Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (73 page)

Already, that remoteness was diminishing, thanks to aviation companies following the paths now blazed by the pioneers to set up commercial routes. The previous year, in 1929, the Dutch airline,
Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij
—or KLM as it was known—had begun a fortnightly service between Amsterdam and Batavia (as Jakarta was then named), while Britain’s Imperial Airways had inaugurated a weekly service between London and Delhi. The obvious thing, therefore, was for an Australian airline to begin a service to either Batavia or Delhi—preferably the latter, on the grounds of loyalty to the Empire—and be part of a lucrative route that would take passengers and post around the entire planet! Who would get it? Qantas felt it was a strong contender, as did ANA, as did Norman Brearley’s West Australian Airways.

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.

C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH TO
A
MERICAN
J
OURNALIST
E
DWIN
C. P
ARSONS
¹

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.

A
NTHONY
F
OKKER WRITING IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
,
IN
1931
³

S
mithy 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 York 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