Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  The Southern Cross remained perilously close to the water for all that, and they were 25 miles out to sea before they could rise high enough that in the back Jim Warner could safely reel out his radio antennae, which hung from small weights from both sides of the plane. For the life of him he couldn’t work out how Smithy had got her aloft and, as he later recorded: ‘I think Smith “wished” her into the air for those first few miles. There’s a Pilot!’32

  But they were not out of danger. Smithy had no sooner got her up to 300 feet than the plane suddenly went through a series of huge bumps, as thought it were a brick bouncing down steep and irregular stairs. Smithy’s arms ached in his sockets as he tried to hold her aloft, and he fully expected one or both wings to crumple under the massive strain they were enduring.33 By the time the turbulance settled down five minutes later, and they had climbed to 600 feet, he was wringing wet with sweat and white as a sheet, his lips pursed and bloodless. That had been close.

  But, at least they were still going. Next stop, Suva, some 3150 miles away! This was to be the longest hop on their trip, and certainly it was always going to be the most challenging. They had even added smelling salts to their usual provisions, on the reckoning that staying awake for such a long journey was likely to be one of their many enormous challenges.34 The day before, the Honolulu Advertiser had characterised it as ‘a flight to stagger the imagination’. Just this leg alone, after all, was the rough equivalent of the distance of Lindbergh’s flight of the year before, except in this instance there would be no broad barn door of the coasts of Europe and Africa to hit if their direction was off—just the tiny dots of Fiji.

  Heading 213.75 degrees south-west by south from Hawaii, Kingsford Smith found his thoughts turning to the grandiloquent. While others before them had forged the aerial passage between the mainland of America and Hawaii, the same could not be said for the passage to Fiji.

  ‘Balbao,’ he later wrote, firmly identifying with the captain and not the crew, ‘had been the first white man to set eyes on the Pacific; Magellan had been the first to furrow its water with his keel; Bligh had navigated its unknown water for 3000 miles in an open boat. 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.’35

  And he also momentarily had time to let his mind drift to other things. Like his old mate Keith Anderson. As well as everything was going with Charles Ulm, he allowed himself a moment of quiet yearning that things had been able to work out so that Keith could have been with them. What, he wondered idly, would Keith be doing now? And how would he be taking all the publicity that their attempt seemed to be generating? Still, it was just a passing thought, and before long the demands of the flight completely absorbed him once more. From the moment the last wisp of vision of the mountain of Mauna Kea disappeared behind them and all that appeared ahead was a vast vault of blue—with the sky and sea merging with no discernible line of horizon between them—both Kingsford Smith and Ulm felt once more a sense of lonely vulnerability wash over them. Could this really be done?

  At least for the moment it seemed so—the weather was benign, the motors of the Southern Cross were rumbling away and sounded as sweet to Smithy’s ears as the choir of St Andrew’s had to his mother so many years ago, as their path across the now slightly less mighty Pacific Ocean stretched before them.

  And yet…harbingers of doom do not, of course, announce themselves like thunder. Sometimes it is the tiniest of tiny things that can signal the certainty of oncoming disaster. So it was, just a few hours into the trip to Fiji, when Kingsford Smith’s roaring reverie of engine noise was interrupted by a nudge in his ribs from Charles Ulm. His co-pilot was pointing with alarm at a tiny trickle of liquid which looked to be seeping from the bottom of the petrol tank situated in their port wing and running back along that wing towards them.

  If that was indeed petrol, they were as good as dead, as there were only two possibilities: if they were lucky in their catastrophe, the petrol would ignite and they would be dead in an instant; if they were unlucky, they would run out of petrol and would have to ditch in the ocean, where the likelihood was that a slow and agonising death would await them.

  It was with great trepidation thus, that Kingsford Smith removed his flying gloves and put a finger on the rivulet beneath the wing. He then put his finger in his mouth to taste it. Kingsford Smith looked at Ulm and laughed.

