Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (60 page)

As if that suit wasn’t shocking enough, it soon transpired that Keith Anderson was suing them too, with Bon’s solicitor father, Arthur Hilliard, calling the shots. And whereas Bobby was suing them for lost salary, Keith wanted a share of the profits! He had taken an action before the New South Wales Supreme Court to recover monies spent to organise the flight and to provide their living expenses while they were in San Francisco.

In response, Smithy was stung and Ulm was stoical. They would fight the writs tooth and nail, and hire King’s Counsels to tear their erstwhile friends apart.

In the meantime, nothing could be allowed to interfere with their program. A large part of that would be forming their own airline, to be called, grandly, Australian National Airways which they felt could do in New South Wales and Victoria what Qantas did in Queensland and West Australian Airways did in the west. In terms of historic flights, though, one beckoned immediately: the honour of being the first flyers to traverse the Tasman Sea. Of course, now without Lyon and Warner, they would need replacements to man the radio and navigation table but that proved to be no problem. For a navigator they were able to secure their old friend, Australian Hal Litchfield. With Bill Todd, the softly spoken Hal had given them instruction in navigation, and they were delighted to take him on board their craft. For a radio man, both Ulm and Kingsford Smith thought it would be a good gesture to engage a New Zealander to be part of the crew with the honour of crossing the Tasman first, and Tom McWilliams was perfect: he was a first-class wireless operator then teaching at the radio school of the Union Steamship Company in Wellington, a friendly, easygoing veteran of the Great War and, most importantly of all, he was provided by the New Zealand government, free of charge!

In a sign of the changing times, the first that most of the Australian public knew about the trip was when a full-page advertisement appeared in the
Sydney Morning Herald
:

Kingsford Smith To Fly the Tasman

These are the Bonds Woollen Athletic Singlets and Pure Wool Fancy Half Hose that will accompany Capt. Kingsford Smith on his flight to New Zealand.

I shall be delighted to wear them on my flight to New Zealand. I know their worth.

C. Kingsford Smith.

With these Garments Australia’s Air Hero will be protected against the Chill and Cold in his effort to bring still greater honour to Australia.

1239 Miles from Sydney to Wellington.

Estimated Flying Time 14
¹
/
₂
Hours.

In fact, their destination soon changed to Christchurch chiefly on the grounds that that fair city had a serious airfield, while Wellington didn’t. And although Christchurch was only a relatively paltry 1400 miles away—nearly nothing, in comparison to their Honolulu to Suva hop—they had before them the tragic example of Hood and Moncrieff to show that the exercise was not a doddle. As a matter of fact, Kingsford Smith was personally convinced that it represented ‘one of the most dangerous and difficult seacrossings in the world’, as it was one of the ‘wildest and stormiest seas on the globe’,
⁹
and also comparatively deserted.

Still, it was a sea that was clearly going to be crossed sooner or later, and both Kingsford Smith and Ulm took the view that they might as well be the ones to do it. As Smithy told the press, ‘This isn’t just a flight across 1,425 miles of stormy sea. This flight’s important to us. It’ll publicise the feasibility of such a flight, and make people realise that if this trip is possible, our own Australian National Airways Limited is a safe, quick way of getting from point to point in Australia. If we can fly the Tasman safely, we can certainly fly people from Sydney to Melbourne without any trouble. Anyway, however stormy it is, the “Old Bus” can handle it.’
¹⁰

Once committed to the flight, they sent for ‘Doc’ Maidment to come across from America to recondition the engines once more, and he was assisted in this task by a young RAAF mechanic by the name of Tommy Pethybridge, a tousle-haired young man, who was simply beside himself with joy that he was able to work on the plane of Kingsford Smith, whom he hero-worshipped.

Now, though their every interaction with New Zealand to this point had been positive and welcoming, a sudden glitch occurred when they announced that their likely landing in Christchurch would be on Sunday, 9 September 1928. A
Sunday
? The Lord’s day? On a trip sponsored by a commercial enterprise, a brand of petrol? The more conservative elements of wider New Zealand, and Christchurch in particular, took a very dim view of such sacrilege, and a very stern message soon came from the mayor of Christchurch, addressed to Charles Kingsford Smith:

Christchurch churchmen strongly protest against plans involving arrival on a Sunday. I support the protest. Cannot departure be delayed?
¹¹

Smithy laughed. It was amazing the things that could upset some fellows. Fortunately he was spared the difficult decision about whether to bow to the Lord or to his instincts to leave as soon as he was ready by the even greater need to bow to the weather bureau. When the boffins reported that it was blowing a powerful gale along the New Zealand coast on the day Kingsford Smith and Ulm wanted to leave, they had no hesitation in delaying the flight.
¹²

This reluctance to go when there was a poor forecast made Smithy’s predicament all the more surprising, therefore, when just a couple of days later they were flying in a storm as they had never experienced before, an even worse storm than the one that had nearly brought them down off the coast of Fiji.

For
never
had they been in wind and lightning like this. When they had left Richmond in the gathering dusk of 10 September, only a few hours earlier—carrying just 700 gallons of petrol—both the Australian and New Zealand weather bureaus were reporting fine weather in their own parts of the world, and yet neither had the capacity to know what it was like over the heart of the Tasman, as there were no ships out in the middle of it. Well, Kingsford Smith could tell them what the weather was like in the middle, when he arrived.
If
he arrived…

At the controls, Smithy took the
Southern Cross
as high as she would go, but at 10,000 feet there was not the slightest sign that they were getting above the weather, and the plane refused to go any higher. Regrettably, at that height, the air was so thin that the
Southern Cross
was almost impossible to handle so he took her back down, bouncing off air pockets as they went.

