Flying the Southern Cross

by Michael Molkentin

  These technical hitches appear not to have dampened the crew’s spirits during the final afternoon’s flying. Ulm described a feeling of ‘unbounded confidence’ regarding the journey ahead. At 1,700 kilometres it was substantially shorter than the previous two legs, seeming, commented Ulm, ‘quite short to us now hardened veterans’. Navigation was easier too, their route crossing an obvious reference point (New Caledonia) and in any case, the Australian coastline being difficult to miss. Reports from the Commonwealth meteorologist were fair (‘increasing cloud and some showers’) and the Royal Australian Navy had dispatched HMAS Anzac to patrol the waters beneath their flight path. Warner summed up the feeling aboard Southern Cross that Friday afternoon when he recalled thinking ‘what a simple matter it had been to fly across the Pacific’ and pondering why nobody had done it before.

  As the sun began to set, Kingsford Smith began climbing. In the log, Ulm noted how although the temperature began to drop, prompting them to climb into their fur-lined overalls, the weather ahead appeared clear. By 6.15 pm they had reached their nighttime cruising altitude of 4,300 feet. The sun had disappeared, the darkness once again throwing the hot exhaust fumes into brilliant relief. A gentle southerly breeze cut across their course but hardly affected their speed. ‘This is the best night so far’, declared Ulm in the log.

  At this point there is a ‘silence’ in the log, lasting almost five hours. Resuming his commentary at 11.07 pm, Ulm explained that they had been through the most violent storm of the entire flight. Unable to climb above it, they were forced to plough right through a maelstrom of gale-force winds, torrential rain and lightning. At times, the turbulence had been so severe that it took the strength of both pilots to hold Southern Cross in level flight. Thus was Ulm’s brief recap of the ‘worst 2½ hours on whole flight’. For a more detailed picture of what happened, and to appreciate the precarious position of Southern Cross for those few hours, it is necessary to turn to other sources.

  Just before 7 pm, the crew had noticed a change in the weather. The temperature plummeted and the moon became obscured by clouds. Kingsford Smith recalled ‘the visibility, which a short time before had enabled us to see to the distant horizon, dwindled to a mile, then to a few yards, then to nothing’. In a radio transmission, Ulm mentioned the deteriorating weather but maintained his cheery outlook.

  Cheerio everybody! It wont be too long now. Possibility of fairly dirty weather tonight hence self will relieve Smithy at controls now that he may be better rested for night flying. We are as happy as Larry up here Cooee. Signed ULM KHAB

  Over the next hour, the gentle southerly crosswind grew stronger, Ulm recalling in his memoir how it began to hit Southern Cross with gusts that ‘bumped and rocked us’. He described how the stars disappeared and ‘dark fingers of black clouds streaked everywhere’. Lyon’s navigational charts record how their average speed dropped from 160 kilometres per hour down to about 100 kilometres per hour.

  Just after 8.30 pm they hit the front of an immense storm cell. Ulm described how it struck with ‘deafening force’ and tossed Southern Cross about, so that in ‘a somewhat terrifying void it dropped, pitched and plunged’. The gut-churning gravitational forces produced by these sudden altitude changes caused the crew’s unattached wicker chairs to float and bounce around the cabin. Opening the throttles, Kingsford Smith put the aircraft into the most rapid climb he could manage, watching the gauges carefully to stay above stalling speed. It was, reckoned Ulm, ‘a supreme test in instrument flying’. In his published account of the flight he took readers into the cockpit during that slow, frightening ascent:

  To look though the wind-shield was practically the same as peering through glass at a rushing cascade of water. We were enfolded in blackness. Usually, we could not see the propeller ahead. Its speed made it invisible. But now it was wet and glistening in the lash of the storm. Our little light illuminating the instrument board reflected slightly on the streaming glass, and there before us the propeller for the first time in 5500 miles made its presence known. From the centre flashed a glistening disc, the sole relief in the impenetrable blackness ahead.

  The final log pages appeared in The Sun and its associated newspapers on Sunday, 10 June 1928, shortly after Southern Cross landed in Sydney.

