The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  They were also thrilled, after a week of separation, to be back in each other’s company. As much as Lancaster and Jessie had initially centered their relationship on business, and on the immense effort required to propel a journey like theirs, the days had drawn them, perhaps inevitably, ever closer emotionally. The space they shared was in essence a world within a world: on the outside was the protective womb of the British Empire, which allowed them to traverse the globe despite knowing almost nothing of the local peoples and cultures, not to mention any languages besides English. Nor did they find this fact unusual. As biographer Chrystopher Spicer writes, “They were totally confident that because of their white skin and British passports they would be protected and looked after wherever they went.” Such was the reach and power of the flag under which they flew.

  Inside that sheltered space existed the two of them as a unit, navigating a daily onslaught of occurrences that practically no man and woman in the history of the world had experienced together. It would have been almost impossible for the kinship they felt not to deepen with each new exhilarating takeoff, or narrowly avoided danger, or festive greeting by RAF compatriots and political elites. The attachment was fostered both between themselves and in how others perceived and treated them. As the celebrated guests at each new stop, they were treated, gender differences aside, as a single entity. This joining together was cultivated whether they were sleeping in barren tents on a windblown expanse or carousing with other revelers in the dining hall of an RAF airfield. As people, Lancaster and Jessie were up for anything, and their vastly compatible spirits took unalloyed pleasure in their sheer like-mindedness. It was a far cry from what each viewed as the mismatch of their respective marriages.

  All told, Lancaster and Jessie spent more than two weeks at Basra before the Red Rose’s ignition was at last repaired, and they were able to depart for RAF Bushire in Iran. The RAF warned them to follow the Iranian coast instead of crossing the Arabian Gulf—“The water is shark-infested and you’d have no chance if you came down,” they were told—but Lancaster was determined to save time, and crossing the Gulf would halve their distance. As the Red Rose flew over the Gulf’s glistening waters, over its mangrove trees and coral reefs, the new ignition began to sputter. The clear sea below highlighted the truth of the RAF’s warning: sharks thronged the water. Jessie was consumed by terror, and by the time the plane reached the Iranian coast, she felt utterly wrung out.

  As her pulse began to regain its normal rhythm, Jessie gazed from the plane at the land flanking the Gulf, struck by its lack of vegetation. “The whole expanse resembled nothing so much as a boundless field which had been turned over by the harrow,” she wrote, “and before crops could be planted storms had washed it mercilessly, and the sun had baked it again into a myriad of fantastic patterns.” A lovely colored mist swirled over the landscape, enhancing the tone of the yellow clay. Jessie thought of the Grand Canyon in America, which she had never visited, and imagined it looked the same.

  The city of Bushire on the Gulf, Lancaster and Jessie’s destination, was a white city on a spit of land; from the air, Jessie thought it looked like “a huge chunk of coral.” Her impression was correct: many of the city’s residences were built from coral and shells.

  Rather than friendly RAF cohorts, Lancaster and Jessie were confronted at Bushire by a squad of scowling Persian soldiers wielding bayonet-tipped rifles. In an effort to win them over, the two aviators handed the soldiers their cigarettes, but further exchanges were stymied by the language barrier. Lancaster asked repeatedly for food and lodging, along with fuel and oil for their airplane, but to no avail. The stress of the flight, the soaring temperature, her growling stomach: all of these drove Jessie nearly to tears. Their uncomfortable limbo was finally broken when a Persian officer appeared on the scene and guided them to an unused barracks.

  Lancaster and Jessie were six weeks into their flight, during which the potent mixture of thrills and peril, along with their forced stay at Basra, had changed them. The blur of exotic locales, the near-death escapes, the navigation of encounters that ranged from the absurd to the profound—these dynamic experiences forged between them a connection whose intensity was not dissimilar from that of soldiers in war. Sharks in the Gulf and rifle-bearing soldiers were only their latest adventures, and now they were alone in an abandoned room, exhausted from their trials, and unleashed from their normal tethers. Their homes and their families seemed a world away; only the current moment seemed tangible. The electricity that had crackled between them since the first night they met burst into sparks.

