• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 - First Flight
• Profile: Charles J. (Charlie) Boyd
• Chapter 2 - Becoming a Pilot
• Profile: John Myers
• Chapter 3 - Soaring
• Profile: Alcide (Al) Santilli
• Chapter 4 - The Landing
• Profile: Antonio (Tony) Sabino
• Chapter 5 - From A to B
• Profile: Laszlo (Les) Horvath
• Chapter 6 - All of a Piece
• Profile: Christine (Chris) Doig
• Chapter 7 - All Kinds of Air, All Kinds of Flying
• Profile: Carl Ray Smith
• Chapter 8 - Buttoning Up and Getting Going
• Profile: J. William (Bill) Bullock
• Chapter 9 - Helping Out
• Profile: Gerald (Jerry) Hoogerwerf
• Chapter 10 - Making It
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements

Profile: Charlie Boyd

hen Charlie Boyd was born, in 1895, aviation consisted of occasional ascents in hot-air balloons and short hops in primitive gliders. When he died, in 1974, jet planes were spanning oceans. The big event between those two dates that nearly everyone knows about is Charles Lindbergh's non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. But Lindbergh wasn't the first to fly the Atlantic. The first trans-Atlantic flight took place eight years earlier, and Charlie Boyd, although not part of the flying crew, had a hand in the success of that mission. On May 8, 1919, three giant flying boats, named NC-1, NC-3, and NC-4* (NC for Navy Curtiss), each with a crew of six, took off from the waters near Rockaway Beach, New York, close to the present site of JFK Airport. More than three weeks later, one of them, NC-4, touched down in the harbor of Plymouth, England, having hopscotched via Chatham, Massachusetts; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Trepassey, Newfoundland; Horta and Ponta Delgada in the Azores; and Lisbon, Mondego River, and Ferrol in Portugal.