  Lightning bolts provided intermittent glimpses of the furious storm enveloping them. ‘It ripped a hole in the clouds, revealed great masses of nimbus cloud and shot across the sky in aweinspiring jags’, remembered Kingsford Smith. He would later describe it as the worst flying of his career to date, which at that stage totalled some 3,400 hours. As evidence he would point to the propeller blades, which the rain sheared down by half an inch (13 millimetres).

  Arriving at almost 8,000 feet they found no reprieve. At this point, explained Ulm, all they could do was, ‘sit tight, hang grimly to the controls and keep the nose of Southern Cross pointed unswervingly in the direction which the instruments … told us was straight ahead’. To their disbelief, the altimeter registered changes in altitude of up to 400 feet at a time. It played havoc with their senses. Ulm described how he regularly felt that they were diving, only to see in the dim light on the instrument panel that their nose was still pointed above the horizon. He claimed that one needed remarkable discipline to trust the instruments and disregard all sensations. It must have been especially terrifying for Warner and Lyon in the blacked-out rear cabin. ‘Lyon and I held on and wondered whether we were flying or falling’, said Warner, while Lyon admitted to thinking the wings might collapse at any moment.

  The seals around the windshield gave way and water poured into the cockpit, soaking Kingsford Smith and Ulm. ‘The cold grew more and more intense’, wrote Ulm, ‘and our feet and hands felt like clumsy blocks of ice’. The temperature affected the engines too. After a couple of hours at their maximum ceiling their ‘vital signs’ began to fade, forcing Kingsford Smith to descend in a series of zooming dives, which both warmed the engines and reduced turbulence. Back at 4,400 feet just after 11 pm, they found a break in the weather and Ulm finally had a chance to resume the log.

  Newspaper clipping from Harry Lyon’s personal scrapbook of American and Australian newspapers relating to the 1928 trans-Pacific flight.

  Crowds converge on Southern Cross after the landing at Eagle Farm aerodrome, Brisbane, 9 June 1928.

  Since 3 pm that Friday afternoon, Australians had tuned in to hear live relays of Southern Cross’ radio transmissions. As well as Warner’s hourly position updates, they heard Ulm’s more detailed bulletins, including his acknowledgement of Hancock’s contribution. After his jovial message at 6.50 pm mentioning the possibility of ‘fairly dirty weather’, however, Australian listeners heard little else for several hours. Once Southern Cross hit the storm, Ulm instructed Warner not to report it. ‘It would worry our people to death. Will tell you should things become very serious.’ In any case, the turbulence, which tossed the two Americans about the rear cabin, prevented Warner from working his key. For most of the night he left it screwed down to transmit a continuous tone, a signal they were still airborne. To families gathered around their wireless sets, Southern Cross’ transmissions came through as demented and incoherent shrieks and whines. To an experienced wireless operator like Charlie Hodge, still listening in from USS Omaha’s radio room, the noises painted a disconcerting picture. ‘Call shrieked with violent pitch’, he logged at one stage. ‘I think plane has evidently plunged downward through the storm. They seem to be in very bumpy air as generators speed up and down.’

  Between midnight and 3.30 am, Southern Cross encountered a succession of thunderstorms. In the log Ulm explained how for four hours they had ‘been dodging up and down at altitudes between 500 and 9000 feet’, though he reckoned none of these subsequent storms had the intensity of the first. Being drenched made the hours before sunrise ‘miserably uncomfortable’. They had no gloves; Ulm apologised to future readers of the log for making so few entries. ‘Hands too numb to write now.’

  At
that time of year the southern hemisphere was in the midst of winter. Travelling ‘with’ the night, darkness lasted almost 13 hours for the crew of Southern Cross . At half-past seven (ship’s time) the sky finally paled and the clouds thinned enough for them to make out the white caps on the ocean below. ‘Dawn is just breaking’, logged Ulm. ‘My feet are like blocks of ice, and I’d give a finger for a smoke. Believe we will sight the Aussie Coast within two hours.’

  ‘ON OUR WAY HOME’

  Reception in Australia, 9–16 June 1928

  ‘It was all Smithy and Ulm’s flight’: Southern Cross taxies at Eagle Farm after touching down, 9 June 1928. Warner and Lyon (right background) have left the aircraft, intending to make a quiet exit.

