Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  With a man dead before the Detroiter had even left the ground, Wilkins decided—after poor Palmer had been removed from the scene—to leave the plane on the ground and take the shorter winged Packard Liberty-engined Fokker F.VIIa Alaskan on a trial flight. In the grand tradition, flying was to resume as normal.

  And yet, after the Alaskan had circled satisfactorily for twenty minutes, its sole engine suddenly lost power and the ‘heavier-than-air-machine’ was suddenly indeed a lot heavier than air and obeyed all the laws of physics to the letter as it plummeted earthwards. Though both Wilkins and Eielson survived the crash unscathed, the Alaskan was a wreck, with the ski-undercarriage smashed clean off, and the ‘propeller twisted like a ram’s horn, and engine a total loss’.50 The next day Wilkins and Lanphier finally took the jinxed Detroiter up, only to have it violently swerve on landing and crumple into a snowbank ‘within a few feet of the spot where the Alaskan had crashed the day before’.51

  At this point, with US$100,000 worth of planes smashed within a day of each other, and a man already killed, a lesser explorer than George Wilkins would have abandoned the project in tears. But Wilkins was not such a man. He continued to believe that it was possible to do what he had set out to do, and so methodically set about repairing both planes. Though there was no way he would be able to fly over the top of the world that season, he was at least determined to get both planes up in the air long enough before the flying season closed that he would be able to ferry supplies of petrol to Point Barrow, using its frozen lagoon for a runway.

  When Wilkins and Eielson first succeeded in getting the Alaskan on the ground at Point Barrow, 500 miles north, it created a sensation among the local Eskimo population. The Eskimo lads, mystified, looked it over and asked: ‘How can it fly? It has no feathers.’ Others said it looked ‘like a duck when overhead, but on the ground it looked like a whale with wings’.52 That notwithstanding, one female Eskimo elder seemed to be not nearly as impressed as the others and, after poking the fabric of the plane with her finger, announced that she was certain that with the right sealskins she would be able to sew one for herself. Which was as may be…

  Wilkins and Eielson kept ferrying supplies until one day, loaded down with tins full of petrol, the two pilots were hurtling down the airstrip at Fairbanks in the Alaskan, when it was clear that something was wrong, as the plane simply refused to lift.

  Crash positions! (Basically, tense up and pray.) While stopping a fast-moving and heavy plane was problematic at the best of times, on snow and ice it was a nightmare. Certainly it was little problem to get the brakes to stop the wheels, but getting the tyres to stop on the ice was something else again…and now the single-engined Fokker began to slide from side to side, careering towards disaster. Finally it came to a crunching rest against the brush and stumps, and the main thing, as ever, was that neither Wilkins nor Eielson was hurt. The mystery remained, however: why had they crashed? They had loaded the plane and done this take-off many times. There had never been a problem. They knew the plane was capable of taking that load. This time, however, the plane had simply refused to leave the ground, as if it were too heavy. But how could that be?

  Well, for the moment there was nothing for it but to unload the plane to lighten it enough that they could drag it free and begin repairs. It was while doing exactly that, however, that Eielson suddenly saw something move in the cargo hold. What the devil…?

  Reaching a hand into the semi-darkness he grabbed at a shape, to pull it out into the light, not knowing what to expect and…

  And he was suddenly confronted with a very beautiful young woman, flashing angry eyes at him as she tried to wrench her arm free. Stowaway! George Wilkins recognised her immediately. She was a gypsy, a rather modern independent one who, instead of moving around in a band of other gypsies, was moving around on her own, exploring the world. As a matter of fact he had danced with her just the night before, during which time she had told him she was a bit of everything, a musician, artist, writer and explorer—and wanted to know whether she could accompany him on this flight? It was with some reluctance that he had declined—for fear that her weight would make them crash—but it now turned out she had taken matters into her own hands.

