Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (85 page)

It was one of those perfect July days where, although the calendar says it is winter, Sydney decides to turn on spring weather. In the company of the other planes from Kingsford-Smith Air Service, Bill Taylor swept up the sparkling harbour in the same Percival Gull that Smithy had broken the England to Australia record in the year before, and reckoned that his home city had rarely looked more stunning.

And yet he was about to see something more stunning still. Coming through the heads of Sydney Harbour that late morning of 16 July 1934 was the
Mariposa
, on which Smithy and Mary were returning from the States, and there on the deck he saw it for the first time. ‘It was the Lockheed Alt air,’ he later wrote, ‘her tapered wings glistening below her blue streamlined fuselage, a real thoroughbred: no contraption of wires and struts and gadgets hanging everywhere; just a wing, a body, and a tail of perfect form, like a beautiful blue bird poised ready for flight.’
⁴¹

Ah, but the Australian Customs officers certainly didn’t think so. No automated bird could fly without the proper papers, so where were they? Smithy handed over the Experimental License of Airworthiness received from the US Commerce Department. It had expired on 30 June.

Did he have a Certificate of Airworthiness?

He did not.

Did he at least have a Certificate of Importation, allowing him to bring into Australia an American aircraft?

No, he did not.

Well, it was impounded then, wasn’t it?

He supposed so.

All Smithy could manage in the short term—as the plane couldn’t stay aboard the
Mariposa
and had to be moved to Mascot one way or another—was to get permission to fly it there. From where, exactly? He favoured clearing the traffic from Macquarie Street in downtown Sydney and using that as a runway, but not surprisingly permission for that was refused, so he came up with another idea.

On the equally shining afternoon of 17 July, hundreds of locals had gathered on the north side of Sydney Harbour at Neutral Bay’s Anderson Park. Kids, grannies, mums and dads, dogs, everyone from Blind Freddie to Mrs Cafoops to Johnnie Bloggs…For the word had spread. Smithy was down at that little green corner by the harbour, with one of his flying machines, and he was going to take off!

And sure enough, it was true. Just a short time earlier, a massive crane had lifted this most extraordinary-looking machine—with Smithy’s exultant chief engineer, Tommy Pethybridge, sitting on top—onto a barge, from which it was rolled ashore at the southern end of the park. The
excitement
of seeing Smithy himself! Looking just like he did in the newspapers and on the newsreels, a chiselled man in crumpled cloth, he was standing right there, beaming up at his beauty, as the crowd continued to swell around him. Beside him was Bill Taylor, who was going to be his co-pilot for the Centenary Race.

And there was the name he had given the plane, painted in big white letters on the Consolidated blue fuselage:
ANZAC.
An old Digger, who had parked his lorry on Kurraba Road and wandered over, looked up at the name and then said to the famous airman, ‘Yer got a good name for ‘er Smithy. The Diggers are behind yer, boy.’
⁴²

Well, they might have been, but the Customs officers most certainly were
not.
As a matter of fact, that name should not have been visible, as it was the Defence Department that declared that calling the plane
ANZAC
represented a gross commercialisation of the sacred name, notwithstanding that Smithy was an Anzac himself and had risked his life on those shores, nor even that the famed Australian racing driver Norman Leslie ‘Wizard’ Smith named his car ‘Anzac’ which he drove to set speed records in Australia and New Zealand.

A condition of this small flight to Mascot was that the name be covered with brown paper before he was allowed to take off.

Speaking of which…there was only a measly 175 yards to do it in. It was the growing crowd’s strong view that it surely couldn’t be done.

Then the great man stirred. The wind had at last changed to his satisfaction and, climbing in, with Bill Taylor getting into the back cockpit, he cranked the engine and, as people fell back when mysterious whining noises were heard from the front cowling, the huge radial engine suddenly belched smoke and burst into a shattering cacophony of sound. Smithy then taxied the plane up to the northern end of the tiny park.

