Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (74 page)

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.
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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 could 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.

It was 7.30 pm on 26 June 1930 and Charles Kingsford Smith was second only to Lindbergh in terms of his world celebrity as an aviator. Among the cognoscenti of aviation he may have even moved beyond Lindbergh, and that was certainly the view of the American himself. Via his father-in-law, the famed diplomat Dwight Morrow, Lindbergh expressed his considered and expert opinion to the press that the two greatest achievements in aviation both had Kingsford Smith’s signature on them—the first crossing of the Pacific, and the crossing of the Atlantic from the east to the west, against the prevailing winds.
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Kingsford Smith was, in Lindbergh’s view, ‘the greatest of long distance pilots’.
³²

That also seemed to be the view of the crowd, who were so enthusiastic that the aviators were for a short while effective prisoners in their plane, as it took the 150 Nassau County Police officers and sixteen motorcycle cops nearly fifteen minutes to herd the crowd under control and allow them a safe exit.
³³

This latest of Kingsford Smith’s feats made front-page headlines all over the world, particularly in France—where the ill-fated trip of Nungesser and Coli was remembered—and in Holland, where there was great pride that a Fokker had once again set a major aviation record.

One particular line from the press conference that occurred immediately after landing was widely quoted. Kingsford Smith heaped praise on the machine that he loved so deeply, almost like a woman, and said with feeling: ‘That plane has carried me, with the same motors, close to 80,000 miles since we left Oakland a year ago. It has flown all the oceans but the Polar oceans, carried me safely over the deserts of Australia and America, the jungles of India and Burma, and the towns and cities of Europe, and she still has a lot of flying left.’
³⁴

As to the real woman he loved, Mary, there was a wonderfully warm and loving telegram that he had received from her, even before leaving the field. She had been waiting up through the night for news that he was safe, that he had done it, and hopefully got these long-distance trips out of his system once and for all.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she told the press in Melbourne. ‘My mother insisted that I spend last evening playing bridge to keep me from worrying. Oh, but the terrible things I did at bridge!’
³⁵

In Australia, it was the Controller of Civil Aviation, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Brinsmead, who perhaps best spoke for the proud nation. ‘In my opinion,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘Squadron Leader Kingsford Smith must be classed as No.1 in the list of the world’s best pilots.’
³⁶
For his part, a thrilled Charles Ulm exulted: ‘Kingsford Smith undoubtedly is the world’s premier pilot. And surely the authorities will confer some signal honour upon him. I would suggest an entirely new title, K.M.A., Knight Master of the Air.’
³⁷

As ever for Smithy, the next few days were a blur, beginning with a hairraising trip into New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, behind four motorcycle cops with sirens blaring through streets lined with masses of cheering New Yorkers. Though they politely declined the offer of a ticker-tape parade down New York’s Broadway,
³⁸
thinking that was too much for such as them, they did agree to a welcome on the steps of City Hall where, in front of a massive crowd, Mayor Jimmy Walker, after making a robust welcoming speech, presented them all with the city’s Medal of Honor. There were so many photographers there to record the event that the stand upon which they were perched collapsed, fortunately with no major injuries.

When, shortly afterwards, Smithy was able to speak to Mary in Melbourne via a special radio hook-up, the
New York Times
was there to record his end of the conversation: ‘Hello—yes, hello darling. I’m speaking from New York. I am thrilled myself. How are you? I’m here for only two or three days. Then I am going to San Francisco. No, I am not going to fly back across the Atlantic. Not a chance! Ah, I told you I’d make it old dear, and not to fear about it…‘
³⁹

In a subsequent radio hook-up with his mother in Sydney, Smithy was equally firm when Catherine began by saying, ‘No more ocean flying, I hope.’

‘I told you I had to do the last one,’ her son retorted, for all the world to hear. ‘There are no more oceans left to fly.’
⁴⁰

Then Anthony Fokker himself flew them down to Washington in a—can you believe it?—
four
-engined, thirty-two-seat Fokker F.32, where nothing less than an official lunch at the White House awaited. At the height of the proceedings, President Herbert Hoover told them: ‘Your feat of flying across the Atlantic is remarkable enough, even though it has been done before, but Kingsford Smith’s achievement in becoming the first flyer to completely circumnavigate the world by aeroplane is enough to take one’s breath away.’
⁴¹

Thunderous applause all round.

And yet, when Smithy rose to graciously reply, he couldn’t help but make a small correction. ‘I thank you on behalf of my crew and myself for this wonderful reception, sir. But you are premature in crediting me with complete circumnavigation of the world. I have to fly my “Old Bus” to Oakland, California, before I can claim that distinction…And I wouldn’t be here with you now, if I hadn’t had the help of Evert van Dijk, Paddy Saul and John Stannage, my New Zealand friend.’
⁴²