closer to home, we have felt the impact and reaped the benefits here at Carderock,” Silberg said. “Our basins and wind tunnels are direct descendants of the facilities at the Navy Yard critical to making the NC program a success, and our commitment to providing the Navy with world-beating technology traces back to our namesake.”