Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  In the meantime, Kingsford Smith and Ulm were expanding Australian National Airways, even while Kingsford Smith was overseas, and on 1 June 1930 the airline inaugurated its daily Sydney to Melbourne service. From a standing start only a year before, ANA had now established the first regular service between the major cities of the eastern states, all of it without a penny of subsidy from the government.

  Getting the passengers to their destination on time was important, but so too was facilitating their journey, with ANA having a bus service in Sydney that delivered passengers straight from the GPO in Martin Place, to the steps of the aeroplane. Each of the eight passenger seats—a wicker chair with a cushion, though without a seat-belt—had a side-pocket containing the daily newspaper, and they were also provided with a map showing the route and the times they should be above certain landmarks. And, oh yes, a sick bag.38 The tightening effect of the Depression notwithstanding, generally the numbers were good and the planes were full.

  Though interested in ANA’s expansion, and certainly impressed by Ulm’s business acumen, Hudson Fysh did not feel that the airline threatened their own pre-eminence in the Australian aviation market. He later recorded: ‘It was rather felt that the service was run on the experience and ideals of the pioneer record-breakers, who braved all elements, and in this respect we felt ANA had operated ahead of the supporting ground organisation. The tenet “the mails must fly”, over which I used to argue with Charles Ulm, was ahead of time for passenger carriage.’39

  In broad brushstrokes, ANA pilot Bill Taylor was also of the view that the airline was particular in its approach to commercial services, always leaning towards the we-can-do-it! approach, above all else.

  ‘Right from the start,’ he later noted, ‘the spirit of this airline was the spirit of the Pacific flight.’40 That is, no flying task was impossible, no weather too bad to overcome, if you just had the right pilots. Smithy’s view was that ‘contact navigation’, otherwise known as ‘track crawling’, as every other airline in the country did it—steering by visual contact with the ground—was primitive, and that ANA would lead the way with modern navigation by instrument flying in and above clouds. Just as they had done it to cross the Pacific and the Tasman.41

  Fifteen

  NEW FRONTIERS

  My heart is in adventure and the last frontier is the air.

  CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH TO AMERICAN JOURNALIST EDWIN C. PARSONS1

  Kingsford Smith I regard as the greatest flyer in the world today. Balchen is perhaps comparable to him, but only in the cockpit.2 Kingsford Smith has the advantage of being a great commander as well as flyer. He is the best organiser for success I know, and has the most courage of any airman I have met. Slight, he is like an animate copper wire, surging with electrical energy, a man not to be downed no matter what the odds pitted against him.

  ANTHONY FOKKER WRITING IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IN 19313

  Smithy was now devoted to making his long dreamed of trans-Atlantic hop a reality. At Anthony Fokker’s suggestion, Smithy engaged a Dutch co-pilot by the name of Evert van Dijk, who normally flew with KLM.

  But who should be his radio man?

  He was pondering that very question in London’s Royal Air Force Club one afternoon, when he heard a familiar voice behind him. It was that of John Stannage, whom he had first met at Mills Field in 1927 and who had been the radio man aboard the Canberra when it had found them at Coffee Royal. Now, after much furious handshaking and back-slapping, Smithy was delighted to hear Stannage report that he was trying to get back to Australia by the quickest possible means. As a matter of fact…

  ‘You don’t happen,’ Stannage asked, ‘to be looking for a radio operator to fly the Atlantic, do you?’4

  Smithy signed him on the spot. Not only was he a very good radio operator, but he was tiny in stature, and that meant they could load more petrol on.

  As to the final member of the crew, upon inquiry, Smithy was able to sign a Celtic navigator, the genial and ebullient Paddy Saul, who was an ex-mariner, just as all the best navigators were. Part of the bond formed between Smithy and Paddy was that the Irishman had married an Australian woman—alas, who had recently died tragically, leaving him with an eight-year-old daughter to raise on his own—and in the course of his many travels had even served with the AIF at Gallipoli. This made him Smithy’s kind of bloke.5

  Retrieving the Southern Cross from Amsterdam—with van Dijk, Stannage and Doc Maidment—Smithy found his beautiful bird had been so superbly reconditioned that he dared do a loop-de-loop soon after taking off from the Fokker headquarters!6 After a few days in Croydon, about 10 miles out of London, they then flew to Baldonnel in the Irish Free State to pick up Paddy Saul, and by the early hours of Tuesday, 24 June 1930, everything was in readiness.

