They did not give up! – The 1922 South Atlantic Air Crossing - part one.

This is the continuation of the description of this great adventure by Portuguese Naval Aviators Captains Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral. The idea was triggered by the arrival in Lisbon on May 27, 1919 of a Curtiss hydroplane (nicknamed "Nancy") commanded by Albert C. "Putty" Read completing the first Transatlantic flight. This was a major enterprise that started with the flight of three "Nancies" but ended up with the arrival of a single craft. On May 29, Read took off again and landed in Plymouth, England, on May 31. Another event was also a booster for the Portuguese aviators. Two British pioneers Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown on June 14, 1919 took-off in a modified Vickers Vimy IV and made the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic from Lester's Field in Newfoundland to a swamp by the town of Clifden (misjudged as a landing ground) in Ireland the next day on June 15.

The idea presented by Captain Sacadura Cabral was accepted enthusiastically by the Portuguese Government. Sacadura was appointed to study the flight and enough money was raised to make it possible. It seems relevant to point out that aviation was in its infancy. Flying over large extensions of water created many technical issues that had to be equated, these were related to the type of aircraft to be employed, its range and aerial navigation. The latter problem in particular was linked to navigation and if something would go wrong then support would be barely available. During those times many things were fallible and unreliable. We now live in a time where everything is automatic, it is possible to perform a variety of tasks, all at the same time because certain apparatus with just a small set of computations can perform all those tasks and spare us a great deal of work.

Dead reckoning (estimating one's current position based upon a previously determined position), was only possible if someone could check its fix (position) once in a while. This could be obtained during the flight with celestial observation and for this Captain Gago Coutinho, two years earlier in 1919, invented a Mariner's sextant fitted with an artificial horizon. This system was widely employed for Air Navigation until the generalization of Radio Direction Finding and Inertial Guidance.