Atlantic crossing

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Atlantic crossing is a term for the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Europe or Africa to America - or vice versa - by water or air.

Per ship

As early as the year 1000, Grænlendingar set foot on American soil under Leif Eriksson . Today, Christopher Columbus is generally considered to be the discoverer of America , since it was only after his discovery of the Caribbean on October 12, 1492 that European nations began to continually explore and conquer the continent. The researcher Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) demonstrated in 1969 and 1970 with two trips from Morocco to Barbados with a papyrus ship ( Ra I and Ra II) that an Atlantic crossing would have been possible with the means of the Egyptian pharaohs.

Until the invention of the steamship , the Atlantic could only be crossed by sailing ships . The main reasons for crossing the Atlantic were trade (in both directions), emigration (from Europe to America), travel and slave transport (from Africa to America). The ship Sirius was the first steam-powered ship to cross the Atlantic in 1838.

In 1889, the White Star Liner Teutonic, which had a speed of 20  knots, was the first deep-sea steamer to go into service without any sail. The effort just to operate the steam boiler of a high-speed steamer from the turn of the century around 1900 was enormous. In order to be able to achieve ever higher speeds with ever larger ships (see blue ribbon ), the performance of the machinery had to be increased continuously.

Express steamer Crown Princess Cecilie

The largest piston steam engine system ever used in civil shipping was on the express steamer Kronprinzessin Cecilie , which was put into service in 1907 for the North German Lloyd . The steam requirement of four four-cylinder, four-way expansion piston steam engines with a total of 46,000 hp was covered by steam from 31 boilers (7 single-end and 12 double-end boilers) with four furnaces each. The 760 tons of hard coal that was burned daily were carried by 118 coal trimmers from the coal bunkers to the boilers. During each of the three sea watch, 76 men worked to generate the steam.

Titanic

The RMS Titanic was a passenger ship of the British shipping company White Star Line . She was built in Belfast and was the largest ship in the world when she entered service on April 2, 1912 .

On its maiden voyage, the Titanic collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912 around midnight, about 300 nautical miles southeast of Newfoundland, and sank two hours and 40 minutes later. She was the second of three steamers of the Olympic class and, like its sister ships for the scheduled service on the route Southampton - Cherbourg - Queenstown - New York , New York- Plymouth provided -Cherbourg-Southampton and should set new standards in travel comfort set.

Although there was plenty of time for the evacuation and the sea was very calm, around 1,500 of the 2,200 people on board died - mainly because of the insufficient number of lifeboats and the inexperience of the crew in handling them. The sinking prompted numerous measures to improve safety at sea.

Smaller boats

Even today, sailing ships prefer the routes of the classic Atlantic triangular trade to cross the Atlantic

Several hundred sailing yachts cross the Atlantic every year, many of them as part of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC). The journey from east to west typically leads from the Canary Islands southwest to the trade wind belt at around 30–35 ° north and then west to the Lesser Antilles , with an optional stop on the Cape Verde Islands . The journey of around 2800 nautical miles takes about three to four weeks, depending on the size of the ship and the weather, and usually begins after the Caribbean hurricane season from late October to late December. The return journey often takes place from Antigua and Barbuda or Bermuda via the Azores to Portugal or directly further north to southern England. The westerly winds preferred for this project are frequent but moderate in spring.

Many people became known for crossing the Atlantic on particularly small boats, for example:

  • The Norwegian Ole Brude observed in 1898 how a wooden lifeboat was hit against the hull by a large wave and smashed. Then he designed a small, closed lifeboat that should be made entirely of steel. Brude was convinced that a closed lifeboat is superior to open lifeboats in an emergency at sea. In order to prove the seaworthiness of his boat, Ole Brude started on August 7th, 1904 with three companions in Ålesund to cross the Atlantic with his boat Uræd . The trip lasted several months and ended on January 6, 1905 in Gloucester, Massachusetts .
  • In 2006 Bruno Peyron and his crew crossed the Atlantic from New York to Lizard Point in the record time of 4 days, 8 hours and 23 minutes on the almost 37 meter long maxi catamaran Orange II .
  • In 2010, 2013 to the west and 2017 to the east, Aleksander Doba crossed the Atlantic in a kayak .
  • Janice Jakait was the first German to cross the Atlantic in a rowing boat alone and without a support boat . In 2011 she rowed from Portimão ( Portugal ) to Barbados in 90 days .
  • In 2017 the Frenchman Thomas Coville broke the one-handed record on his trimaran Sodebo . The fastest solo circumnavigator conquered the North Atlantic on the classic record route from New York to Lizard Point (Great Britain) in just 4 days, 11 hours, 10 minutes and 23 seconds. Coville improved the record set by Francis Joyon on Idec Sport just three days earlier by 15 hours, 45 minutes and 47 seconds.
  • In 2018 the Dutchman Mark Slats (40) rowed almost 5,000 kilometers from La Gomera (Canary Islands) to the Caribbean island of Antigua in 30 days (December 14, 2017 - January 14, 2018) with muscle power , breaking the previous world record of a good 49 days .

