Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  This good man, an officer and a gentleman, was initially dead against the whole idea of a flight over the Pacific. ‘I do not want to be interested in this thing in any way,’ he told them, his moustache bristling as he pounded the table. ‘I don’t want to be connected with it—you’re crazy. Flying to Australia! I want to keep right outside of it. Look at what happened to the Dole flyers!’16

  These proved to be merely his opening remarks. From that point the rear admiral, supported by his aide-de-camp, expanded on the hideous dangers the flyers faced—the storms, the distance, the winds, the hundreds of thousands of dollars the navy had already spent in trying to retrieve foolish fallen airmen, and so forth. At last, however, there was a small lull in the barrage—much as there used to be occasionally in Gallipoli and on the Western Front—and, seizing the opportunity, Smithy was able to quickly fire his own shot: ‘We’re going to use a three-engined Fokker.’17

  On the instant, both the rear admiral and his aide-de-camp calmed down. Using a three-engined Fokker showed the flyers were serious, not mere fly-by-nighters who invariably crashed by night and day. The US Navy man was further impressed to be informed by the Australians that they intended to have a four-man crew, including a radio man and professional navigator, the latter of whom they had already hired.

  If they used a machine like that, with personnel and specialised equipment, then perhaps it was possible to traverse the Pacific. A long discussion ensued, and both the rear admiral and his aide-de-camp agreed that Wright Whirlwind engines were the right choice. By the end of the meeting the rear admiral had pledged the full co-operation of the US Navy in their project, and most crucially, affirmed that the Australians could take the navy’s position at the front of the queue for three Whirlwind engines! With this commitment, the men were at last able to engage expert mechanics and get the refitting process under way at the Boeing Aircraft Company, just outside Seattle, where the fuselage and the wing of the Detroiter—the bigger plane—were reunited once more, turning the plane back into the Fokker F.VIIb.3m. After that, the engineers began to install the engines and instruments.

  Meanwhile, Keith Anderson was sent by ship to Hawaii to reconnoitre the main island for the best place for landing and take-off. He was not long in returning to say that Wheeler Field would be fine for landing, but Barking Sands on the nearby island of Kauai would be much better for taking off as it would provide a longer flat space to get off the ground. As to where they would go from Hawaii, their ideas had evolved in just the few weeks they had been in America.

  At the same time their plans had switched from a Ryan monoplane to a Fokker, so too had they decided that converting to a seaplane was impractical. Keeping it a land plane, they explored the possibilities of flying from Honolulu all the way to Lae on the north coast of New Guinea, before hopping down to Brisbane from there. But the problem with that was the massive distance from Honolulu to Lae, a long leap of over 4200 miles. Surely it would be better to fly directly to Fiji—only a bit more than 3100 miles—and then on to Brisbane? After much discussion, the Hawaii–Fiji–Brisbane plan was the one they settled on.

  For his part, Bill Todd, their navigator, certainly seemed to think that was the best plan, both when he was drunk and when he was sober.

  The great day came at last, late in September 1927. Their plane, with three big, beautiful, new 200-horsepower Whirlwind J-5-A engines attached—with the consecutive serial numbers 7416, 7417 and 7418—was ready for testing. In terms of a long-range flyer, it certainly looked the part, with its enormous spruce and plywood wing, so typical of the Fokker, balanced above a slimmed-down fuselage of welded steel tubes covered by fabric. In the small cockpit, the two pilots sat side by side, each with his own control column wheel which, on larger planes, had replaced the once ubiquitous joystick.

  To do the initial testing, Wilkins had insisted on hiring a navy pilot of great experience with US Army tri-motor Fokkers, a fellow by the name of Commander George Pond—all to the great chagrin of Keith Anderson, who once again found himself outvoted. After Pond did indeed do the honours, Smithy was able to fly the plane down to San Francisco, where the others were to greet him upon arrival at Mills Field, the San Franciscan airstrip that was to be their base. The original nickname for the Detroiter at Fairbanks had been Big Fokker—even though an Irishman would probably call it exactly that, and then some—but that would not do here. This plane was their creation, and needed its own name.