  Ulm recalled how the rising sun produced ‘a comforting warmth penetrating our soaking bodies’. Using it to take a sextant shot, Lyon was surprised to calculate they were more or less where they should have been, about 270 kilometres south-east of Brisbane. The storm had knocked his sextant around severely, though, and he couldn’t be certain of its accuracy. With a dead receiver battery, Warner had no hope of raising a land-based station to confirm their position. Considering they could hardly miss Australia in any case, Kingsford Smith simply headed west.

  As the sun came up the clouds disappeared, revealing a bright winter’s day. At 9.50 am, Ulm perceived a ‘long grey shadow’ on the western horizon. As the minutes passed, hills and a sea cliff appeared to spring up from the ocean. ‘Loud cheers’, scribbled Ulm in the log. ‘Our goal is in sight. In an hour or so we will have satisfied our ambition to be the first ones to cross the Pacific by air.’ Reflecting on the moment six years later, he would consider it the greatest of his life.

  Kingsford Smith immediately knew they were off course, having not spotted Moreton Island, ‘the airman’s landmark for Brisbane’. As they crossed the coast, Ulm recognised Ballina, his wife Jo’s hometown. Southern Cross had made landfall 140 kilometres south of its intended destination, an indication of the storm’s intensity. They turned north, and were shortly met by a formation of seven aircraft from Brisbane, come to escort them in.

  The Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower, as it appeared in 1928.

  Southern Cross touches down at Eagle Farm, 10.50 am, Saturday 9 June 1928. Since leaving Oakland ten days earlier it had been in the air for almost 82 hours and covered some 12,000 kilometres.

  An hour later, Southern Cross passed over the unpainted corrugated iron roofs of Brisbane’s south-eastern suburbs. About 8 kilometres to the city’s north-east, Kingsford Smith could clearly pick out Eagle Farm’s large iron hangars ‘winking like heliographs’ in the morning sun. A sea of people—some 15,000—had gathered in a semi-circle around the tarmac and cars covered the surrounding paddocks and roads stretching back towards the city.

  Kingsford Smith circled the aerodrome twice before landing. ‘It was a wonderful and never-to-be forgotten sight’, reported one journalist. ‘The crowd went wild.’ Southern Cross taxied across the field and pulled up before the police cordon with Kingsford Smith waving from the cockpit. He and Ulm descended ‘into a surging press of people’, all intent on congratulating them personally.

  Kingsford Smith greeted the crowd with ‘Hello Aussies—my kingdom for a smoke’; and in the next instant both airmen were drawing heavily on cigarettes in ‘luxurious enjoyment’. With difficulty, the police hauled the two grimy faced Australians through the crowd to a dais where the official welcoming party waited.

  The greatest moment of his life: Ulm climbs from the cockpit of Southern Cross at Eagle Farm aerodrome.

  What about the Americans? The Sun reported that they emerged from the cabin after Kingsford Smith and Ulm wearing dapper blue suits. That they were wearing the dinner suits purchased in Suva is beyond doubt from the photographs, but we can be certain that they did not leave the plane in the manner reported by The Sun . Warner and Lyon had, in fact, exited Southern Cross as Kingsford Smith taxied slowly towards the enclosure; a fact unwittingly caught by a photographer. As Lyon explained during a radio interview in 1958, ‘Jim and I had the intention as soon as we got there—it was all Smithy and Ulm’s flight—that we’d disappear. So we got out of the plane and started for the fence’. They didn’t get far, as one journalist reported, ‘when the crowd pounced on them with a cheer and hoisted them shoulder high. Moments later they were thrust onto the rickety dais with Kingsford Smith and Ulm to great cheers and shouts of “Look, it’s the Yanks” and “Look at him. He’s the boy who worked the keys” ’.

  During the official speeches the completely inadequate police force—just 90 officers—lost control of the seething mass of spectators. They surged against the dais, causing it to collapse; radio equipment and cameras were trampled and the police ‘swept away like straws in the wind’. The throng carried the four fliers to an open-top car, which after a circuit of the field headed for town, passing the north Brisbane suburb of Hamilton where Kingsford Smith had been born. By one estimate 30,000 people were crammed onto Queen and Adelaide Streets to welcome the airmen. They swarmed around the motorcade and leaned from every available balcony and window. Girls shouted ‘Kingy you darling!’ and showered the airmen—still wearing flying caps and wet overalls—with flowers. At Town Hall, the Mayor gave a speech, proclaiming the flight a watershed in aviation history. He read a congratulatory telegram from the Prime Minister, and an announcement that the federal government had awarded the party £5,000.