  The Southern Cross was in position on Ireland’s magnificently long Portmarnock Beach—at low tide as wide and flat as a billiard table—with the summery dawn still a couple of hours away. Even at that absurdly early hour of 4 am, around 1000 Irish locals and a few enthusiasts from Dublin, which lay just a little to the south, had turned up to see the historic flight begin, and flares placed around the plane and along the beach threw an ethereal, dancing light upon their expectant faces.7

  For just under twenty-five minutes, Smithy kept the engines of the Southern Cross turning over, on the reckoning that they would have to be thoroughly warm to be able to give maximum power when the time came. No matter the shattering sound, Paddy Saul’s dog, Kips, who had accompanied his master on many plane trips, now sensed that he was being very rudely left behind and steadfastly refused to move from beneath the fuselage in front of the plane’s wheels. It was some time before he could be forcibly removed.8 They were less insistent about stopping the pretty Irish colleens who continued to break through and kiss the fuselage of the plane to bring it good luck.9 At last, at 4.25 am GMT the moment arrived, and Smithy gave the Southern Cross full throttle, its shattering roar rolling for miles across the Emerald Isle as, in John Stannage’s words, ‘a thin, blue stiletto flame showed at each of the stub exhausts and stabbed the dark fabric of the pre-dawn gloom’.10

  Before the entranced eyes of the Irish spectators, the plane first waddled, then trotted, then sprinted, then hurtled down the beach at 80 miles per hour and took off after just 1000 yards. The Southern Cross then took a long sweeping circle out to sea, and winged its way back over the beach, dipping one wing a little as a farewell salute to the crowd, before beginning the journey proper, across the Atlantic. Back in Ireland, a friend of Smithy’s sent a prearranged cable to Mary, now that the Southern Cross was safely off the ground: Safely on our way—home.11

  They were away!

  Ahead lay America. They hoped.

  For Smithy, this time, at first, was just like it had been when he had left San Francisco bound for Australia. For the first few hours the skies sparkled, the engines hummed along and beyond everything feeling easy, it almost seemed too easy. Nary a problem in the world! True, before departure they had been warned by the chief of the US Weather Bureau that the American coast was fogbound, and they would be getting such strong winds against them he felt they should delay their start. But, Smithy being Smithy, he decided, just as he had in the lead-up to the Coffee Royal affair, to ignore that advice and deal with the problems as he found them.12 He was confident they would find a way through.

  Besides, this time—together with his trusty talismanic photo of Nellie Stewart which, all these years later, he still flew with tucked under his seat—he had another good luck charm: a gold plaque in the form of a four-leaf shamrock on which was inscribed a Gaelic motto, ‘God Speed Thee, West.’ This was the gift of Mrs James McNeil, the wife of the Governor of the Free State.13

  She, and much of the world—including Charles Lindbergh, who in his Hopewell, New Jersey, mansion was following the flight closely—was hungry for every detail that could be garnered about this trans-Atlantic attempt. Under an exclusive and lucrative arrangement with the New Y
ork Times, the Southern Cross was to keep up a steady stream of messages in Morse code, which the paper subsequently published.

  Getting darker now. The outboard motors are shrouded in a blue haze. Each exhaust port has a faint, pink flame feathering from it. It is very uncanny. The lettering on the starboard wing is embossed in gold as the last faint radiance from the western sky touches it.14

  And then, of course, as ever, things began to change. Mid-Atlantic, they were suddenly confronted by cloud castles of an unknown but evil aerial kingdom, and soon thereafter were entirely engulfed by fog so thick that in every direction—up, down, left, right and forward—everything looked exactly the same. Blank. When Smithy took the Southern Cross up to try to get out of it, he found headwinds so strong that they could make no more than 50 miles per hour against them, which meant the fuel would be exhausted before they even got close to America, so he was obliged to go back down into the fog. Calling it ‘pea soup’ didn’t begin to do it justice. In the back of the plane it was out of the question for Paddy Saul to get any bearings on where they were, but fortunately John Stannage was able to maintain contact with many ships below—who relayed their own positions and the direction they were getting the signals from the Southern Cross on, so that he was able to cross-reference them—that they were able to retain a fair idea of where they were at any given time.15 And that was, despite the lack of vision, flying like an arrow to New York!

