Flying the Southern Cross

by Michael Molkentin

  The Sun breaks the story of Southern Cross’ arrival in Honolulu on the afternoon of 2 June 1928.

  ‘ON THE WAY

  AND HAPPY’

  Bound for Suva, 2–3 June 1928

  The Wright Aeronautical Corporation was among many businesses that used its association with the flight for advertising.

  ‘Hectic’ would be an apt word to describe Saturday 2 June 1928 for the four trans-Pacific fliers. Ulm envisaged leaving Hawaii the following day, his goal: ‘Dinner in Sydney [next] Saturday night’. They had 24 hours therefore to prepare for the 5,000-kilometre journey to Fiji, the longest ocean flight anyone had ever attempted.

  There was much to do if they were to keep Ulm’s dogmatic schedule. Although Wheeler Field had been suitable as a landing ground, it lacked the runway length for Southern Cross to take off with a full load of fuel. A year before, Keith Anderson had reconnoitered alternative airstrips, recommending a beach on the neighbouring island of Kauai known as Barking Sands. Before the day’s end, Ulm needed to arrange for the move of Southern Cross and almost 5,000 litres of fuel to Barking Sands and organise preparation of a 4,500-foot-long runway there. The Americans, meanwhile, had to repair some essential navigational tools that had failed during the first leg. It is little wonder then, that in his dispatches to The Sun that evening from Kauai, Ulm would explain, ‘This has been the busiest day of my life’.

  ‘A desperate, last ditch option’: Ulm consulted the curators of the Bishop Museum and made sketches of islands in the Phoenix Group, on which Southern Cross might land in an emergency.

  In the 5,000 kilometres of open ocean between the Hawaiian and Fijian islands there were few places Southern Cross might land in an emergency. Ulm had, however, recognised that their course passed close to the Phoenix islands. He visited the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu, home to an impressive collection relating to Polynesian and Hawaiian culture, and spoke to curators with firsthand knowledge of the waters they would be crossing the following day. They suggested that the most suitable landing places might be on the islands of Canton and Enderbury. Although the presence of these islands along the planned flight path must have provided a sense of security, in reality they only represented a desperate, last-ditch option. Canton, which Ulm considered the more suitable of the pair for landing, was in fact a coral atoll ringing an immense lagoon. Enderbury was 5 kilometres long, but covered by palm trees, ponds and rocky outcrops. Landing on either island in the middle of the night, with nothing but moonlight to illuminate their deserted surfaces, appears an incredibly unlikely proposition. If the crew survived a forced landing, there would be no fresh water or help for hundreds of kilometres and no hope of getting Southern Cross off the ground again.

  In the late afternoon, the crew flew from Wheeler Field to Barking Sands accompanied by Captain Lowell Smith and a team of eight Army mechanics in another Fokker. ‘We were agreeably surprised at the condition of the runway’, explained Ulm. Gangs of workmen had cleared and smoothed a 1,400-metre-long section of the beach, and the Army had stockpiled enough fuel there to fill Southern Cross’ tanks to capacity. ‘It has been hard work to keep to my schedule’, noted Ulm in the log. ‘Unforeseen delays crop up; but Army and Navy co-operation splendidly helped us out.’ Indeed, without the logistical support of the United States military, this Australian triumph would not, as it were, have made it off the ground in Hawaii.

  Kauai had only five white residents, but typically, Lyon knew one of them. He stayed with this old friend that night and, from Warner’s description of him attempting to rehydrate himself from a huge water jug at dawn the following morning, it appears he indulged in a heavy drinking session. The others stayed with the family of plantation owner Lindsay Faye at Kekaha, about 20 kilometres from Barking Sands. They had baths (‘our first shave since we left Oakland’, logged Ulm) and then dinner, which merged into ‘hours of conference’.

  Ulm, no doubt, probed every aspect of the planning to ensure that they had attended to every detail. He noted in the log how he and Kingsford Smith agreed to take the maximum amount of fuel possible. What he did not record, however, was the rather pessimistic arithmetic that had led them to this decision. As Kingsford Smith’s biographer, Ian Mackersey, points out, Fiji lay 1,200 kilometres further from Hawaii than Oakland, yet they could only ‘squeeze’ enough additional fuel to extend their endurance for three hours or so. Despite warnings from several quarters in Hawaii that day, Ulm and Kingsford Smith refused to acknowledge the almost impossible odds with which this presented them and call off the flight.