  ‘My kingdom for a smoke’: Unchecked by the police, the crowd hoists Kingsford Smith aloft at Eagle Farm.

  ‘Kingy you darling!’: An estimated 30,000 people crammed into Brisbane’s centre to capture a glimpse of the fliers as they made their way to a civic reception at Town Hall.

  The four airmen then replied, Kingsford Smith and Ulm emphasising the team effort and piling accolades on the Americans. Lyon and Warner briefly expressed gratitude, but appeared uncomfortable with the attention.

  As per the contract they had signed in Suva, Warner and Lyon were supposed to leave Southern Cross in Brisbane. The day after their arrival, however, The Sun reported that ‘at a midnight conference’, Kingsford Smith and Ulm had once again, in an act of sportsmanship invited the Americans to accompany them to Sydney, which represented the journey’s real conclusion. Yet again, however, it appears that in the name of decorum The Sun had obscured the facts.

  Kingsford Smith and Ulm embraced their honorary status as Royal Australian Air Force officers, though not everyone in the small, recently established and highly competitive service embraced them. The air force’s leadership ordered Ulm to remove his pilot’s ‘wings’ as he had no official flying qualifications.

  One of The Sun ’s competitors, The Guardian , had sent journalist Norman Ellison to Brisbane to cover Southern Cross’ arrival. That afternoon he ran into Lyon in the lounge at Lennon’s Hotel, and struck up a conversation. Ellison was surprised to learn that the Americans would not be flying to Sydney and that Lyon had fallen out with Ulm while drunk in Suva. Perceiving a potential scoop, Ellison approached Ulm and Kingsford Smith’s minders with a threat: if the Americans did not accompany Southern Cross to Sydney, The Guardian would charter an aircraft for them and report Lyon and Ulm’s argument. They had 30 minutes to decide. As Ellison related,

  Ten minutes later, the secretary came back to the lounge—several other reporters had arrived—and said Smithy and Ulm would like the Press to come to their room. There Ulm was the spokesman. He said there seemed to be a story around that the two Americans were being left in Brisbane. Not so, he declared; they were coming to Sydney in the Southern Cross.

  ‘One mad exciting whirl’

  Southern Cross left Eagle Farm the following morning, Sunday, 10 June 1928. The Mayor, along with thousands of Queenslanders, turned out to farewell the Pacific fliers. After circling the aerodrome and waving, Kingsford Smith set a southerly course. ‘We are on our way home’, noted Ulm in the log.

  Approaching Sydney on that Sunday afternoon
, it seemed to Kingsford Smith that ‘the entire population … had either assembled at Mascot Aerodrome, or was on its way there’. Whereas they had expected ‘a quiet little crowd’ of around 10,000, something like 200,000 people—about one in six of all the city’s residents—had gathered to welcome ‘their’ airmen home. Nothing like the major international airport it is today, in 1928 the aerodrome at Mascot—which would later adopt Kingsford Smith’s name—was not yet a decade old. Surrounded by marshland and connected to Sydney’s then-distant city centre by rough roads it was, in effect, an oftenwaterlogged paddock surrounded by a few small huts and hangars.

  ‘On our way home’: The crew of Southern Cross say farewell to their hosts at Eagle Farm on 10 June 1928 before embarking for Sydney—the journey’s symbolic ending.

  When Southern Cross flew over Sydney Harbour on 10 June 1928, construction on the bridge pylons had just begun. Bennelong Point, future site of the Opera House, can be seen at upper left, at the foot of the Botanic Gardens.

  Following the crowd management debacle in Brisbane, New South Wales police had made far more extensive arrangements. Four hundred officers kept the spectators at bay and formed a phalanx astride Southern Cross as it taxied in. They efficiently ushered the crew onto a stage where an official party, including Kingsford Smith’s parents and Ulm’s wife, waited. After a brief introduction by the Governor General, the airmen made a circuit of the aerodrome on the back of a lorry before retiring into the New South Wales Aero Club hut for a private afternoon tea. Most spectators went away from the brief proceedings profoundly disappointed, the luckiest having only caught a fleeting glimpse of their heroes.