  Why not, Anderson suggested, call it Southern Cross?

  The others looked at him. Paused. Thought about it for a moment…

  It was Australian. It was aerial. It was somehow upbeat and sparkling in one. It was perfect!

  Southern Cross it was, then—soon painted in big white letters on the fuselage, itself painted very close to the colour True Blue, which was then in use by the US Navy—and all seemed right with the world.

  The enthusiasm the crew of the Southern Cross felt, however, was in no way matched by others. The flyers became aware that at home in Australia something of a press campaign had been mounted to get them to stop before they killed themselves. Paradoxically, now that their dream had gone from mere fantasy flight to a real and roaring plane, getting ready to go, the resistance was able to focus intensely.

  You see, the critics pointed out, Hawaii and Fiji were no more than a couple of tiny dots in a vast ocean of otherwise near-nothingness, and if the men missed them and ran out of fuel then they were all as good as dead, precisely as had happened to those dozen or so other flyers in the Dole Air Race. What made these men think they could succeed in a flight three times as long, when so many others had failed with such disastrous results? It was insane!

  ‘To attempt a flight from Honolulu to Australia in a land machine is an impossible task,’ stated Geoffrey Hughes, the co-founder and President of the New South Wales Aero Club, and he should bloody well know, shouldn’t he?18

  And anyway, what were they doing flying a Fokker?

  Most vociferous in his attacks on the latter point was RAAF Squadron Leader Lawrence Wackett, DFC, AFC, BSc, FRAeS, a highly regarded Australian aircraft designer and former contemporary of the likes of Paul McGinness, Hudson Fysh and Keith Smith in the Australian Flying Corps’ prestigious No. 1 Squadron, who just the previous year had become the founding chairman of the inaugural Wackett Australasian branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society. ‘What they’re doing,’ he told the press, ‘is offering an insult to every returned Australian soldier, sailor and airman. Fokkers were used by the German Air Force to fight us, and many a good Australian died from bullets spewed from them…’19

  When Kingsford Smith was told of Wackett’s views by an American reporter, he was under the Southern Cross. Enraged, he put down his tools, emerged from under the fuselage and told the reporter straight: ‘That’s crap. No-one loves Australia more than I do. I’m dealing with a plane, not with personalities or nationality. I’m dealing with a fine piece of machinery and engineering. You can quote me as telling Wackett to go to hell.’20

  Mere criticism, however, he and Ulm and Anderson could have coped with fairly easily. The real blow, however, landed when a cable arrived from the New South Wales government, gravely informing them that their promised extension of funding would not be arriving after all, and it was the government’s wish that they pull out immediately. It had taken some time for the full significance of the Dole Air Race disaster to be appreciated at home, but now that it had been, the government wanted no part in helping to bankroll a new aviation disaster, this one involving famous Australians.

  Even Sidney Myer seemed to doubt them when—while making it clear that he was not asking for his money back—he implored them to put the whole thing on hold. Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson were not remotely interested, however. They had come too far and dreamed too long to simply pull up stumps because the nay-sayers were multiplying like rabbits.

  Yet while their stoicism and determination to keep going was unwavering, continuing to
pay the bills required something beyond mere determination. The Southern Cross could fly beautifully, but they still had to fit it out with extra fuel tanks, state-of-the-art radios and the best navigational equipment they could get their hands on. They also had to continue to accommodate and feed themselves, and pay for aviation fuel to keep putting their plane through its paces.

  The only answer, as ever, was to get money from people far wealthier than they, and while that precondition described pretty much everyone bar California’s hobos, none of the people they approached seemed interested in helping.

  For the three Australians, to keep going under such circumstances—to keep knocking, keep ringing, keep asking for a meeting on the off-chance that it would actually take place and then lead to something solid—took a particular fortitude, and neither Charles Kingsford Smith nor Keith Anderson had it. Each brought talents to the project, but neither man would claim organising finance was among them. Instead, after just a few weeks of useless traipsing around, it was Charles Ulm who came into his own, who continued to believe that they would make a breakthrough and find the money they needed…even as the bills they owed just for staying alive and under a roof continued to pile up.