  1.29 New York Time. O.K. Old boy. Have been messing about trying to get a bearing. It is very dark, and we are flying blind. The motors are ringed with flames. Still 160 miles from Cape Race. Dickens of a struggle to keep awake now. The drone makes you tired.16

  Of course, sleep was not an option. In the cockpit, Smithy was obliged to engage in the longest period of ‘blind flying’ he had ever done, well over twelve hours and counting, which was exhausting and unnerving.

  Mijn God, van Dijk wrote in his journal, how long is this going to last? If he and I don’t make it, then no one will ever make it.17

  All they could do was keep going, and hope for a break in the fog. In fact, the break in the monotony of it all came in a rather upsetting fashion. Smithy had taken the Southern Cross a little lower, in the hope of at least sighting the ocean, when a shocked Stannage—whose radio signals had suddenly gone dead—sent through a frantically scribbled note: UP, UP! Aerial dragged water twice!18

  Horrified, Smithy did exactly that, not realising that their altitude had dropped to such a low level, for his altimeter clearly showed them at 600 feet, and the antenna was only 200 feet long. In the cabin, John Stannage removed his helmet and wiped his brow, knowing how close they had just come to a catastrophe.19 And yet in short order it was Paddy Saul who had his own complaint, which was at least as troubling, and also quickly passed forward to Smithy: My compass shows up to ninety degrees divergence from course, and Stannage has two radio bearings which I find inexplicable.20

  Dumbfounded, Kingsford Smith showed the message to van Dijk, who was equally stunned. What on earth was going on? According to their compass they had been flying on course for the whole time, and they soon advised that to Saul in a note.

  In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles south of the coast of Newfoundland, their compasses, quivering with indecision, had gone haywire, and not even uniformly haywire, which would have given them a chance of working out exactly on which course they were heading. It was one thing to know where they were, but quite another to know what course to fix on to get to where they wanted to go. The problem was compounded when Paddy Saul informed them that in the last two hours, by his calculations, they had made no progress to the west at all.21 The only explanation was that in the fog they had been flying in a series of massive arcs. Was this what had happened to Nungesser and Coli on their journey, not to mention the many others who had tried, and failed, to cross the Atlantic from east to west?22 Was there something about this part of the world that sent compasses crazy? Was everyone who attempted it doomed to fly around in useless circles until the ocean claimed them?

  Smithy knew what he needed at this point. He needed a drink. Taking up his pen, he wrote a note to Stannage and Saul in the cabin behind, and sent it back: I’d give anything for a toot. Do either of you birds happen to have one back there?23

  Almost immediately, a tiny bottle of whisky that John Stannage had been hiding from the skipper came forward. Smithy took a long swig.

  Calling on all his experience, Smithy tried to think the problem through. Considering his options, it became clear that really only one gave the men any chance of salvation. He would have to ignore the vicious headwinds and take the plane up again, in the hope that being in clear air would sort things out.

  At last, just when the situation was getting absolutely desperate, the Southern Cross got to an altitude of 3500 feet and emerged from the fog of both the skies and the crew’s panic.24 Stars twinkled above. Everything seemed bathed in an odd kind of ethereal blue light, while away on their starboard horizon the sky showed a streak of peculiar red that was possibly an effect of the aurora borealis phenomenon.25 It was a moment in time none of them would ever forget…

  And, almost as one, after a hurried committee meeting it seemed, all their compasses at last agreed and started pointing in exactly the same direction again! A direction that made sense and aligned precisely with where the moon was. Setting a confident course, it was not long before they had moved beyond the worst of the fog and the waves of the Atlantic were, in patches, visible below them in the moonlight.