  Ulm’s sketch map of Enderbury Island, displaying his detailed annotation.

  ‘A long shot at a dot on the map’

  When the crew climbed aboard Southern Cross just after 5 am the following morning, Kingsford Smith recalled that it was a ‘warm and rather muggy morning; the air was still, the sea calm, and the moon was bright’.

  Kingsford Smith started Southern Cross ’ engines at 5.10 am, causing a cloud of the beach’s white sand to engulf the aircraft. The small party of Army mechanics gathered to see them off. While the engines warmed for ten minutes, the crew checked over their equipment and provisions. In preparation for this, the Pacific crossing’s longest leg, Southern Cross carried close to its maximum lifting power: almost 5 tonnes of fuel and oil and enough sustenance (48 sandwiches and a little under 4 litres of water and coffee each) to see them through the 36-hour flight. No wonder Kingsford Smith was aghast when Lyon turned up with a rubber life raft, loaned by his Navy friends. ‘He refused to take it. Far too much weight’, recalled Lyon. ‘I think he even begrudged the weight of my sextant.’

  This early-twentieth century example of a mariner’s sextant would have been familiar to Lyon. His was only slightly modified by the addition of a spirit level to estimate the horizon’s position.

  At 5.20 am, Kingsford Smith opened up the throttles. Lowell Smith stood just over 1,000 metres further down the beach marking the point at which they needed to clear the ground. Not far beyond him, the beach curved, creating a drop-off into the sea. After running 900 metres, Southern Cross ’ wheels left the ground for a moment but then dropped back into the sand. With just 100 metres to go, Kingsford Smith used the force to ‘bounce’ the aircraft off the end of the beach. In the back, Warner and Lyon felt their guts churn as Southern Cross reached the top of its bound and dropped 25 feet before levelling out just above the surf.

  Southern Cross could only manage the most gradual climb, taking five minutes to reach 300 feet. Coastal gusts rocked the overloaded aircraft violently, causing some anxious moments for all on board: any loss of control at that altitude would be fatal. Within ten minutes, Kauai disappeared over the horizon. ‘All OK’, recorded Ulm in the log. While Kingsford Smith and Ulm shared a now traditional handshake, Warner nervously passed a note to Lyon. ‘Is he purposely flying at 100 ft or is she too heavy?’ To conserve fuel Kingsford Smith and Ulm had agreed to fly as low as possible throughout this leg and, as Ulm logged, ‘Would rather not fly blind so heavily loaded’. At Warner’s request Kingsford Smith coaxed Southern Cross a little higher so he could deploy the radio aerial.

  The flight from Barking Sands to Suva: the longest ocean flight attempted at the time.

  The Oakland to Honolulu leg had been a significant achievement, but as Kingsford Smith later admitted, other aviators had flown that route before. The flight to Suva, however, took them into ‘the unknown’. It made him nervous, but he also took great pride in the fact, perceiving himself as part of a lineage of Pacific explorers such as Balboa, Magellan and Bligh. ‘I felt that we were following in the footsteps of these great predecessors and that we could claim kinship with them. They had traversed virgin waters; we were about to traverse virgin air.’

  As it had with their intrepid forebears, navigation weighed heavily on the margin separating succcess and failure. As Kingsford Smith described it, they were attempting ‘a long shot at a dot on the map … over 3000 miles away’, with practical
ly no landmarks by which to check their position. The United States Army rotated their radio beacon on Hawaii to face Suva, which should have provided Warner with the reassuring ‘T’ signal for about the first thousand kilometres of their flight. Just half an hour after take-off, however, Warner passed a note to the cockpit reporting ‘one generator bad’. This, logged Ulm, was ‘a little worrying’ given the usefulness of radio navigation during the first leg.

  Warner continued receiving the beacon for a time, but a little after 8 am lost the signal altogether. Soon after, the port generator failed, shorting out the receiver’s battery. He spent the rest of the morning with the radio set in pieces on the cabin floor rewiring it to run off the single working battery. Despite the turbulence and incessant engine vibration, Warner had the radio operating by lunchtime, though on only one battery it would remain practically incapable of receiving. ‘We missed the chats with the world’, Ulm and Kingsford Smith would later admit. ‘With every mile the loss of the radio words became greater. Our sense of loneliness increased.’

