Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (46 page)

That is, so long as clouds didn’t prevent you from getting a fix on the object,
and
you hadn’t made even the tiniest error in all of the complex calculations,
and
all your prayers had been heard and answered…

Familiarity with the heavens was half of it. Take the constellation of the Southern Cross, for example, which is always visible in the southern hemisphere. As the earth rotates on its axis over a twenty-four-hour period, so too does the Southern Cross appear to rotate around a fixed point in the night sky known as the south celestial pole—which is, in turn, that spot in the sky pierced by an imaginary line going from the earth’s north pole to its south pole and continuing on up towards the Southern Cross’s stars.

It was not at all easy to understand, let alone master, and yet, although foremost among them as a pilot pure, Kingsford Smith concentrated every bit as much as the other two. True, in Western Australia you flew ‘by guess and by God’ and by recognising the landmarks beneath you, while in the Great War, navigation hadn’t been that important because the main thing you needed to find was Germans, and even if you couldn’t find them, it generally didn’t take them long to find you…but this was different. If the aviators were to succeed in their venture to cross the Pacific, they would be landing on islands in the vast blue swirl of the Pacific Ocean that would be no more than needles in the world’s biggest haystack, and failure to find them would result in the all but certain deaths of the flyers. So let’s try it again. And again and again. And again.

After several days of intense instruction, the three men had achieved some proficiency with the sextant, while remaining aware that it would be far more difficult to operate such an instrument when hurtling above the earth’s surface at 100 miles an hour. And they also became more proficient at doing all the calculations, comparing their estimations as to where they were at that moment, against where Todd or Litchfield told them they
actually
were. In the course of the trip and their lessons, the aviators became very close to Todd and Litchfield, strengthened in part by the fact that the massive Todd—he was all of 19 stone—was such a big drinker. He and Smithy, particularly, frequently liked to imbibe late into the night, as the Pacific Ocean slipped by beneath them.

In between such lessons and carousing there was, of course, time for other things, which included discussing in more detail how they were going to do the flight.

On the strength of Lindbergh’s achievement, the obvious thing was to purchase a bigger version of the Ryan monoplane, one that would be capable of holding all three of them. As to the route they would take, their plans changed by the day.

At first it seemed as though the best plan would be to have the plane as a land plane and fly it from ‘Frisco to Honolulu, at which point they could have it quickly converted to a seaplane, and proceed from there via a series of Pacific islands, such as Fanning Island, the Phoenix Islands and so forth. Perhaps Samoa? Fiji? New Caledonia? There was a lot to discuss and they kept tossing ideas around as America drew closer.

Ten
THE TOUGH GET GOING

Smithy was happily irresponsible on the ground. But as soon as he stepped into a cockpit he became a changed man. His very features altered. He looked like a hawk—a creature of the air with wings to fly, for it is no more than the truth that the plane was part of the man. No matter how friendly he was with his crew—and he was always that—he commanded their respect. Not one of those who worked for him would have refused to follow him anywhere he wanted to go. He had that precious gift of all born leaders of men—an infinite capacity to inspire confidence.

R
ADIO OPERATOR
J
OHN
S
TANNAGE
,
WHO FLEW EXTENSIVELY WITH
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH AND WAS ONE OF HIS EARLY BIOGRAPHERS
.
¹

O
n 5 August 1927, the three Australians—Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and Keith Anderson—headed down the gangplank of the
Tahiti
onto the San Francisco docks, with their kitbags over their shoulders and a dream in their hearts to fly the Pacific.

How
exactly?

Yes, well.

As Kingsford Smith would later write, ‘We landed with but vague notions how such a flight was to be successfully carried out; we had some promises from Australia of financial support and I had considerable experience of flying in all types of planes in England, America and Australia. But our determination to make the flight was our principal and indeed our only asset when we set foot in the United States.’
²

Their first priority after landing was settling into a rather salubrious hotel in downtown San Francisco, where they began to get down to brass tacks. And at least Harold Kingsford Smith, who had met them at the ship, had pledged himself to give them a good start by introducing the adventurers to some of his more well-heeled business contacts.