  Mindful of his own past, where stowing away had started him off on world adventure, Wilkins was not too angry, despite the wrecked plane and the fact that she was now swearing at them in a manner that would have made an Australian wharfie blush. He understood her compulsion, and besides, she was too beautiful to be angry with for long anyway. Wilkins ignored the damage to the plane and arranged for the girl to be slipped away from the plane into a friend’s car, so she would not be embarrassed in the Fairbanks community.

  He and Eielson and their mechanic then did the best they could to repair the plane, but something wasn’t working, for on their next attempt to take off they crashed again, this time shearing off a wing and further injuring Wilkins’s previously broken arm. And that was the end of the Alaskan.

  One more trip to Point Barrow in the Detroiter, and then the fog closed over the Arctic Circle, to the point that their flying season was over. Wilkins would have to return to Detroit, try to find more money, and then return the following season to finish the job, fulfil his dream and fly over the top of the world, all the way from Alaska’s Point Barrow to Spitzbergen, Norway—a place that had first come to wider attention when no less than Hans Christian Andersen had written a story saying it was where the ‘Snow Queen’ lived.

  One more time, thus, he left the freezing wastelands behind, to return to rather more modern civilisation.

  The heat, the flies, the sheer gut-wrenching monotony of it all! Running a trucking business in this part of the world just had a way of getting to a man. Though Kingsford Smith returned to Carnarvon in April 1926 and resumed with the Gascoyne Transport Company, it was not the same as it had been. When he and Keith Anderson had started it up, they had been proving themselves, doing something that hadn’t been done before and it had been exciting to build the business up. Too, it was something they pretty much had to do, because to fail would be to end up penniless. But now? Now it had turned into hard work without passion, even though the business continued to grow. The more he worked, the more Kingsford Smith became convinced that in his heart of hearts, in the very soul of his soul, that he was a pilot and not a truck driver. When you had known what it was like to zip from one cloud to the next, to dive, to zoom, to fly like a bird and go wherever you wanted, how long could you remain happily earthbound, so often stuck in heavy mud, or chasing bloody prize rams that had got out of the bloody truck and were running bloody wild all over the bloody country until you rounded up every last one of the bloody beasts and got them back in the bloody truck? The short answer, it seemed to Kingsford Smith, was about two and a half bloody years, tops. Which, funny he should say that, was right about bloody now. Always the dominant partner in both his friendship and his business relationship with the stoical Keith Anderson, Kingsford Smith began to talk to him more seriously about finding a buyer for the business and using the money to have a go at fulfilling their dream to fly across the Pacific.

  Late September 1926. Flying across the Illinois landscape late one night, delivering the post from St Louis, Missouri, to Chicago, Illinois, the young pilot got to thinking in the moonlight. How much he loved the purity of flying. How much he hated returning to earth, with all its petty worries and hassles. How he wished he could just keep flying and flying and flying…forever, or as near as he could get to it.

  ‘Why submerge myself in brick-walled human problems,’ he asked himself, ‘when all the crystal universe is mine?’53

  Why, if he had just a bit more petrol, instead of flying to Chicago as he was now, he could turn right and fly to New York. And if he had the right plane—say, a Bellanca with a Wright engine—and more petrol tanks, he could fly through the whole night, like the moon, fly to…fly to…

  Suddenly the thought struck him, settled, and didn’t move the
reafter. He focused on it with wonder, startled at his own audacity. From out of nowhere, a certainty came upon him. If he had the right plane, the right engines and specially designed petrol tanks, he felt that he could fly all the way to Paris.