To get maximum revs up before letting her loose, Smithy kept his feet stamped down hard on the pedals as he brought the engine up to full throttle and then, with the variable propeller pitch set to ‘fine’ and the flaps a little extended to get maximum grip on the air, he released the brakes.
⁴³
The snarling monoplane leapt forward like an emu stung by a wasp. But this bird had wings…

As the crowd held its breath, the tail of the Altair lifted first and it was clear that Smithy and his navigator were going to be smashed to pieces on the wall, when at what seemed like the last possible moment, the nose came up and, as people would tell it ever afterwards, the plane cleared the wall by the hairs of Smithy’s chinny-chin-chin.

Past Neutral Bay’s Hayes Street Wharf it still seemed to be perilously low, but then it soared high and away. Away to the wild blue and beyond-er. Then, and only then, did the crowd—to that point caught mute between horror and awe—let out a mighty cheer that continued until Smithy was just a will-o’-the-wisp beyond the clouds, on his way to Mascot. That marvellous man, in his flying machine.

People walked home. It was a great day.

And it proved to be a great aeroplane—the fastest ever seen in Australia. Though the Altair was impounded the instant it landed at Mascot, had its name painted over, and was even immobilised with the removal of the ignition leads to No. 5 and No. 6 cylinders, Smithy—or for this purpose Air Commodore Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, MC, AFC—was not long in bringing his own weight and that of his adoring public to bear on those who would try to
wilfully
prevent him from flying this beauty. On the firm promise that Smithy would soon produce the missing documentation, the Defence Department allowed the Customs Department to release the plane, and the Civil Aviation Branch of the Department of Defence to give him permission to fly it, on a temporary basis, on condition that it not be flown for profit and to undergo rigorous local testing at Richmond air base. That testing completed satisfactorily, all he needed in the short term was a name to replace ‘Anzac’. After considering all of
Aurora Australis
,
Spirit of Phar Lap
,
Hargrave’s Hope
,
Star of Gallipoli
,
Shipmates
,
Merino
,
Blue Streak
,
Trade Wind
and
Sunny South
, none of which grabbed him for longer than a few minutes, inspiration struck…
⁴⁴

‘
Lady Southern Cross!
’

As he explained to the press, ‘The name
Southern Cross
has always been a lucky one for me. I have prefixed
Lady
as a compliment to my wife.’
⁴⁵

And so, the
Lady Southern Cross
, with Smithy and Taylor pushing the plane hard, started to set new records on nearly every long trip they took through August and September, in times that were previously unimaginable. They included:

Sydney-Melbourne—2 hours, 23 minutes.

Melbourne-Perth—10 hours, 22 minutes.

Perth-Sydney—9 hours, 32 minutes.

Sydney-Brisbane—2 hours, 35 minutes. The plane was so fast it made the
Southern Cross
herself almost look like she was going backwards.

For example, on the record-breaking trip to Brisbane, Smithy was able to give the
Southern Cross
, piloted by another, four hours start, and still get into Brisbane first. It was some kind of plane, and Smithy was more confident than ever that it was the machine he needed to win the Centenary Race.

There remained one problem, however, as he contemplated the coming race, which was due to start at 6.30 am on 20 October 1934—now just weeks away—in England. Under the race rules, all competitors had to report in at the Royal Air Force’s newly constructed Mildenhall aerodrome in Suffolk, before 6 am, on 14 October 1934 in preparation for taking off six days later. Mildenhall had been chosen for its superb 1400-yard-long by 110-yard-wide airstrip.

Smithy was yet to receive official approval for his plane to enter the competition, as he did not yet have the certification required to prove that it conformed to the international ICAN standard. This, despite a blistering array of correspondence between Kingsford Smith, the Australian Controller of Civil Aviation, the Minister for Defence, the Prime Minister’s Department, the air race committees in Melbourne and London, Lockheed and the US Department of Commerce. The broad dilemma was that the modifications Smithy had made to the plane had moved it way beyond the ‘normal’ range for a plane of that type, meaning that it needed all kinds of stress analyses to determine if it could safely carry such an excessive load as 418 gallons of fuel. Lockheed engineers had estimated that this would result in an overload of almost 2000 pounds. Fresh from the factory, the plane could weigh 5400 pounds, whereas Smithy planned to fly with a load of 7300 pounds.