By plane

  • On May 8, 1919, three Curtiss NC flying boats of the US Navy took off for an Atlantic crossing from New York to Lisbon. On the longest section on May 16 from Trepassey Bay ( Newfoundland ) to the Azores , two planes landed in the open sea and were then unable to continue the journey. The NC-4 under Albert C. Read reached Faial , flew to the planned stopover at Ponta Delgada on the 20th and to Lisbon on May 27, 1919 . The machine and its six-person crew were the first to fly over the Atlantic. They then flew to Plymouth via Ferrol . (Details here )
  • The first non-stop Atlantic crossing from America to Europe by plane was made on June 14, 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown . They flew in a Vickers Vimy , which was built as a long-range bomber during World War I , in 16 hours and 12 minutes from St. John's / Newfoundland to Ireland (near Clifden). It was nautical miles (3,667 km) flown in 1980. So they flew an average of 225 km / h over the ground.
  • From March 30 to June 5, 1922 (arrival in Rio: June 17), the Portuguese pilots Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral were the first to fly over the South Atlantic route from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro , not in one piece, but in stages, with a stopover the Canary Islands and Cape Verde - and not with one plane, but with three machines. On April 18, they tried to reach the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha with the Fairey IIIC floatplane Lusitania from Porto Praia / Canary Islands . Since the fuel would only be enough under favorable conditions, she had planned an emergency stop at the Saints Peter and Saint Pauls rocks , where an escort ship would take care of them. They reached this intermediate destination with the last of the fuel, but damaged a swimmer when landing in rough seas and the machine sank. The Portuguese government provided a replacement Fairey IIID aircraft to be carried by the Brazilian freighter Bagé ex Sierra Nevada to Saint Peter and Saint Paul’s Rock, where it arrived on May 6th. Because of the bad weather conditions, the aircraft could not be unloaded, so the pilots decided to unload the machine in Fernando de Noronha, then fly back to the rocks and fly back to the starting point after turning. This round-trip flight began on May 11th. However, the engine failed due to problems with the fuel supply and the Portuguese had to make an emergency landing 170 nautical miles from their destination on the open sea away from the shipping lanes. A freighter found the drifting aircraft in the night and finally the escort ship Republica also reached the victims. The machine was in very bad condition after> 15 hours at sea, both swimmers were damaged and no longer watertight. The plane could no longer be towed and it finally sank. When this became known, there was great public support in Portugal and Brazil for the continuation of the flight. Another Fairey IIID was brought to Fernando de Noronha by a Portuguese warship until June 2, 1922, which was named Santa Cruz . With this machine, Cabral and Coutinho flew to the mainland (Recife) on June 5th and then in four stages along the Brazilian coast up to the 17th to Rio de Janeiro. In the 80 days of the voyage, 60 hours and 14 minutes had been flown.
  • From August 2 to 31, 1924, planes flew for the first time from Europe to North America, when two American Douglas World Cruisers flew back to the USA as part of their circumnavigation of the Orkneys via Iceland , Greenland and Labrador . A third machine had to make an emergency landing at sea on the leg to Iceland. The crew could be found and rescued by the escort ships; the recovery of the machine, which had covered more than 20,000 km since the company's start in Seattle in April, failed. A whale flying boat under the Italian Locatelli, who had joined the Americans in Europe, was also lost after an emergency landing off Greenland. The first flight in this direction was carried out by the British airship R34 in 1919 (see below).
  • The first South American flight with a machine was made in 1926 when the Spanish Air Force officer Ramón Franco flew with the whale flying boat Plus Ultra from Huelva to Buenos Aires and crossed the South Atlantic from Cape Verde to Fernando de Noronha (see Dornier Wal ).