  Yes, he could fly from New York to Paris! No matter that he was just a junior mail pilot, with only five years’ flying experience. He knew himself to be good enough, and after the idea came to him he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had to make the attempt. After all, he had always accepted the fact that risk was a great part of flying, and had long ago decided that, ‘if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime’.54

  Beyond all that, the truth of it was that as much as he loved flying, he was sick of the mail run, going back and forth between fixed horizons. In his early days of flying he had gone barnstorming and kept body and soul together by doing anything and everything his passengers paid him for, including when one man had wanted to relieve himself while flying above his home town. Certainly, he didn’t want to return to that craziness, but he did want to try something new. Not long before, he had applied to join the Australian explorer, George Wilkins, on his planned trip across the roof of the world, but that had come to nothing.55

  Now, within a few days the clean-cut young man with the seeming innocence and sometime demeanour of an enthusiastic schoolboy had begun making calls to the St Louis business community to see if he could get them interested in providing him with the money he needed…56

  Oh, Mr Thompson? It’s time for your meeting, sir. Mr Charles Lindbergh has arrived to see you…

  Hudson Fysh was away and so it was his wife Nell who answered the phone. It was a Qantas pilot getting ready to take off from Cloncurry, who wanted to know what kind of shape Longreach aerodrome was in. When Nell told him that she didn’t know, the pilot requested that she go out to the aerodrome wearing her high-heeled shoes, and then call him back. When she did so and duly reported that the high heels did not sink into the runway, the pilot took that as an all-clear and set off for Longreach.57

  Generally, Qantas was going well, growing in both the number of flights it was offering and the number of passengers it was carrying, as the idea began to take hold with the public that aeroplanes were not just scientific wonders but a genuine alternative means of transport, and a safe one at that, for travelling vast distances. In the early days, something that had helped the company’s overall standard had been the insistence by Hudson Fysh that each plane receive a regularly scheduled maintenance overhaul, whether it seemed to be running correctly or not, and that each pilot go through a check list before and after every flight to ensure that everything was as it should be. All the logbooks had a notice pasted on the front: The correct carrying out of routine means the difference between the success or failure of our organisation.58 True, there had been resistance to this order, with one pilot nearly crying when pushed, saying it was ‘impossible to remember’, but bit by bit over the months and then years this approach became standard, and bush pilots on the books either changed their ways to become serious commercial pilots or were moved on.

  And yet Hudson Fysh was convinced Qantas could go a whole lot better still, if the Federal government would institute its own sensible policies. It was for this very reason that Fysh was bending the ear of the Controller of Civil Aviation, Colonel Horace Brinsmead, in the early spring of 1926, as the two men sat side by side on a train from Charleville to Brisbane.

  It was crazy, Fysh told the powerful public servant respectfully, that they, not to mention everyone living around Charleville, should be condemned to this long, tedious rail ride to get to Brisbane, when Qantas wanted to provide a Charleville–Brisbane service to fly them there in a tenth of the time, but were prevented from doing so!

  In response, Brinsmead would not be moved.

  ‘Fysh, you’re just wasting your time. You won’t get it, and it’s the wrong scheme.59 Why waste your time trying to expand airways along railway routes. That’s ridiculous. The aeroplane cannot compete with the train, and that’s the policy of the Federal government, and therefore of my department. In eastern Australia, airlines will remain complementary to the railways.’60

  Fysh continued to argue hotly against it, with the clickety-clack of the infernal earthbound journey adding emphasis to every word. It wasn’t fair to the people around western Queensland, particularly, where there were only poor roads and no railways. Why should they be prevented from travelling quickly, like everyone else?

  Brinsmead held his ground, maintaining that it was government policy for the railways to be the backbone of the nation’s transport infrastructure, and for airlines to provide only the missing link, as it were, between railheads, but…

  But it was a hot day, the trip was tedious when a Qantas plane could have got them to Brisbane in no time at all, and the argument put up by Hudson Fysh did make a certain amount of sense. It was at least worth thinking about it, and perhaps talking to some people within the government.

  By late 1926, the time had come. Both Charles Kingsford Smith and Keith Anderson were so fed up with driving trucks—as witness the rare bickering they now embarked on whenever there was a reason for one of them to go to Perth, say, to pick up a new truck—that they began to actively look around for a buyer for the business. What they had to sell was a thriving driving concern with six trucks and trailers, with no debt attached, together with a fully equipped garage to keep the fleet on the road. What they wanted to buy were a couple of planes, to get them back into the air.