  Throughout the morning, pilot and co-pilot took shifts for an hour or so each at the controls. Flying conditions were ideal, the early overcast giving way to a bright, warm day. Just after 7 am as monotony began to settle in, Ulm spotted liquid on one of the fuel pipes above Kingsford Smith’s head. He nudged his partner and pointed. As Kingsford Smith later explained, ‘the possibilities were too dreadful to contemplate—the risk of a serious loss of petrol was only exceeded by the risk of a disastrous fire mid-ocean’. Ulm took the controls while Kingsford Smith reached up and dabbed his gloved finger into the liquid. Putting it to his lips, he grinned: just condensation. The relief must have been immense, though as Kingsford Smith admitted, ‘the incident passed, but the memory of it remained with us for some time’.

  Southern Cross’ radio receiver, manufactured by Heintz and Kaufman in San Francisco.

  At least the petrol scare probably helped the aviators rein in their tobacco cravings by reinforcing the danger of smoking on board. There was the risk as the flight wore on and their confidence mounted, that they might become complacent about such things. Lyon, in fact, had demonstrated this tendency earlier in the morning when Warner broke a cigar in two and gave him half to chew. Soon afterwards, Warner was horrified to see Lyon produce a match and light his half: ‘I pointed and waved and finally shook my fist at him before he came out of it and threw it overboard’. As he well knew, ‘We had enough gas aboard to make a lovely explosion’.

  Throughout the morning Lyon’s dead reckoning indicated their excellent ground speed, the result of a tail wind that whipped them along at almost 167 kilometres per hour. Less promising was the sky ahead. As the morning wore on, the firm, clear line of the horizon became blurred with haze and then obscured by cloud. By 11.40 am dense rain clouds hung low over the ocean, right on their course. As they flew into the storm, the wind picked up, rocking Southern Cross gently at first but soon bouncing it violently in the turbulence.

  Kingsford Smith skirted around the first cloudburst and then passed the controls to Ulm so he could navigate about the outskirts of another. Within moments, tropical thunderstorms were ‘closing in all round’. Kingsford Smith took the controls while Ulm kept a running commentary in the log. ‘He has just seen a way through, and we may miss them … Here they are again—all round us.’ Pushing the three throttle leavers forward, Kingsford Smith pulled the control wheel back, causing Southern Cross to struggle up through the torrents of rain. ‘Running into these storms when only 600 feet and heavily loaded is no joke … what bumps.’ At 1,000 feet they emerged from the cloud barely above stalling speed and in a murky, grey haze between towering storm-clouds. ‘More ahead’, scribbled Ulm. ‘Visibility only about 200 feet—ceiling nil.’ Kingsford Smith pushed the wheel forward, hoping to make it underneath the ‘menacing black curtain of water’ ahead. Ulm reckoned the wind gusts buffeted them from three directions.

  Five minutes later they were back at 600 feet and emerging into clearer weather. It suddenly became stifling in the cabin: everyone began removing clothing to cope with the tropical heat. Warner recalled how throughout the afternoon after each radio update he would remove an article of clothing until he sat at his radio set in his singlet and underwear.

  The increase in temperature and the storms is not surprising as by 12.45 pm, Lyon’s dead reckoning put them 1,166 kilometres from Kauai and on the verge of the ‘Intertropical Front’. This weather band (known nowadays as the Intertropical Convergence Zone) runs around the earth to the north of the equator during the northern hemisphere summer. The convergence of northern and southern trade winds produces a curtain of ferocious thunderstorms across the Pacific.

  At this time of year the band could straddle a particularly wide area of the central Pacific. For the rest of the afternoon, Kingsford Smith and Ulm flew an erratic course attempting to dodge one thunderstorm after another. Those they could not fly around, they ploughed on through, each time enduring several minutes of blind flying through a ‘dim, opaque world of nothingness’. Already doubting the sufficiency of their fuel supply, they agreed not to climb above the weather. By mid-afternoon the seals around Southern Cross ’ windshield had loosened. Half an hour later Kingsford Smith and Ulm were drenched.

