Three "firsts" in North Atlantic aviation history are well known. In June 1919 Alcock and Brown were the first to fly non-stop from America to Europe, while Lindbergh in 1927 became the first to perform the same feat as a solo pilot. Then in April 1928 Fitzmaurice and his colleagues, starting from Bal donnel, were the first to successfully undertake the non-stop westbound trip aboard the Bremen.
But there must be a fourth: someone had to be the first to fly solo and non-stop from Europe to America.
Jim Mollison was 27 years of age in 1932, a flamboyant Scotsman and something of a media celebrity, not least because of his recent marriage to the pioneering airwoman, Amy Johnson.
His attempt on the Atlantic began 65 years ago today when, just before midday on August 18th that year, he took off from Portmarnock Strand in Co Dublin in the single-engined aeroplane he had christened Heart's Content.
Apparently there are three tiny villages on Newfoundland called Heart's Content, Heart's Desire and Heart's Delight; if Mollison arrived directly over Heart's Content he would be right on course for achieving his objective.
His was a formidable undertaking. Because of the prevailing westerly winds on the Atlantic, a westbound flight was a much more arduous challenge than one in the opposite direction, which explains why so much time elapsed between Alcock and Brown's arrival in Clifden and the Bremen's flight a decade later. Obviously a solo flight was even riskier.
As it happened, unfavourable winds caused Mollison to drift slightly to the south of his ideal track, and he was also hampered by a bank of fog as he approached the coast of Newfoundland.
In due course, however, he found the aerodrome at Harbour Grace across the inlet from St Johns and was home and dry. With fuel to spare, Mollison flew on across another stretch of water, crossing Nova Scotia into mainland Canada.
He landed eventually in a meadow near the town of Pennfield Ridge, New Brunswick, having been in the air for over 30 hours.
Thus did Jim Mollison become the first person to complete a solo flight across the north Atlantic, east to west. In the years that followed he continued flying aeroplanes, and his somewhat stormy marriage to Amy Johnson ended when they divorced in 1936.
Johnson died when her aircraft crashed in the Thames estuary in 1941, but Mollison himself survived for many more adventures until his death in 1959.