Robert Foden tells the story of the first flight across the North Sea, made by the Norwegian Tryggve Gran, who had been on Scott’s doomed Polar expedition two years earlier, and managed in 1914 to make the flight from Cruden Bay to Stavanger in a Bleriot monoplane. To take off he had to clear the electric tram wires on the grassy slope that he had chosen, and on the way across the North Sea a fuel cut-out caused his engine to stall and the propellers only started up on the second tank when he was 15 feet above the sea. Amidst the rocky landscape near Stavanger he managed at last to find a field, and surprise a farmer who had never seen a plane before.