  With single-minded abandon, Lancaster and Jessie removed their clothes and made weary, intense love.

  4

  ARRIVAL

  There were no regrets the next morning; there was only the exhilaration of newly revealed love. And while Lancaster and Jessie’s situation was made immeasurably more complicated because both were married, that reality seemed, for now, a world away—not just physically, but emotionally. Jessie’s marriage was over in all but name anyway, a fact of which Lancaster was aware. But Jessie was less certain about Lancaster’s relationship with Kiki. She knew the two of them were living apart for financial reasons, but Lancaster had implied that their separation was more serious than that.

  Whatever the truth of Lancaster’s marriage, the morality of the time dictated that he and Jessie had to keep their new relationship intensely private. To the press, and even to their friends, they would continue to play the role of dutiful spouses to their respective partners. Anything else would lead to outraged condemnation of Lancaster and Jessie from all quarters: their corporate sponsors; the general reading and viewing public; the RAF; the British and Australian governments. Jessie, as a woman, would be the recipient of particularly vicious slandering.

  Following Bushire and brief stopovers on Iran’s southern coast, Lancaster and Jessie headed for the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, a sprawling metropolis of grand European edifices, wide gravel-paved streets, organized marketplaces, and a state-of-the-art British airfield. As they flew, the Red Rose was subsumed by a series of sandstorms and clouds so thick that Lancaster had to repeatedly shut off the engine and dive close to the water—perilously so—to gain his bearings. At higher altitudes the swirling sand was so thick that Lancaster and Jessie couldn’t even see the plane’s nose. As the hours trudged by, the two aviators grew famished. They never carried food in the Red Rose; any added weight would have upset the plane’s delicate balance.

  After nine and a half hours of white-knuckle flying, during which the blowing sand clotted their eyes, mouths, and noses, Lancaster and Jessie at last reached Karachi, where the local RAF officers plied them with whiskey and soda. Lancaster took a rejuvenating shower at the officers’ mess and borrowed an officer’s clean shirt. Jessie felt grimy and drained from the long flight, too, but when she asked to use the bathroom, the commanding officer politely refused. RAF dictates stipulated that women were forbidden in the mess hall.

  Lancaster and Jessie had now flown more than six thousand miles and accumulated a total of ninety-two hours in the air. The press reported that the aviators were nearly halfway to their destination, while Avro and Wakefield Oil extolled Lancaster and Jessie’s achievements in their advertisements. They also cabled much-needed funds. Given this new approbation, Lancaster didn’t mind that the journey was progressing slower than he’d initially hoped, and he was amenable when the RAF asked him and Jessie to remain in Karachi a little longer. The air force was preparing a grand performance in honor of Afghanistan’s King Amanullah Khan, who was attempting to modernize his country based on Western precepts.

  The Red Rose was housed in an enormous one-story building next to the airport, and it was here that Lancaster and Jessie waited for King Amanullah and his fifty-man retinue. The occasion was significant: Jessie would be the first white woman to greet Amanullah outside of his home country. Because she had never met a king before, she was uncharacteristically nervous when Amanull
ah first approached, but the king, dressed in Western garb, quickly broke the ice. “How do you do?” he inquired in French, sticking out his hand. He asked Jessie if she was a pilot, and if she liked flying, and he took a keen interest as she and Lancaster showed him the Red Rose. For twenty minutes the king chatted with the pair, even signing their logbook. Then, with another handshake, he bid them farewell.

  Lancaster and Jessie subsequently followed the path of the Ganges River as they headed for Calcutta. The land hugging the sacred river was a patchwork of small fields in every shade of green, but the journey was a desolate one: hundreds of dead bodies, many of them children, floated on the Ganges’s filthy surface. Crocodiles sunning on the river’s banks plopped into the water as the Red Rose’s engine buzzed overhead. “The combination of corpse and crocodile,” Jessie wrote grimly, “is not a happy one.” The searing heat and bumpy air further exhausted the weary aviators. As they approached their destination, smoke belching from modern factories surrounded the towers and mosques of the centuries-old city.