  • Less than 2 weeks before Charles Lindbergh, the French tried Charles Nungesser and François Coli , two veterans of the First World War, in May 1927 the first nonstop - Transatlantic -Flight between Paris and New York to perform at the exposed 25,000 US dollars prize money of Orteig- Prize to win. The designer Pierre Levasseur developed the prototype PL 8, a double-decker with a Lorraine-Dietrich-12-Eb engine with 450 hp. The L'Oiseau Blanc aircraft was last seen over the cliffs of Étretat in Haute-Normandie after taking off on May 8th in Paris and has since been considered lost. The whereabouts of the White Bird is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in aviation history .
  • Charles Lindbergh managed on 20./21. May 1927 with the Ryan NYP called Spirit of St. Louis , the first non-stop solo crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Paris .
  • The first transatlantic flight from mainland Europe to (North) America was made by Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld , Hermann Köhl and James Fitzmaurice in 1928 with the Junkers W33 Bremen .
  • Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) achieved international fame when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a 20-hour flight on June 17 and 18, 1928. To her annoyance (she had a license to fly) she was only a passenger, but that too was a sensation at the time. She was celebrated as a heroine, voted "Woman of the Year" and received much more attention than the pilot Wilmer Stultz . Earhart soon became an idol among young American women. She was frequently invited to interviews and lectures and used them to “get women out of the cage of their sex”. She emphasized again and again that no different standards should be applied to women than to men.
In 1932, six months after their wedding, she - five years after Charles Lindbergh - dared to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo. She started on May 20, 1932 from Newfoundland towards Paris . Due to bad weather and technical problems they had near Londonderry ( Northern Ireland ) emergency landing . For this flight, which also made her the first person to cross the Atlantic twice, President Herbert C. Hoover honored her with the gold medal of the National Geographic Society . She was also the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross . In her acceptance speech she said laconically : “Some aspects of the flight have been exaggerated, I'm afraid. It was much more exciting to write that I landed with the last few liters of fuel. In fact, I still had over four hundred (liters). And I didn't kill a cow on landing - unless one had died of fear. "
  • Darius and Girėnas , two Lithuanian pilots with US citizenship, took off from New York on July 15, 1933 with the aim of landing in the then Lithuanian capital Kaunas after a total of 7,186 kilometers . Although the two had no navigation equipment except a compass and flew in adverse weather conditions, their flight was navigationally one of the most accurate of the time. After 6,411 km and 37 hours 11 minutes in the air - only 650 km from the target, however, her plane crashed at 12:16 am for reasons that have never been clarified; the two died.
  • On August 11, 2003, the TAM 5 model airplane flew on autopilot from Canada to Ireland in 38 hours and 23 minutes and was landed by manual remote control - less than 2% of the fuel remained.
  • From June 20 to 23, 2016, the Solar Impulse piloted by Bertrand Piccard made the first and so far only solar plane to cross the Atlantic from New York City to Seville , Spain. The distance of 6765 km was covered in 2 days, 23 hours and 8 minutes and was also stage 15 of a circumnavigation of the world in 17 stages.

In June 1936 construction work began on Gander Airport ( Newfoundland ); The first plane landed there in 1938. This airport was built in the deserted wilderness (in the far northeast of North America). Planes on the Great Circle Route refueled there. When in the 1960s most passenger aircraft had enough range for non-stop flights , this airfield quickly lost its importance.

Jean Batten (1909–1982), a New Zealand pilot, was the first woman to fly over the southern Atlantic. Maryse Bastié (1898–1952) wanted to fly the same route in less time. In September 1936 she started in a Caudron "Simon" monoplane from Paris via Dakar to Natal (Brazil), which she reached in 12 hours and 5 minutes, with which she undercut her competitor by a good hour. The average speed was 260 km / h. Upon her return to France, she was appointed officer of the French Legion of Honor.

