HighBridge Audio

Skip to Main Content »

Category Navigation:

Search Site
 
The Big Hop

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History
Unabridged   11 hour(s)
Publication date: 06/24/2025

F O R T H C O M I N G ! Available June

The Big Hop

The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

Available from major retailers
Digital Download ISBN:9781696695190

Summary

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

Be the first to review this product
Email to a Friend


Product Description

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.

Author Bio

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.