  Lancaster and Jessie’s arrival at Dum Dum Airport in Calcutta on December 19 heralded a new world record—8,500 miles—for distance flown in a light plane. For Jessie, the accomplishment was even more remarkable: it heralded the longest distance ever flown by a woman in an airplane, and the longest distance ever flown by a woman with a copilot. The RAF officers who greeted them proffered two cold bottles of beer to toast their accomplishment. Lancaster and Jessie spent a day savoring their achievement before pushing onward toward Singapore, but after a painfully early 4:30 a.m. take-off, they were forced to return to Calcutta one hour later. Lancaster had absentmindedly left under his pillow the considerable sum of money they had received from Avro and Wakefield, sparking Jessie’s fury. By the time they got back to the hotel, the money was gone. Lancaster frantically cabled the police commissioner, but no assistance was forthcoming. Just the day before, they had been comparatively rich, but now Lancaster and Jessie were utterly broke, lacking even the funds to pay for that morning’s fuel. They signed on credit instead. The buoyancy of the previous day was replaced with dismay. With no other options, Jessie sent a plea to her family to cable some funds.

  After leaving Calcutta for the second time, Lancaster and Jessie headed to Burma, then hugged the heavily wooded coast southward before hopping the Irrawaddy River and aiming for Rangoon. The landscape was stunning. “The sea was a magnificent blue, dotted here and there with lovely little green islands,” Jessie wrote. “Stretches of white curving beaches were an invitation to come and sun-bake on the sand. Towards the seashore [was] a jungle of mangrove swamps, but in the valleys between the mountains were paddy-fields irrigated with astonishing precision.” Coming into Rangoon they flew over flat, heavily cultivated country in which innumerable workers toiled the arable land.

  Their intended landing field was a racetrack in the city, but three miles from their destination, the Red Rose’s engine gave two stomach-churning belches and then died. Lancaster shouted to Jessie: “Hold your legs up! I think we’re going to crash!” Jessie was too paralyzed with fear to follow his advice. Forced to rely purely on wind currents, Lancaster steered the plane just over the tip of an expanse of thickly forested mountains. A river appeared below, and beyond it muddy fields of rice that stretched into the distance. With an expert hand, Lancaster guided the plane into a flawless landing on one of the fields.

  The two aviators stepped out of the Red Rose into the dripping, swampy heat; startled Burmese field-workers soon ran over to check on them. Removing his sweat-soaked shirt, Lancaster poked around the engine until he found the culprit: a broken piston. The only option was to contact Calcutta for a replacement, which would take up to ten days to arrive. One of the Burmese spoke some English, and he led Lancaster on a two-mile walk to the nearest train station for a telephone. Jessie, meanwhile, spent two and a half hours in the scorching midday sun. Steam rose from the marshy ground as she tried in vain to keep the locals from swarming over the Red Rose to explore its every nook and cranny.

  Finally Lancaster returned with a local British couple named the Taits, who carried baskets filled with iced soda water. The Taits advised Lancaster and Jessie to move the plane immediately so that venomous krait snakes couldn’t hide inside it. But the advice proved moot: without a working piston, the plane was stuck. “Close everything up before we go, then, so that the snakes can’t get in,” the Taits cautioned.

  Lancaster and Jessie passed the Christmas holiday in Rangoon, killing time until, just after the New Year, the piston arrived, and the Red Rose was fixed. Right before takeoff, the Taits offered a final warning about poisonous snakes, but Lancaster and Jessie laughingly dismissed it, believing the couple was just trying to frighten them. Once aloft, they steered out to the coast, then angled south for the port city of Tavoy, on the Dawei River’s northern tip.

  About thirty minutes into the flight, Lancaster felt something brushing along his back. A moment later he looked down, only to see a three-foot-long snake slithering out from between his feet. Petrified, he took his foot off the rudder and tried to stomp on it, but the snake squirmed away. Before Lancaster could regain control, the plane began a steep dive.