  Mostly, thus, it was Ulm who went ‘tramping from interview to interview, from oil company to aircraft builder, from Jew to Gentile, seeking monetary backing for a project which nobody in the world, apparently, thought was tenable. For month after month it went on.’21

  And yet, despite the grimness of the situation, work on the Southern Cross progressed, and they kept George Pond on as a test pilot and adviser, benefiting from his enormous experience. It was in this field, of preparing the aircraft, that Kingsford Smith was at his strongest, rigorously pursuing ‘a fixed policy of trusting for the best flying conditions, and preparing for the very worst’.22

  If Smithy wasn’t flying the plane, he was working on it, or supervising work on it, or doing calculations as to just what kind of work should be done on it to make it as safe as possible and as capable as possible of completing the journey. He might have been catch-as-catch-can in much of the rest of his life, but when it came to flying and preparing to fulfil his dream, he was deadly serious.

  Let’s start with the three Whirlwind J-5-A motors, each one producing 200 horsepower. Each of those engines would consume 6 gallons of fuel an hour when at full throttle, and a little more than 31/2 gallons when cruising at optimum speed, or 11 gallons an hour in total. Previous testing had confirmed that the optimum speed for getting the greatest mileage per gallon was 95 miles per hour, with the engines at 1600 revolutions per minute.

  On their longest hop, from Hawaii’s Honolulu to Suva in Fiji, they would need to cover a distance of 3128 miles, if they were not blown off-course, which meant that the standard tanks they had would be totally insufficient. The answer, as Smithy established in consultation with experts, was to fit four separate tanks, each holding 96 gallons, inside the wings, while in the cockpit, the two co-pilots would be sitting on another tank of 107 gallons. The major tank, however, would be the one directly behind the pilots, between them and the navigator and wireless operator, with 807 gallons, making a total of—dot three, carry one, subtract two—1298 gallons, weighing nearly 31/2 tons.

  All else being equal, that should give them a very conservative range of 3800 miles, which should be plenty enough, and it also fitted in perfectly with Smithy’s firm view that the only time a plane had too much petrol on board was when it was on fire. Other than that, keep pouring…

  Which was to the good. But could the Southern Cross possibly carry the extra weight that came with the extra petrol, now that that weight had gone up by two tons, from five to seven?

  More calculations. From tip to tip the wings of the Southern Cross stretched 71 feet, 81/2 inches, with 12 feet, 6 inches of ‘chord’, being the average distance of the wing from its leading edge to its trailing edge. All put together, it meant that every square foot of wing surface, which had been designed to lift 11 pounds, would now have to carry 23 pounds 2 ounces.

  Could it be done? They thought so. But it would need testing, filling the tanks progressively more—from 40 per cent, to 60 per cent to 80 per cent to, hopefully, 100 per cent—to see whether their maths worked. (If the plan didn’t work they would crash either on or shortly after take-off, something which helped Smithy to focus rather fiercely on his sums.)

  This was the last straw. It was Bill Todd. Pissed out of his mind, he had crashed the car they had been using. Charles Ulm—effectively the boss of all things that happened on the ground, while Smithy was the captain of the air—sent him packing. Out! Out! Out!

  Todd was furious. Yes, he had been drunk, and yes, he had crashed the car. But why wouldn’t he be drunk? What else did he have to do? He had joined them in good faith that the historic flight would take place in a very short time, and here it was, weeks, months later, and they were still a long way from taking off. So of course he had had a few drinks. Ulm wasn’t moved. Todd was a liability whose actions jeopardised the entire project. This was a serious endeavour for serious people and he had to go. Todd finally left, outraged beyond all measure at his treatment.

  It was not long after this that Kingsford Smith met Anthony Fokker for the first time—a rather strange thing, given Smithy’s experiences in the war both being shot at by Fokkers as well as shooting them down. Still, Fokker was so personable, such a good man to have a drink with and the war so long ago that they were soon getting on famously. At one point, Smithy asked him straight out about their trans-Pacific project.

