This is too great an event to be lumped in with others on the Aviation Greats page, it deserves a page of its own.

100 years ago today, on 15 June 1919, two Brits completed the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. It will be remembered that a few weeks earlier a US flying boat made the flight in two stages with a stopover in the Azores.

John Alcock, a former RAF pilot, and Arthur Brown a former RFC observer teamed up with Vickers to win the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail for the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight.

Their aircraft was a modified Vickers Vimy bomber built at Brooklands in 1919 and after just one test flight was shipped to St John's, Newfoundland in a crate in May. The two men having gone ahead.

Just two test flights later they were ready to go and at 1345hrs on 14 June they took off. The radio failed almost immediately, but the greatest danger came when the petrol flow gauge became obscured by snow and Brown, as the navigator, had to climb out of his seat to clear it, this he did several times. More than once they flew dangerously low weighed down by snow and caught in down draughts until the Irish coast was sighted. They crash-landed in a bog at Clifden, Co Galway at 0840hrs 15 June after a flight of 16hrs 28mins and a distance of 1890 miles.

Both men were knighted a few days later. The Vickers Vimy never flew again, it is on display in the London Science Museum.

Tragically Sir John Alcock was killed just six months later in an air crash in France. Sir Arthur Brown died in 1948.