Further, the US Department of Commerce could not certify as airworthy a plane it hadn’t inspected, and Lockheed couldn’t affirm it was airworthy when they had made their doubts clear to Kingsford Smith from the beginning. And under Australian law it could not be given a Certificate of Airworthiness without an appropriate certification from its country of construction.

For his part, the Controller of Civil Aviation, Edgar Johnston, was stunned at the way things had turned out. What
could
Smithy have been thinking? How could he possibly have so totally ignored written and verbal advice? What was happening now was precisely what both Johnston,
and
Lockheed,
and
the US Department of Commerce had told him would happen, and yet he was acting as if everyone was out to get him!

When it came to judging the safety of the plane, Smithy—and to an even greater extent, his supporters—took rather the reverse view. After all, this was
Air Commodore Sir Charles Kingsford Smith
, for God’s sake! He had landed and fought at Gallipoli, survived the Western Front, flown the cross-Continental route to Europe and back, crossed the Pacific, the Tasman, the Atlantic; been feted as a hero in New York City; dined at the White House and held dozens of aviation records and firsts around the world. Surely,
he
was the best one equipped to judge whether his plane was airworthy or not? Surely some deference should have been paid to the fact that there was no more experienced, or accomplished airman in the entire world?

To which, the short answer was that deference
had
been paid, with people on both sides of the Pacific obliged to engage in a mad scramble to try to find a way around the fact that Kingsford Smith—despite being warned from all sides, both in written and verbal form, that it would be a disaster if he did so—had imported to Australia a potentially lethal aeroplane that had little more certification than a tomato box. And yes, they knew he was probably capable of flying a tomato box if it came to that, but not without bloody certification he couldn’t.

Smithy would not back down.

‘I am sick of all the delay,’ he thundered to the press, ‘and the difficulties which are being placed in my path. Why cannot the Australian Government observe the spirit of the law, rather than the letter?’
⁴⁶

The deadline for leaving Australia loomed closer. As to a rash of rumours that Smithy didn’t actually want to compete in the race at all, the pilot had a firm answer: ‘If my critics think that I am frightened, then they can accompany me on the race…‘
⁴⁷

Finally, a compromise of sorts was reached. Australia’s Department of Civil Aviation agreed to give him a restricted Certificate of Airworthiness, which would enable him to fly to England at least, but he would be constrained to a maximum gross weight of 6700 pounds, which was to say, 394 American gallons of fuel instead of 510 American gallons.

Smithy, finally brought to ground by rules and officialdom, had no choice but to bow and agree to have the wing tanks of the Lockheed sealed. The bottom line was that with the fuel capacity reduced, he would have to make
nine
stops on his way from Mildenhall to Melbourne, instead of just five—all but eliminating his chances of winning the race. But he had to try.

The remaining question was, would the Royal Aero Club in London accept this as sufficient certification to allow him to enter the race? Smithy phoned the club and stated his position, and the RAC promised it would come back to him with their decision. That decision came via a 2.15 am phone call to Smithy’s home on 29 September 1934—he could enter subject to restricting his fuel capacity to 300 gallons—and he and Taylor took off from Mascot less than four hours later.

Before they knew it, they were all the way to Cloncurry—it was still only 2.30 in the afternoon! This sense that they were flying into the future, in a machine that made their past look impossibly slow and old fashioned was heightened when only a short time after landing they were stunned to see heading towards them from out of the dusty skies nothing other than the
Southern Cross
herself! On assignment to take government geologists on a survey of remote parts of the Northern Territory, the old girl was being piloted by Harry Purvis, a Kingsford-Smith Air Services stalwart, who was also a skilled engineer.