From the 1930s, airfields were built on some Atlantic islands:

By airship

  • The English rigid airship R34 , a copy of the German naval airship L 33 of the Zeppelin design that was started during the World War , was the first airship to cross the Atlantic in 1919 , making the first non-stop east-west transatlantic flight ever. Under the command of Major George Herbert Scott , it took off on July 2, 1919 from East Fortune near Edinburgh with a crew of 27, three passengers and one stowaway, and landed on July 6 at Roosevelt Field on the New York City end from Long Island after 108 hours and 12 minutes drive.
  • On July 9th, the airship took off on its way back to England. The stowaway, a crew member on the test drives of the airship that had not been selected for the transatlantic flight, was refused entry again. The US Navy observation officer of the outward flight ( Z. Lansdowne ) was replaced by an Army officer and a radio operator was replaced by two additional engine control rooms, so that again 31 men were on board. The journey on a more southerly course with favorable winds took only 75 hours to the British airship base in Pulham near Pulham St. Mary in Norfolk , where the airship landed on July 12, 1919, making it the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic in both directions.
  • It was not until five years later that an airship crossed the Atlantic again. Hugo Eckener transported the Zeppelin LZ126 from October 12 to 15, 1924 in 74 hours 56 minutes from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst as a reparation delivery to the USA. The airship covered more than 9000 km. On board were a crew of 27 and four observing US officers. The airship came into service with the US Navy as ZR III Los Angeles (for details see LZ126 )
  • The successful transfer facilitated the approval of civil airship construction in Germany. On October 11, 1928, the Graf Zeppelin LZ127 from Friedrichshafen, with a crew of 40 and 20 passengers, took off again under Eckener for the USA. The journey in partly very bad weather took 111 hours. The return journey began on October 29th. This airship flew several times to the USA in the following years and since 1930 also regularly to Brazil with passengers, freight and mail. The Graf Zeppelin carried out 136 crossings of the South Atlantic until the abandonment of passenger traffic after the Hindenburg crash in Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. (For details see LZ127 )
  • On July 29, 1930, a British airship crossed the North Atlantic for the second time. From the base of the planned British airship passenger traffic in Cardington , the new airship R100 started on a journey to Montreal , which was reached in 78 hours 49 minutes on August 1st. There a one-day demonstration trip was carried out with passengers to Toronto and Niagara Falls . On August 13, the ship began its return journey, which led to Cardington in just 57½ hours.
The ship was overtaken after the long voyage and the focus was on the upcoming voyage of the competing model R101 to India. After the crash of R101 on October 4, 1930, further trips by R100 were also prohibited and the airship was scrapped the following year.
  • The last passenger airship over the North Atlantic was then LZ129 Hindenburg . The airship, which was completed in March 1936, drove to South America for the first time on March 31 with 37 passengers. The first trip to the USA followed on May 6, 1936. In the first year of operation, 46 journeys across the North and South Atlantic were made, for which the Rhein-Main Airport in Frankfurt now served as the basis. On its first voyage to North America the following year, the Hindenburg had an accident when landing in Lakehurst on May 6, 1937 (35 dead).
This serious accident led to the end of passenger aviation with airships across the Atlantic.

See also

Data transfer:

Web links

Wikivoyage: Atlantic crossing  - travel guide

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rod Heikell, Andy O'Grady; Blue water routes ; Edition Maritime; ISBN 978-3-89225-711-0 ; Hamburg 2009; P. 50ff
  2. ↑ 6500 kilometer journey: German rowing across the Atlantic in 90 days. In: Spiegel Online . February 21, 2012, accessed March 5, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Alone on the oceans - Janice Jakait. In: rowforsilence.com. Archived from the original on March 15, 2013 ; Retrieved March 5, 2013 .
  4. ↑ yacht-online: Coville's fabulous Atlantic record: 4 days, 11 hours (Tatjana Pokorny), July 17, 2017 , accessed on July 20, 2017
  5. ↑ Dutchman rowed across the Atlantic in 30 days orf.at, January 14, 2018, accessed January 14, 2018.
  6. ↑ Ted Wilbur: The First Flight Across the Atlantic online at the NHHC (English)
  7. ↑ Model rocket forum: Are model airplanes banned? Contribution by Oliver Missbach, October 7, 2003, 5:29 pm.