  Which was the good news. The bad news was that they had burnt up so much fuel flying in circles in the fog it was now out of the question they would make it all the way to New York, and it was even going to be a close-run thing to make it to Newfoundland. Smithy throttled well back, at a speed designed to gain maximum mileage and John Stannage managed to raise the Cape Race radio station on the coast of Newfoundland. Unfortunately, Stannage was told that Newfoundland’s principal airstrip, at St John’s—from where Hawker and Grieve had taken off over a decade before on their own Atlantic attempt, heading east—was entirely fogged in, and that most of Newfoundland was in exactly the same state. The only place not entirely lost in the fog was a remote fishing village called Harbour Grace, about 25 miles beyond St John’s.

  It was their only hope. To give themselves every chance, as the dirty dawn began to break, they radioed ahead to Harbour Grace with the desperate appeal for a local plane to be sent up above the fog, which they might be able to follow closely to the landing ground.26 And even when they reached the point where they knew land must be beneath them, there was no respite. The cloud cover went so low that it was the exact conditions where Australian pilots used the expression, ‘even the bloody birds are walking today’, on the reckoning that the birds were sensible enough never to fly when they couldn’t see.27

  Of that plane, alas, there was no sign, and yet, just when it seemed as if all was lost, at a time that they knew they were practically flying on fumes alone and were expecting the engines to cough dead at any second, a brief break in the fog revealed the landing strip they were looking for, with people waving white sheets near a fire lit to signal the field’s position!

  Smithy brought the mighty Southern Cross down from out of the clouds where it had been for the last thirty-one and a half hours, and executed a perfect landing at 7.53 am local time. The Atlantic had been conquered from the east, by a plane with just one last gasp left in it. It had been a close-run thing, as it so often was with Smithy, pushing everything to its limits, but they had done it. They had flown 1900 miles by the chart, but considerably more in actual fact.

  Early the next morning, refreshed from a wonderful sleep in a local hostelry, and still more than a little amazed that they had survived the terrible ordeal of the day before, they took off again for New York.

  Compared to the first leg of their trip, this was relatively clear flying—so clear that looking down upon the rugged country of Nova Scotia, they c
ould clearly see enormous brown bears running away from the sound of the plane’s engines. From there they traversed the Bay of Fundy, where they could gaze upon a massive shark basking on the ocean’s surface, and shortly afterwards they saw the United States Atlantic Fleet on manoeuvres—whose sailors all waved their caps at them and cheered as they buzzed low—before they continued over Boston, New Haven and then Long Island Sound.28 As they were nearing New York, Smithy penned a message and had John Stannage send it to the world:

  All going fine. Have just climbed through fog to clear air at 2,500 ft. Stop. Everyone happy, and I expect my girl in Australia is glad that my last ocean is flown…

  And this time he meant it. He was getting too old for this caper. He had done it for too long, taken too many risks, and now he needed to find something easier to do. Build up Australian National Airways, for a start. He knew that Mary worried about him terribly when he was away, and he simply wanted to spend more time with her.

  This time there really were twenty welcoming planes coming out from New York to guide them towards their destination. Following them, the legendary Southern Cross, the most travelled aeroplane in the world, well on its way to completing the first circumnavigation of the entire planet while crossing the equator, briefly deviated from its appointed path along the Hudson River and circled around the New York skyscrapers—much as Lindbergh had circled the Eiffel Tower in Paris four years earlier. Those roofs were crowded with New Yorkers waving an enthusiastic welcome. And then, after ‘performing several side slips that tilted its wings at almost right angles to the ground in triumphant salute to the delighted, cheering crowd’,29 came in to land on the spot where Lindbergh had himself started, Roosevelt Field, with a glorious setting sun appropriately marking the completion of the circle. Some 5000 New Yorkers had gathered to witness the occasion. For a moment after Smithy switched the engines off, he took pause before the madness began, as a wave of complete exhaustion washed over him. The long hours of darkness, the flying blind, the dark ocean reaching up at them through the mist, all passed kaleidoscopically before his eyes.30 They dinkum had done it.