Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (39 page)

Thelma had had a gutful. None of Smithy’s grand plans meant anything to her, and she had really had enough of the whole thing. He was almost never at home and she had reached the point where she was just as glad when he wasn’t. When he did return, and he wasn’t at the pub, all they did was argue and it was becoming clear to both of them that what they had shared together was less a long-lasting love and more a passing passion—a passion that had now passed out of sight. It seemed to Thelma, the only thing her husband was passionate about now was his damned Pacific flight—it was all he talked about, thought about, dreamt about. As hard a worker as he was on his business, it seemed to her that even that was only because he wanted to make enough money so he could make the Pacific flight, the Pacific flight, the Pacific flight…always the Pacific flight!

Well, she wanted no part of it, or him, and one day when he returned home from another long haul, he found that, like an Arab, she had folded her tent and silently stolen away. No-one who knew them both well was particularly surprised.

Though upset at the time, a letter Smithy wrote to his mother a short while after Thelma left showed that it wasn’t long before things had returned to normal. A quick mention of the separation and then back to the Pacific flight and ongoing money worries:

26th July, 1925

Dearest Mum,

Thanks muchly for your understanding of my troubles.

They are pretty heavy on me and I will take some getting over. But all will be ok some day.

I hope that there really is a good chance for this Pacific flight as I want to come over next month but cannot risk being away unless it is justified. I need the change tremendously.

Unfortunately my income tax has just hit me with a bang (£30) Lord knows how they can possibly reckon I owe that much, but anyway, I’m used to being in debt. I will be amazed if I am ever out of it
…

Your loving son,

Chilla
⁴⁸

Not long afterwards—leaving Bert Pike and Elsie in charge of running the trucking company—Kingsford Smith and Anderson returned to the east coast on a brief trip to see family and friends, and to do the rounds of possible sponsors, including government bodies, to raise the money they needed to make the flight.

Seeing their nearest and dearest was wonderful. Trying to find sponsors, however, was nigh on impossible.

Their first port of call was the seat of the Federal government, Parliament House in Melbourne, where they were generally flat out getting to the third secretary from the left, let alone any of the relevant ministers. A letter to Prime Minister Stanley Bruce produced only a terse response acknowledging receipt. The Defence Minister was not that interested. The Vacuum Oil Company advised that it wished them well, really well, but was in no position to bankroll the trip, because…
blah
,
blah
,
blah
,
blah
,
blah
…but it really did wish them well. The only genuine interest came from the editor of the
Sun
, Herbert Campbell-Jones, but the mere £500 that he promised wasn’t remotely enough to turn their dream into a reality.

All was in readiness.

George Wilkins had now selected a co-pilot for his planned trip across the roof of the world—a phlegmatic Alaskan resident by the name of Ben Eielson—and with him intended to make many trips 500 miles to Point Barrow on Alaska’s far north coast and ferry enough petrol there to establish the base from which they would launch on Norway.

That was the plan, anyway. But from the beginning, things did not go as he envisaged.

It was minus 52 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees below zero) in Fairbanks when they began to unpack the crates on the morning of 8 March 1926, though that in itself wasn’t too much of a problem. There were many goldminers around Fairbanks who warmly remembered how many times Ben Eielson had flown through storms to get medical help to injured miners, and they flocked to assist the aviators. In no time at all they were hauling the two still wingless planes through cheering crowds to the hangar of Ben Eielson’s Fairbanks Aeroplane Corporation, where the reassembly process began.

No, the first of the real problems came a few days later, when Palmer Hutchinson, the young correspondent for the newspaper alliance that was helping to finance them, insisted that a ‘christening’ of the newly assembled planes would make for great copy and photographs. Generally, Wilkins didn’t go in for that kind of malarkey but Hutchinson was such a nice bloke and his organisation was such a loyal sponsor that he felt obliged to co-operate. On the morning of 11 March 1926, the two planes were pushed out of their hangars as variously the mayor of Fairbanks, some local dignitaries and a few men of the cloth did the honours. The climax came when the wife of the mayor and another lady stepped forward and, by cracking a bottle of petrol over a propeller of each plane, christened firstly the single-engined Fokker, the
Alaskan
, and then the three-engine machine, the
Detroiter
, as everyone clapped vigorously in the sub-freezing air.

Palmer Hutchinson was appreciative and was about to go back and write his story, when Wilkins had a quiet word with him. Hang around, he told the enthusiastic and likeable young reporter. In a couple of hours, once everyone including the local press has gone, we’re going to take the planes up for a test flight and you can have another ‘scoop’.

The
Detroiter
, when they at last wheeled it out to the runway proper, was an extraordinary sight. With the wings spanning 71 feet 2 inches, it was the prototype F.VIIb.3m, the biggest Fokker ever constructed, as Wilkins’s good friend Anthony Fokker himself had proudly informed him. And now it was time to see how she would fly. With all three Wright Whirlwind radial engines at full throttle, the massive plane lurched forward towards the starting point on the runway…before getting stuck in a snowdrift.

No problem. There were many willing hands ready to push her out again, including the enthusiastic Palmer Hutchinson. And yet while all the others knew that when pushing a plane with propellers whirring the only proper way was to push from behind, no-one had ever told Palmer. He had been pushing from behind when he decided he could get a better grip by pulling on the wheel stuck in the ice. This placed him between the wheel and the whirring, invisible, propeller of the starboard engine, just inches behind him. George Wilkins was in the cockpit with his co-pilot, and knew nothing of what was going on below.

Straining,
heaving
, to get the plane moving, the other workers spotted Palmer’s danger just as the plane broke free and once again lurched forward. To get out of the way of the oncoming wheel, the 28-year-old journalist had to quickly step back…

George Wilkins and his deputy, US Army Major Tom Lanphier suddenly felt a sickening
clunk.
Worse, the instant they turned off the engines, they could hear screams and howls from outside, getting progressively louder as the engine noise lessened. They emerged from the plane to see Palmer Hutchinson decapitated.
⁴⁹
A newsreel man who had captured the whole thing on his camera was, then and there, pulling open the back of his apparatus and exposing the film to the light, certain that he never wanted to see it again, and nor should anyone. Beyond the obvious tragedy to Palmer Hutchinson and his family, it was a brutal beginning for the whole venture.

Wilkins began to feel that there was a hex on that machine from the beginning. And maybe, in fact, a hex on the whole expedition…

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.