This Plane Tried To Do The Impossible: The Caproni Transaereo

Sign up for an annual CuriosityStream subscription and you’ll also get a free Nebula subscription here: Research and writing in collaboration with Tomás Campos. In June of 1919, two daring British aviators made the world’s first successful non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from North America to Europe using a modified Vickers Vimey airplane. In just 16 hours, they achieved what up until that point, required days to accomplish by ocean liner. John Alcock and Arthur Brown’s transatlantic flight was celebrated around the world as a monumental achievement, but regular passenger carrying flights were still decades from becoming reality. In 1919 flight was still in its infancy, and knowledge about aerodynamics and the mechanics of flight were still rudimentary. But a pioneering Italian aircraft builder named Giovanni Battista Caproni was convinced that he could design an airliner to fly passengers from Europe to America. But unlike Alcock and Brown’s heavily modified V