  It was water!

  The heavily humid air they were travelling through was condensing when in contact with the cold petrol pipe. They were safe for the moment. But while the possibility of one major catastrophe had faded, it was not long before another potentially all too real disaster arrived.

  A prod in Smithy’s shoulder was his first warning. It was from Warner. He had lost the buzz from Wheeler Field. The radio had packed it in. He didn’t know quite what the problem was, and he was going to try and fix it, but that was the situation as it stood. It was the kind of news that could almost make the fiery conflagration they had just been contemplating look momentarily appealing—for nothing could be worse than getting lost over this endless Pacific and being condemned to continue looking for Fiji until their petrol ran out—but there was no panic. While the radio had been their surest method of checking that they were on track, Smithy was confident that either Warner would be able to fix it or they would still be able to continue to navigate by the other methods of sextant, compass bearings and dead reckoning. The fact that they were no longer in contact with the world markedly increased their sense of isolation, and yet there was little time to contemplate that.

  For they were soon heading into a heavy storm, and obliged to climb hard to get out of the driving rain and tearing, ripping gusts as the Southern Cross once again bounced upon the bumpy air road in near darkness.

  As near as Lyon could work out, by 12.45 pm Honolulu time—some seven and a half hours after they had taken off—the Southern Cross had flown 630 miles, with just over 2500 miles still to go to reach Fiji, meaning they were nearly one-fifth of the way through what would be the longest trans-oceanic flight to date.

  If they made it…

  Some hours later, just after 3.30 pm…What was that? A seeming cough from the starboard motor. Pilots listen to engines with the seat of their pants, taking in vibrations every bit as much as with their ears soaking up sounds—hence the expression ‘flying by the seat of your pants’36—and there was no mistake.

  For there it was again. A cough, then a splutter. Bound as one, the ears of all four men on the Southern Cross focused on that cough, willing it to stop, to right itself, to return to normal…for that engine to continue to carry them across the seas, towards land and safety. And, eight exceedingly long minutes later, maybe it worked. Just as suddenly as it had begun, the coughing stopped and the starboard motor resumed its sweet symphony of pounding pistons, as if being conducted by God Himself.

  What had caused the coughing they knew not, nor whether it might return, though in all likelihood it was a speck of dirt stuck in the carburettor that had at last been blown through. The important thing was that it had stopped and they weren’t going to be obliged to ditch in the angry sea without even the wherewithal to tell the world where they were.

  From the back shortly afterwards came some good news. After long labour in difficult conditions Warner had managed to get the radio to work again.

  By five o’clock Lyon’s reckoning was that Hawaii was 1000 miles behind them and Fiji just a bit over 2000 miles ahead.

  Now, as darkness began to fall, it wasn’t immediately apparent if the clouds ahead were blackening in solidarity or of their own accord, as the sun sank, but the crew of the Southern Cross was not left wondering for long. In short order the four men in their tiny airborne capsule were in the middle of a major storm from which there seemed to be no respite. Smithy tried to fly above it…but after going all the way up to 5000 feet there was still
no break in the deluge. The question was whether to go back down, or use more precious petrol on the chance that there would be relief higher up?

  After consideration he decided on the latter and powered higher, in still very heavy going. At last, at 8000 feet, they burst up out of the storm, to see the Southern Cross constellation itself!

  Courtesy of Warner, an almost blow-by-blow account of their adventures was being picked up by the many radio listeners in Hawaii and on ships dotted throughout the Pacific. At 6.10 pm, Honolulu time, for example, the following message came through:

  We are hitting something. Made a short, sharp turn amid heavy banks of clouds. Altitude 6,000 feet. Smithy still banking for altitude. It’s a bit bumpy here now. The air currents are changing.

  And then the messages continued:

  6.12 p.m. A little spitting from the left motor now.

  6.20 p.m. It’s going to be a bad night. Motors are doing heavy pulling. Getting dark. Motors straining.