  As it turned out, it required only one advertisement placed in a Perth newspaper to find a buyer for their business—their main trucking competitor from Carnarvon did the honours, for the princely sum of £2300, cash.

  Henry ‘Bob’ Hitchcock, one of their mechanics from the old days at Western Australian Airways turned up, filled with enthusiasm for a particular plan. He told them how, up in New Guinea, gold had been discovered in the Highlands, but there were no roads to get into or out of the diggings, see? Bob had been one of thirteen children born and bred in Kalgoorlie and not only knew about the whole goldmining game, but still knew a lot of miners, and there was a fortune, an absolute fortune to be made in New Guinea!

  Now, this was interesting news. Like them, Bobby was a veteran of Gallipoli, had in fact been badly wounded there, and though he was a great mechanic and a decent man, he was not one given to easy enthusiasms, being of a rather more lugubrious nature. So if Bobby was fired up about something, it was definitely worth listening to.

  Why not, he said, buy a couple of the Bristol Tourer 28s that Brearley wanted to sell—as he was getting some new planes—and head up there? They could start an aviation company based in Port Moresby, flying miners and supplies in and the gold out! And with no competitors to speak of, no-one would worry about what they charged. Bobby would join them as their mechanic, and then, if all worked out well, hopefully make a claim on some of the diggings himself.

  Gold, for everyone, in them thar hills, one way or another!

  Well, it was a plan, and it seemed like a solid one. With the sale of the truck company they had a start on the money they needed for the Pacific flight, but it wasn’t nearly enough. If there was a quick fortune to be made in New Guinea, they were up for it.

  One approach to Brearley, and it was done. The two pilots, turned truckers, turned pilots again, bought a couple of the Bristols that they were already so familiar with from the lately renamed West Australian Airways—for £500 a pop—and started working on them immediately to get them into tiptop condition.

  Now, while getting the planes over to Sydney, before heading north to New Guinea, why not drum up some publicity on the way, in the hope that they could attract some sponsorship for the Pacific flight? With that in mind, Kingsford Smith and Anderson decided to make an attempt at breaking the cross-continental record between Perth and Sydney, which, set by a Lieutenant F.S. Briggs in 1920, then stood at five days
, encompassing twenty-one and a half hours actual flying time.

  In terms of attracting that publicity, it certainly didn’t hurt that Smithy took a reporter from the Guardian newspaper, John Marshall, and his wife, Gloria, along as passengers, while Keith Anderson would fly the other plane with Bobby Hitchcock and a third passenger by the name of John Howard. True, the fact that Smithy’s two guests were a little nervy—each of them signed a final will and testament just before leaving, using the wing of one of the Bristol as a prop61—wasn’t perhaps ideal. But Smithy’s view was that so long as they sat still it wouldn’t matter. Four days and thirty flying hours later, the great and glorious harbour city of Sydney slowly rose like the shining sun out of the eastern horizon, and she had never looked so good. (Certainly not to the rather shaken Mr and Mrs Marshall, who had spent the last four deafening days willing the whole journey to end, though Mrs Marshall, at least, had been charmed by the pilot, later recalling ‘Kingsford Smith was always so cheerful, with a beautiful smile and lovely teeth’.62)

  And there were press there to meet them! And interviews and stories in the following day’s paper! No, they hadn’t finally broken the record, but they had carried the first female passenger across the country, and that proved a good enough ‘hook’ to hang the story on. The Sydney Morning Herald carried the story on page twelve…‘LONG FLIGHT. PERTH TO SYDNEY’.

  ‘The aviators, Messrs, Kingsforth Smith and Keith Manderson…’ it began. Fame! Misspelt fame, perhaps, but fame nevertheless. And how sweet it was…

  For days and then weeks, Smithy and Anderson were engaged in a round of festive parties, celebrating their flight, their return to Sydney, and their success in the west. Did they really want to leave all that fun and head off to New Guinea straightaway on another, probably even more gruelling, venture than the Gascoyne Transport Company had turned out to be?