Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice

Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."

Comments

Re:Cue the pissing contest

[heck]

This European is always astonished how Alcock and Brown's achievement of 1919 is so overshadowed by Lindbergh's 1927 flight. Perhaps that's one of the sources of resentment that lead to 'pissing contests'?

Because Lindbergh was the first to do it solo

And Alcock and Brown weren't the first to make the flight over the Atlantic, although they were the first to do a non-stop. The crew of the NC-4 did it first (but they used more than one aircraft) Alcock and Brown did have balls - climbing out on the wings to chip off the ice as they flew.