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An air race running between the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower) and the Empire State Building. It sounds like an outlandish episode of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. But in 1969, this really happened.
In 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown had became the first people to fly a non-stop transatlantic flight, scooping a £10k prize from the Daily Mail. Fifty years later, to mark the anniversary, the Daily Mail Trans-Atlantic Air Race was announced — a high-speed dash between two iconic buildings, one of which had only opened a few years previously.
In fact the race was more a window of time — 4-11 May — in which competitors could attempt to get the fastest between the top of the Post Office Tower (which, just to make things more cartoonish, was then owned by Billy Butlin) and the observation platform of the Empire State Building.
Among the categories (for which there was an east-to-west and west-to-east prize) were 'shortest time', 'subsonic aircraft', 'light aircraft (man)' and 'light aircraft (woman)'. Billed as the 'race of the century', the long-haul dash attracted healthy publicity, with newspapers splashing various headlines, and BBC One airing updates.
An important aspect of the race was getting from the start points (the top of the Post Office Tower/Empire State Building respectively) to the aircraft inside a nifty timeframe. This led to the formation of RAF St Pancras, aa extremely temporary, but nonetheless official, RAF station in an old coal yard, from which Tom Lecky-Thompson took off in a Harrier XV741 (as you can see from the video below, billowing dust clouds into spectators' faces). Six hours, 11 minutes later Lecky-Thompson had won the fastest overall east-to-west time. (He had a helicopter to get him from the Post Office Tower to RAF St Pancras, and a motorbike to whisk him from a landing pad in the East River to the finishing line at the Empire State Building.) You can now see the record breaking Harrier on display at Brooklands Museum.
Adding an extra layer of bizarro to proceedings were the celebrity competitors, including athlete Mary Rand, racing driver Stirling Moss and Billy Butlin himself. These celebrities didn't actually fly planes, but rather acted as 'runners', that is passengers who made the entire journey, and crossed the 'finish line'.
Writes Duxford Aviation Society: "Stirling Moss first jumped on a high-powered motorbike for a dash to the Thames where a waiting launch took him out to a barge being used as a helipad in the middle of the river. A helicopter flew him to Gatwick touching down directly on the tarmac adjacent to a waiting BUA VC10 for the trip across to New York where another helicopter/bike combo would deposit him at the steps of the Empire State Building." There was another unusual participant on one of the London-New York jaunts — Tina, one of the Brooke Bond Tea chimps. What a time to be alive.
Despite Lecky-Thompson's sterling effort, the easterly winds were always going to favour those flying from New York to London. On 11 May, Lieutenant Commander Peter Goddard (another 'runner', and a passenger aboard the winning Royal Navy McDonnell Douglas Phantom) got from the top of the Empire State Building to the top of the Post Office Tower in five hours 12 minutes — just under an hour faster than Lecky-Thompson's effort.
Where was Concorde while all this was going on, you may wonder? It had had its first test flight just a couple of months before the Daily Mail Trans-Atlantic Air Race got underway, but didn't enter commercial service until 1976. The race, alas, was never repeated — denying us the sight of Concorde landing on some disused strip of the London Docklands.
