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David Rooney

Biography

David Rooney

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 20 years, he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

David Rooney

Books by David Rooney

The Big Hop: The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future
by David Rooney - History, Nonfiction

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 16-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.