  7.48 p.m. Still trying to gain altitude to avoid storm clouds. Our old friend the moon peeping over a bank of clouds.

  10.43 p.m. That man Smithy deserves credit. He is a good pilot.

  And indeed he was, having guided them through a heavy storm over the preceding few hours, without a break, as the Southern Cross continued on its appointed course. It was rising midnight when Lyon passed forward a note in his scrawling hand: Just crossed the equator.37

  It was as good a sign as any that they were on the homeward run.

  In Sydney there was enormous excitement in the ABC’s 2BL radio studios at William Street. They were picking up the radio signals from the Southern Cross, clear enough that they could translate the Morse code! They immediately did so and broadcast the news, and continued to thereafter, giving their listeners regular updates as soon as possible. And soon, listeners around the country were huddled around their sets. The first message put to air just before midnight on that evening of 4 June recorded the position of the Southern Cross: latitude 3 degrees south, longitude 171 degrees west.38

  By the time the sun was about to catch up with the Southern Cross again, as dawn approached, they were again flying through heavy storms and into a howling headwind which sapped their precious petrol reserves for little progress. The gnawing fear began to grow that they simply wouldn’t have enough to make it, and they began to do tense calculations to ascertain just how much juice remained.

  Smithy worked it out to be just five hours’ fuel left, which would be not nearly enough, while Ulm reckoned there might be as much as nine hours’ worth in the tanks, which meant they might make it. Still, as the headwind continued and Smithy tried in vain to get above or below it, it was obvious that however much fuel there was, it was being drained quickly.

  At ten o’clock in the morning, after thirty-two hours in the air, Smithy ordered Lyon and Warner to regularly report their position over the airwaves, while he flew on and Ulm checked the petrol that remained. The only way to do this was by hand pumping it from the main tank to the gravity tank and counting how many full pumps it took.

  Now, as Ulm took long, precise strokes with the pump, Smithy watched nervously and began counting. Each full stroke meant about another 4 miles that they would be able to fly. As Ulm got to 100 strokes, it meant that there was at least the five hours left that Smithy had calculated, and 400 miles, and every stroke thereafter was a joy and a bonus.

  And so it went…112…116…120…and still he was going!39 Finally the pump gurgled in protest that there was nothing left on the 136th stroke, and this meant that they had just over seven hours’ flying left in the tanks. Neither Smithy’s nor Ulm’s cheers made any impact against the shriek of the engines, but they cheered just the same. It was going to be close, but they were still in with a chance of flying all the way to Suva.

  In the back, Jim Warner, feeling much more positive, decided to take a look out the window, and was momentarily disconcerted to find himself wet. Warm rain, he scribbled in a note to his mate, Lyon, once he had ducked his head back in.

  Lyon, however, who could see a little into the cockpit—and noted that after Ulm had relieved Smithy at the controls, Smithy had in fact relieved himself into a bottle, which he then emptied out the window—was highly amused.

  NO. SMITHY! Lyon replied.40

  Warner was not so amused and yet things were about to get a whole lot worse. Relieving himself in a manner that required something more than a bottle, he was squatting over a bit of spread newspaper when the Southern Cross hit bad turbulence, causing him to fall back into his own waste. What could he do? It was all over him. Him, a trouser salesman. Wiping himself down with the parts of his trousers and underpants that were not already soiled, he threw the lot out the window, and he sat back down to his radio, naked from the waist down.41

  A few droning hours more, and then for Kingsford Smith it was time for a rest and he handed control of the Southern Cross over to Ulm, just as he had throughout the whole journey whenever he needed a short snooze in the pilot’s chair. In the back, in the absence of real land appearing, Harry Lyon and Jim Warner consoled themselves by gazing longingly at the chart, where they could see the tiny dots representing the Fiji group.42

  In those conditions—being buffeted from side to side beneath three shatteringly loud engines, as the rain continued to leak into the cockpit—it was not possible for Kingsford Smith to really sleep. Rather, it was not much more than a light doze where, while one part of his brain shut down, another part hovered on the surface of consciousness, ready to leap into action at the tiniest change in conditions. Three hours after he closed his eyes, Smithy was suddenly alert and swearing loudly at Ulm as soon as he became aware that the direction of their bird had changed. Convinced that Ulm himself had fallen asleep at the wheel, it took Kingsford Smith a few seconds and a sharp nudge in the ribs from his co-pilot before he realised that there had been a very good reason for the altered course.

