Flights that cross the Atlantic Ocean, either with or without stopping en route.
Transatlantic flights are flights which cross the Atlantic Ocean; in common usage, the term refers to flights crossing the North Atlantic (flying between North America and Europe), although flights across the South Atlantic (between South America and Africa) are also "transatlantic".
The first transatlantic flight was in May 1919, when a U.S. Navy Curtiss NC-4 flew from New York to England with stops in Newfoundland, the Azores, and Portugal. The first commercial transatlantic flight was made by the airship Graf Zeppelin (LZ127) in 1928; the first commercial transatlantic flight in a heavier-than-air aircraft was an airmail flight between Germany and Brazil by lufthansa in February 1934, while the first heavier-than-air commercial passenger flights were between North America and Europe in 1937. The first scheduled transatlantic passenger flight by a jet, between London and New York with a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, was made by BOAC on 4 October 1958 using a de-havilland-comet, and jetliners quickly took over the transatlantic airline market. Originally, only jets with three or more engines (such as the Comet, boeing-707, dc-8, boeing-747, dc-10, lockheed-tristar, md-11, airbus-a340, and airbus-a380) were allowed to make transatlantic crossings; however, since the introduction of etops, airlines have mostly switched to using twinjets (such as the airbus-a300, boeing-767, boeing-757, airbus-a310, airbus-a330, boeing-777, boeing-787, and airbus-a350, plus, to a much lesser extent, the boeing-737 and airbus-a320), which are cheaper and more efficient.