Alas, at 8500 feet, serious danger presented itself, as ice started to form on the plane’s wings and all exterior surfaces, changing the craft’s contours and adding as much as half a ton weight, slowing it and making it even more unstable. Smithy had calculated that they were covering distance over the water at better than 100 miles per hour, with a spanking tailwind adding 7 miles per hour or so to the plane’s usual ground speed of 95 miles per hour. And yet he was stunned to see that the air speed indicator was registering
zero.

His highly trained instinct was to believe the dials and, on the reckoning that they must now be stalling, he began a steep dive and watched as the altimeter indicated they had gone from 8000 feet to 2500 feet in under a minute, and still the speed showed zero!

Too late, for all the hard-won altitude lost, he realised that the air speed indicator, too, must have become choked with ice, and they were now hurtling down at enormous speed and at a very steep angle. Smithy braced himself and pulled back hard on the control column’s wheel as slowly, oh so slowly, the ice-encrusted mass that was the
Southern Cross
yielded to his command. But was there still time? Smithy was suddenly gripped by the appalling feeling that they were going to go ‘straight into the angry sea like an ice-sheathed arrow’.
¹³

At last, the plane levelled just above the ocean. They were still alive, but not yet out of trouble…

As they continued on their perilous flight, they soon found themselves in a ‘black chaotic void, punctuated every few seconds by great jagged rents of lightning which, like vivid green snakes, seemed to leap at us from every direction’.
¹⁴
Precisely what happened when lightning struck a flying petrol tank like the one they were in, they simply didn’t know. And yet they were not long in finding out.

When a bolt of lightning
did
strike the plane shortly afterwards, it didn’t turn them into a flaming ball as they feared but it did knock out both radio sets. Soon the entire
Southern Cross
sizzled, from its own electrical charge, with a phenomenon called ‘St Elmo’s Fire’—a frightening effect caused by massive voltages exciting the gases in the air to glow. Amazed, Smithy and Ulm saw the propellers flickering in the lightning bolts, while the leading edges of the wings of the plane seemed to throb with the eerie, electrical brilliance—just as Smithy’s grandfather, the roving sea-captain from Kent, may have seen the top of his ship’s mast in an electrical storm glow with the same effect.

This time, the theoretical Movietone News cameras would have captured a veritable glowing ghost plane crackling its way through the thunderous heavens. Just one spark in the wrong spot—anywhere near the fumes from the fuel tanks—and everything would have been all over in an instant.
¹⁵
True, every metal part of the plane had been carefully joined together by an earthing wire to prevent that spark discharging, but it had never been tested like this before.

As Smithy would later write: ‘I was never so frightened in my life before—as also were my three companions.’
¹⁶

Trying not to panic, he took stock of their situation. They were alone in the middle of the deserted Tasman Sea. Above and around them was the worst storm he’d ever seen. Beneath them was a savage hungry sea that would destroy them in seconds if they were forced down.

The
Southern Cross
was encrusted in ice. The radio wasn’t working. It was pitch black. They could see nothing, hear nothing but the storm and did not know where they were.

Yes, all things considered, he thought he could up the ante, and not only was he the most frightened he’d ever been, but he was in fact, ‘touching the extreme of human fear’.
¹⁷

Shoulda worn the brown underpants.

Still trying to fight off panic, Smithy nearly lost his head and momentarily felt a ‘desire to pull her round, dive—climb—do anything, to escape’.
¹⁸
With no respite, ‘we were like rats in a trap, dazed with fear’.
¹⁹

At least the three wonderful Wright Whirlwind radial engines never missed a beat, though it wasn’t long before the propellers were struggling as flying ice tore chunks out of two of them, causing the plane to vibrate terribly.

In the course of that horrifying night, Kingsford Smith made a promise to himself that
never again
would he cross an ocean at night if there was any alternative.
²⁰
Sometimes the going was so tough that it took both Smithy and Ulm together, pulling on the controls, to guide their ship through.
²¹

Never had any of the flyers been so glad to see a dawn as that one, on Tuesday, 11 September 1928. Gazing earnestly for a sign of land, it was Hal Litchfield who spotted it first, then passed forward a note using their stick system: Watch bank of cloud on starboard bow.
²²

They looked…and he was right! As opposed to the other clouds all around, this particular bank didn’t change form, or position. There could be only one conclusion: it wasn’t a cloud. And that high up there was only one other thing that it could be: the far distant snowy peaks of the Southern Alps.

New Zealand. They had made it. At least, they had seen land and, turning to the maps, Litchfield soon worked out exactly where they were, near the entrance to Cook Strait, which separates the North Island from the South Island. The main thing was that the crisis had passed, and before heading to Christchurch they decided to swoop down upon Wellington on the southern end of the North Island, bringing the citizens of that fair city out of their houses to wave them a furious welcome with pyjama tops, tea towels and anything else that came to hand, before heading down to Christchurch. (Two people no doubt excused from expressing such transparent joy—though they certainly would have known of the safe arrival of the
Southern Cross
in New Zealand—were the widows of Lieutenant John Moncrieff and Captain George Hood. All these months later and there had still not been a substantiated clue as to the fate of their husbands.
Home is the sailor
,
home from the sea
,
And the hunter
,
home from the hill
…
²³
but of the aviators nary a sign.)

The
Southern Cross
flew on, triumphant. About 50 miles out of Christchurch they were greeted by four Bristol F.2B fighter machines from the New Zealand Permanent Air Force and escorted to Wigram aerodrome.