  And yet, far from apologising as Smithy might have expected him to, Ulm was—extremely rarely for him—smiling broadly at him and pointing to the far horizon. Land ho!

  Fiji!

  Or at least one of the Fijian islands, sitting ‘like a brown bulge on a floor of blue’.43 But which one? To allow Harry Lyon to get a solid sighting with his sextant, Ulm took the Southern Cross down to as close to sea level as was safe…whereupon an amazing thing happened. Right before their eyes, the island simply disappeared, as if Harry Houdini himself had been on the job. Had this just been another mirage? Were they, in fact, still on their own in the middle of the deep blue sea, with no sign of land in any direction?

  Harry took his sights regardless, while Ulm took the Southern Cross higher again. Equally magically—hey, presto!—the island reappeared! How could that be?

  They realised: whereas at 10,000 feet on a clear day they could see over 100 miles to the horizon, at sea-level they could only see 3 miles. Thus, when they had descended, Fiji, then some 70 miles away, had disappeared, before slipping back into their vision once they rose.

  All to the good then. The main thing was that Harry Lyon, from his calculations, had established that the land they were looking at was Exploring Island—the easternmost island of the whole Fiji group. Despite nearly missing it, they had indeed found it, which was the good news…

  The bad news was that, a few minutes later, they crossed the international dateline, and, just like that, even though the time didn’t change, they went from Monday to Tuesday. Still, not to worry, as they flew like an arrow towards their destination…

  And then they saw it: Fiji ahoy! Gazing out, they could see frothing white surf and backwash around lots of small islands, swaying palm trees and thatched roofs jutting gently through the thick green foliage that seemed to cover just about everything. They could also see villagers running out into the road, looking up gobsmacked at something they had never seen in their lives before—a ‘bird-ship’!

  And yet, were they saved after all? As they came in over the spo
t in downtown Suva that the Fijian authorities had selected for them to land on, an extended sports field called Albert Park, their hearts sank…

  It was big for a football field, certainly, but less than tiny for a landing space, with no more than 400 yards to pull up on. And here they were, flying the biggest and heaviest Fokker that had ever been constructed, a plane which usually needed at least 500 yards to come to a halt. With one glance it was obvious that this was a landing that could only be attempted by one of the best pilots in the world. Fortunately, they had such a one on board, in the person of Charles Kingsford Smith…

  Smithy took the plane around the field to get the lie of the land—even as the citizens of Suva streamed from all directions to the field, all of them gazing skywards at the Southern Cross, its wings glistening in the sunlight—and then came around on one last loop to begin his landing run.

  Oh…shiiiiit.

  It was only when they were lining up on the approach, at 3.50 pm on that sultry tropical afternoon, that Smithy noticed there was an enormous 12-foot drop from the roadway at the southern end of Albert Park. This meant he couldn’t get a clear path to touch down at the beginning of the field as he had anticipated and could only hope to land about one-third of the way in; approaching from the south-west to increase the distance available, marginally, by angling diagonally across the field. So it was that the mighty Southern Cross—oddly enough surrounded by a flock of enormous white seabirds which seemed to be guiding her in, as a matter of professional respect44—touched down at a speed of 65 miles per hour, and with no brakes, only 270 yards to play with, a hill lined with trees and thick undergrowth right in front barring a second chance, and thousands of people all around, many of them watching in horror.