What was obvious from the first was that there would be no problem getting people interested in crossing at least part of the Pacific Ocean, as they had arrived in San Francisco just when the Dole Air Race was about to take off, and it seemed that all of America was
crazy
for these amazing aviators about to race each other from newly established Oakland airport to Honolulu. Day after day, the papers were filled with breathless accounts of the flyers gathering, the rules of the race, what would be required, who was likely to win and so forth. In the midst of such excitement not a lot of play was given to a comment by Charles Lindbergh to the effect that the race was ‘sheer suicide…’

The Australians came to share that view, after being given cause to look at the project closely. Shortly after their arrival they were offered a plane to fly in the race by a representative of the Vacuum Oil Company—which organisation was acting as the New South Wales government’s agent in the matter of the Pacific flight—by extending them up to £3500 capital, as required.

But after looking at the aircraft—an International F-18 air coach biplane, fitted with a Wright Whirlwind engine and named
Miss Hollydale
—and speaking with competing pilots, it became clear that neither the planes nor the personnel were remotely ready to embark on such a venture.

And indeed, there was no doubt that things did not go smoothly for the race from the first. Just five days after the Australians arrived in San Francisco, two US Navy pilots, George D. Covell and Richard S. Waggener, were on their way from San Diego flying to the starting point of Oakland when they completely lost their way in fog and ended up crashing straight into an ocean cliff face and being killed outright, as their flaming plane hit the beach 75 feet below. Less than twenty-four hours later, another intended contestant, Arthur Rogers, took his plane up for a test flight above Montebello, California, and lost control and crashed, killing himself—in full view of his young wife holding their infant daughter. And even then the race preliminaries were not done with disaster, with two more crashes occurring, although mercifully these were not fatal.

Yet that shocking lead-up did not dampen the enthusiasm of the 85,000 people who turned up at Oakland airport on the foggy morning of Tuesday, 16 August 1927, to see the Dole Air Race formally begin.
³
Eight impossibly tiny aircraft, each one single-engined, lined up in a semicircle at one end of the dusty runway. Around the planes, moving back and forth, were the aviators themselves—fifteen men and a young woman—together with assorted mechanics covered in three-parts grease to two-parts oil, making last-minute preparations for take-off.

And there they go! Ah, how the crowd near burst with excitement, pressing against the wooden fence that kept onlookers at a safe distance, as just before noon the first plane in the queue,
Oklahoma
, responded to the dropped chequered flag and accelerated, lifted off, waggled its wings, and headed out over San Francisco Bay, before heading west-south-west to Hawaii…

But look there! Before their very eyes, the second plane away,
El Encanto
—one of the pre-race favourites—clearly totally overloaded, lost control a couple of seconds after take-off and collapsed down onto its left wing in a shrieking metal groan of agony. At least its two flyers survived and were seen to crawl away from the wreckage as quickly as their knees could carry them, fearful that the huge quantity of petrol they had on board would ignite and explode. The next plane,
Pabco Flyer
, also momentarily got off the ground, before it too gave up the unequal struggle with gravity and returned to earth, becoming bogged in the marsh at the end of the runway. And so it went…

Golden Eagle
,
Aloha
and
Woolaroc
got away okay, but though
Miss Doran
—carrying the sole woman in the race, ‘the prettiest little pigeon on wings’,
⁴
Mildred Doran, as part of its three-person crew—managed to take off, it returned ten minutes later before taking off again.
Pabco Flyer
was now freed from the marsh, but crashed more seriously on its second attempt. Another plane,
Dallas Spirit
, also had to return shortly after take-off with engine trouble.