  ‘Do you think we can do it—in a Fokker plane?’

  ‘Of course you can do it in a Fokker plane,’ the manufacturer replied easily. ‘If you can fly.’23

  In that case, no worries.

  One day late in 1927, while Smithy was working away on the Southern Cross at San Francisco’s Mills Field, which had become their base, he looked up to see a young man gazing admiringly back at him. That man, John Stannage, was a Kiwi radio operator with the SS Makura, which took passengers on the Sydney to San Francisco run, and he later wrote an account of this meeting. ‘I shall never forget my first glimpse of the Southern Cross, nor my first handshake with the man who from then on became my hero. His face smudged with oil, and his unruly hair wind-blown in the slip-stream of one of the motors, he gripped my hand as if he really were glad to meet me.

  ‘What do you think of her?

  ‘I still see his infectiously boyish grin as he cast a proud eye over the great machine. Even then I could see that his pride in the big blue Fokker was something more than just the joy of an engineer in a perfect piece of mechanism. Smithy had already endowed the Cross with a soul. For here was no ordinary aircraft, and indeed no ordinary man. Smithy’s personality was likeably dynamic, his grin friendly, spontaneous and sincere. I recall that it occurred to me as I studied the man that there were too many lines on his thin, keen face for one so young. It was sun-tanned and healthy, but it was the face of a sentimentalist who had been hurt; a man keenly alive, a man indeed with a heart as large as the sun…

  ‘I watched Smithy and Pond climb up into the cockpit, warm up the three 200-horsepower Wright Whirlwind motors and then taxi to the far end of the long runway. The Cross was loaded with 80 per cent of her full tankage. This was to be one of a series of test-flights, in which petrol load was to be gradually increased, so that both men could become acquainted with the behaviour of the aircraft on take-off under all load conditions.’24

  Stannage watched, mesmerised, as the great plane rumbled down the runway before finally lifting to the skies. He liked this man an enormous amount. (That affection, however, didn’t extend to wanting to join Smith and Ulm on their trip, when they later approached him to be their navigator. An adventure was one thing, a suicide mission quite another).25

  Based on their test flights, the Australians were able to gather more and more information on how their plane needed to be modified, and bit by bit they improved it. Their modi
fications included redesigning the rudder to make it capable of holding the plane straight if one of the now more powerful side engines failed, then strengthening the fuselage to enable it to carry the modified rudder, and fitting the plane with stronger axles and wheels so they were less likely to collapse under the strain of such a heavy load while still on the ground…

  It was hopeless. No matter how hard Ulm tried, facing the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal—sustained only by passionate drive, and constant loving and encouraging letters from his wife, Jo, at home—he simply couldn’t make headway in getting money out of anyone, and things were now getting urgent. It wasn’t simply that they lacked the money to make the flight; it was that they didn’t have enough money to pay their daily bills.

  Things were so grim that they could not afford to even buy a half-decent meal. As for paying their hotel bill, the worst of it wasn’t that they couldn’t—because that point had been reached several weeks before—but that they were running out of ruses to convince the hotelier that payment was just around the corner. There was a real risk that they would shortly be thrown onto the street.

  Clearly, they needed a breakthrough in securing finance, and a quick one. In the short term, all they could cobble together to stay afloat was a series of loans. Keith Anderson’s mother sent them £400. His uncle extended them £600, though on the strict and written proviso that when the flight took place, his nephew would be on board. Most importantly, their great friend Locke T. Harper extended them an enormous personal loan, and arranged for the San Francisco Chronicle to take out a mortgage on the Southern Cross itself—and the name ‘Chronicle’ soon appeared under both wings, by way of aerial advertisement. Smithy, meantime, cabled his brother Leofric in Australia, asking him to sell the remaining Bristol Tourer and to use the proceeds to hopefully pay some debts they had left behind at home. These, however, were only interim measures, until they could get what they needed, which was serious business backing.