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.
Rooney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Hop and shared the following:
It is Sunday, March 30th, 1919. We join page 99 of The Big Hop just as an aeroplane, carried aboard the Atlantic steamship Digby, has just arrived at the railway station of St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being diverted by an impenetrable pack of ice off the island’s Avalon peninsula that’s so bad nobody has seen the like in decades:Visit David Rooney's website.…encountered on the Newfoundland route. But this was the worst the coast had experienced for sixty years. Nothing could get through. The Sopwith aeroplane had been packed into two large wooden crates, each the size and shape of a railway carriage. They were thirty feet long and weighed over five tons apiece. Between them, they held the fuselage, wings, engine, undercarriage, and fittings. Several smaller cases stored in the ship’s hold carried parts, tools, petrol, engine oil, and other provisions. It should have been a relatively straightforward offloading job onto the dockside at St. John’s. Instead, Digby was forced by the ice field to divert to Placentia Bay, off the peninsula’s western coast. There, in the middle of the bay, it drew up alongside the postal steamer Portia, and the entire Sopwith consignment, as well as the men themselves, were transferred from one ship to the other. Then Portia steamed up the bay to the town of Placentia, where its precious cargo of crates and passengers was delivered, leaving Digby to continue on its way. The next stage of the Sopwith saga was a sixty-mile rail journey across the peninsula. The two giant crates were loaded onto flat railcars, and…The Page 99 Test works perfectly. The Big Hop recounts the story of one of the greatest journeys of the modern age—the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. But it was a journey that started long before the aviators Jack Alcock and Ted Brown made it successfully across the ocean in an epoch-marking sixteen hours in the middle of June, 1919. Moreover, the contest involved a cast of characters far wider than Alcock and Brown. Sopwith was fielding a rival team: an Australian aviator, Harry Hawker, and his avuncular navigator, Mac Grieve.
This is why page 99 is such a great representation of the wider story. It describes, in its single paragraph, a journey that was remarkable in its own right: a perilous ship-to-ship transfer of men and a machine in the cold waters off Newfoundland. Will they reach their destination? It acts as the perfect prefiguring of the aerial journey ahead.
Page 99 also shows us just how long ago the first transatlantic flight took place. On the previous page, we meet a young man named Joey Smallwood, who is waiting at St. John’s station to meet the aeroplane and its airmen off the train. In 1949, Smallwood would become the premier of Newfoundland when the dominion joined the Canadian federation. In 1919, he was an eighteen-year-old cub reporter on the island’s Evening Telegram newspaper. None of the other journalists seemed to care that St. John’s was to become the location of the world’s most thrilling race. One of them reported the passengers due off Digby that day. After naming a few notable St. John’s politicians who had been on the ship, the writer added, “and a couple of airmen to fly across the Atlantic.” As if it was no big deal.
Would the Sopwith team arriving at Newfoundland succeed in flying all the way to Ireland? Or would they be beaten by rival contestants? On page 99 of The Big Hop, all this is yet to come; an unknowable future. Suffice to say—the ice field off St. John’s would prove to be the least of the airmen’s troubles…
--Marshal Zeringue
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