A little over twenty-six hours later,
Woolaroc
did indeed land safely in Honolulu to win the race, followed a couple of hours later by
Aloha.
But that was
it.
Though the people waited, and waited, and waited, with their leis at the ready to drape around the necks of the arriving pilots, no more planes arrived. In fact, no traces of
Golden Eagle
or
Miss Doran
were ever found. Equally tragically, when
Dallas Spirit
went to look for them, it too—with its pilot and navigator, William P. Erwin and Alvin Eichwaldt, both veterans of the Great War—simply vanished into the Pacific’s gaping blue maw.

All up, ten lives were lost in the course of just that one race and…

And these Australian pilots wanted to do
what
?!?! To go
three
times as far as Hawaii, across the entire Pacific?! Three times further than Lindbergh had gone! They must be insane.

It was no exaggeration to say that in the history of aviation—as young as it was—there could have been no worse time to be asking aeroplane manufacturers, fuel companies and business people to provide planes, fuel or cash for such a venture. In most cases the Australians didn’t even get through the front door of their target companies. Yes, Lindbergh had accomplished something phenomenal the year before, but he was an
American
and that was probably a one-off. The Dole Air Race had conclusively proved that flying over the Pacific Ocean in a heavily laden single-engine machine was an extremely dangerous exercise and it would be sheer lunacy to encourage and finance more pilots to needlessly risk their lives.

Against all that, however, what the Dole Air Race gave the Australians was some very clear lessons in how
not
to go about a long ocean flight. The more they looked at it, the more it became obvious that they needed the best equipment available across the board, and that started with the best plane. And that best plane was made by the very same man who had been the bane of Kingsford Smith and other Allied flyers in the Great War—Anthony Fokker.

By now Fokker was well established in the United States, to the point of being the most respected manufacturer in the business, and something worthy of note was that the first plane to make it from San Francisco to Hawaii had been a Fokker tri-motor. Too, the key to a successful journey was to have a robust plane capable of carrying an enormous load of fuel, and at the time the record for the largest load of fuel lifted in a plane was held by two Americans who had crossed the country from coast to coast in a Fokker.

As to engines, what also made a huge impression on Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson was that the only two planes in the Dole Air Race that had made it safely to Hawaii had been powered by Wright Whirlwind engines, just as Lindbergh’s Ryan monoplane had been blessed with one. When Richard Byrd had successfully flown to the North Pole and back the previous year, he too had been flying a Fokker powered by three Wright Whirlwind J-4 engines, made by a company of which Orville Wright had a significant share. The key thing about the engine was that it was air-cooled rather than liquid cooled, which meant that it was a lot lighter, required less maintenance and was less vulnerable to malfunction.

Bit by bit, the Australians came to the conclusion that their ideal machine would be a Fokker powered by three Wright Whirlwind engines and thus capable of carrying a crew of four, including a radio man and navigator to accompany the two pilots. This was a far more expensive option than their original plan of a single-engined Ryan monoplane, but what was expense when they were dealing with their own lives? They felt they would somehow find the money.

George Wilkins had so many problems he could barely keep track, though there was no problem working out what the key one was. He needed
money.
Badly. Money to keep his project going, to get back to Point Barrow and the 500 gallons of fuel he had cached there and complete the job he had started—to fly across the roof of the world all the way to Spitzbergen in Norway. The two wrecked Fokkers of the last two seasons’ attempts were in storage in Seattle, and now he had no money to finance the plane he truly wanted—a Lockheed Vega, with a 225-horsepower engine capable of propelling it at 135 miles per hour. The Vega was an ideal plane because, unlike the Fokkers, it was very fast and fuel efficient, yet not so big that it needed five or six men to handle. When he and the redoubtable Ben Eielson would make the next attempt the following year, they were determined to have a more streamlined, cheaper operation, and the Lockheed would be just perfect for that. Now without the support of the Detroit Aviation Society and the
Detroit News
, as they had effectively given up on him, what he had to do was to sell his Fokkers for whatever he could get for them, and use that money to buy the Lockheed.