  In the front cockpit, Jessie turned around and shouted, “What’s the matter?” Lancaster let out a bellow: “Snake!” Jessie glanced down, and saw the snake’s twisting body pushing out from the little trapdoor through which she and Lancaster passed their notes. The snake, blunt-tailed and brown-colored, was a venomous krait; a single bite, Jessie knew, could kill her. Acting quickly, she jerked her feet up into a cross-legged position on the seat, while yanking her control stick from its socket. Taut with fear, she began bashing her control stick down on the snake’s triangular head. Her pace grew frantic, but no matter how hard she clobbered it, and how much blood jetted from its body, the snake continued to struggle. Eventually, after several more furious whacks, the snake’s movement stopped. It was dead, its blood splattered all over the cockpit. A revolted Jessie picked it up and threw it over the cockpit’s side.

  Over the next few days they traveled up the Malay Peninsula, stopping over at Taiping, after which they left the paddy fields behind them and entered a region where rubber and tin were the prime commodities. At times they flew through clouds so thick that they could not tell whether their plane would clear the mountains ahead of them. Then they would climb above the dense cloudbanks to find, in Jessie’s words, “a heavenly blue sky and brilliant sunshine. The clouds looked so solid one could almost have landed, and the shadow of [the Red Rose] looked like a sinister bird in our wake. As the sun caught the propeller a halo seemed to form” around the plane, and was mirrored against the clouds. At other times they maneuvered through gushing tropical storms.

  Touching down at Kuala Lumpur, Lancaster and Jessie found, to their great embarrassment, that the airport at which they landed was crowded with beautifully dressed government officials and wives who had come to greet them, while the aviators themselves were filthy and covered in grease. They borrowed clothes for a formal luncheon that was held in their honor, and in the afternoon had a grand time playing tennis and swimming in borrowed bathing suits. “I patched up my one black frock for dinner,” Jessie reported, “and powdered my nose with the last of my powder. It almost seemed like civilization again to play bridge before turning in.” 1928 was not yet a week old.

  Lancaster and Jessie next aimed for Singapore, but hard rain throughout their flight soaked their freshly borrowed clothes and made the journey a dismal one. The pounding storm transformed the ground into a ghastly swamp, and the Red Rose’s engine stalled as the plane slid to a halt in several feet of water. Despite the poor conditions, a swarm of local residents swished through the lake around the plane to greet the drenched aviators.

  Singapore was Lancaster and Jessie’s major destination thus far, and they received a hearty welcome, with the acting governor officially greeting their arrival. The Singapore Aero Club, an assemblage of aviation enthusi
asts from various countries, provided them with lodging and threw a luncheon in their honor. The menu featured such items as “consommé a la Red Rose” and “Lancaster croquettes.” Back in England, the London Aeroplane declared its admiration for the two pilots. “Their effort thoroughly deserves to succeed,” the editor trumpeted. “They have already done far more than has ever been done by any light airplane. . . . The flying people at Croydon, where they made their meager preparations, treated their scheme as a joke and refused to believe that they would get much farther than France. But in spite of it all they have made good.”

  Less than three thousand miles now remained between Lancaster and Jessie and their ultimate goal of Darwin, Australia. They would have to navigate the nearly eighteen thousand islands of the Dutch East Indies before they reached their destination. Their pace would remain measured, with the heaviest flying before noon, and mechanical checkups every afternoon. They spent a day in Singapore overhauling the Red Rose’s engine and performing repairs.

  When they departed the next morning, seemingly the entire town gathered at the harbor to see them off. Acknowledging the crowd, Lancaster and Jessie circled the Red Rose low over the harbor, the surface of which was covered with all manner of boats, then headed for the coast of Sumatra. “Somewhere around here we’ll be crossing the Equator,” Jessie realized as they flew—and indeed, later that day she became the first woman to cross the equator in an airplane. From the air, the jungle covering Sumatra resembled a flattened green rug, the trees merged thickly into each other. “The landscape seemed to have compressed breadth but no depth,” Jessie reported, as “[p]alm-fringed bays alternated with mangrove swamps, and tiny emerald islands with a lacy edge of white dotted the coastline.” They spotted a herd of elephants through a slight break in the trees.