  Handling the heavy, unwieldy aircraft in such turbulent weather was exhausting work. Its rudder in particular required an immense amount of leg strength to operate. Kingsford Smith and Ulm took turns throughout the afternoon. At 3.30 pm, Ulm had just completed a tough hour at the wheel when the starboard motor gave ‘a tremendous cough … followed by a splutter and a kick’. Everyone’s heart skipped a beat: the engine resumed, but then coughed again. A note appeared on the stick from Warner and Lyon asking what was happening.

  Ulm inspected the fuel lines but found nothing wrong. The two airmen exchanged scribbled hypotheses, Ulm suggesting rainwater had found its way into the carburettor stoves. After eight minutes of intermittent splutters, the starboard engine resumed its infinitely reassuring drone. Checking the gauges and seeing that they registered no problems, Ulm dismissed the incident in the log: ‘Starboard engine has quit shimmying’. He attempted to make light of it by passing a cartoon into the rear cabin of Lyon’s eyes bulging out of his head, but as he later acknowledged it had been a genuinely anxious moment. For the rest of the journey all ears strained to hear the slightest irregularity in the engines’ unified drone.

  Flying through the storms rather than climbing above them paid dividends. Throughout the afternoon Lyon continued to chart impressive progress. By 4.25 pm they were 1,889 kilometres from Kauai, having made an average speed of 171 kilometres per hour. If they could keep the tail wind, prospects of reaching Suva improved markedly. At 5 pm, the heavy storm cells dissipated, leaving a dull haze, thickened by the gathering dusk. Despite being wet, exhausted and with no prospect of a cigarette for at least another 24 hours, Ulm ventured an optimistic forecast in the log: ‘Very hazy, but still looks like clearing up for the night’.

  Lyon’s charts show that, despite the storms encountered on the afternoon of 3 June and the loss of the radio beacon, Southern Cross made excellent progress and stayed on course.

  ‘A ROTTEN NIGHT

  AHEAD’

  Crossing the equator, 3–5 June 1928

  Ernest Crome’s painting of Southern Cross evokes the miserable conditions the crew endured during the flight from Hawaii to Fiji.

  Ulm’s optimistic prediction regarding the weather barely lasted the hour. At 6.10 pm, ‘thick, heavy cloud banks’ began gathering above Southern Cross . Estimating the clouds would not extend above 5,000 feet, Kingsford Smith opened the throttles up and began to climb. Still weighed down with a heavy fuel load, the aircraft could only manage about 250 feet per minute. It was going to be a long climb up from 600 feet.

  Within five minutes they were among the storm-clouds. Kingsford Smith deviated from their course first one way and then the other, attempting to dodge them. It confounded Lyon�
��s navigation. Wind gusts buffeted the aircraft, rippling its fabric covering and tearing away an exhaust pipe from the centre engine. ‘No damage. No Worry’, logged Ulm. Beyond the blur of the centre propeller, Kingsford Smith and Ulm could see nothing.

  This type of ‘blind’ flying is exactly what Kingsford Smith had practised with Lieutenant George Pond over Seattle. It involved relying on instruments only in the absence of all exterior visual cues such as the ground or horizon. Kingsford Smith later likened it to being blind and deaf at the same time, with the senses providing none of their normal points of reference to one’s orientation. Ulm reckoned it the ultimate test of a pilot’s faith in his gauges, ‘a contest between your senses and your instruments’.

  At 2,000 feet they cleared the storm ceiling, only to find themselves caught in another deluge from thunderstorms above. Shielding his log from the water leaking in around the windshields, Ulm described the scene, noting the ‘gorgeous’ effect of the setting sun on the ominous blue-black clouds, but quickly adding, ‘Hell this rain is rotten’. It reminded him of the 2,000 kilometres of foul weather encountered between Broome and Perth on the flight around Australia the year before. They kept climbing, Kingsford Smith turning at right angles to their course to avoid cloudbursts. In the back, Lyon and Warner had no idea what was going on. The turbulence tossed them about the rear cabin, which had no lighting following the generator’s earlier failure. An ink pot tipped, spilling on Lyon’s charts, and desperatesounding appeals appeared in the cockpit from the navigator, who quickly lost track of where they were heading. ‘Where the hell are you going—are you turning back?’ he asked. ‘What the hell are you doing now?’ demanded another.