Reading Time: 13 Minutes•Print this page
THROUGH THE CHILLY darkness of an early Sunday morning inMarch 2018, a Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner landed at London’s Heathrow Airport tocomplete a historic milestone in Australian aviation history. The 17-hournon-stop journey of QF9 from Australia was “game-changing”, said Alan Joyce,Qantas Chief Executive and a passenger on board.
A Qantas 747 Jumbo had made an experimental flight without abreak to Sydney in 1999, but QF9 from Perth to London was the first flight of aregular non-stop service between Australia and England. Alan Joyce was right:for Australians at least, the new 14,498km route was a major step forward inglobal interconnectedness.
Stepping back almost 100 years to the dawn of long-distanceaviation, the first aircraft to fly between the two countries took roughly 40times longer than QF9 to complete a comparable journey from London to Darwin.But rather than being a mere game-changer for 1919, that first flight was amonumental groundbreaker, arguably one of the greatest single advances inaviation history.
Andy Thomas, Australian astronaut and veteran of four spacemissions for NASA, describes the 1919 feat as the “moon landing of its day”.Yet the Australians who first flew halfway around the planet are today unjustlyabsent from the pantheon of national heroes, and, beyond the ken of aviationhistorians, their daring deeds are often overlooked.
PRIME MINISTER Billy Hughes claimed to speak for “60,000dead” Australians at the end of World War I in 1918. Through that battlefieldblood sacrifice, Australia was, at Hughes’s insistence, entitled to its ownseat at the diplomatic table, a seat he himself would occupy.
While peace negotiations proceeded through early 1919 atVersailles, the pugnacious and energetic Hughes was flown back and forth fromLondon to Paris in a converted Handley Page bomber.
A passion for aviation and its peacetime potential wastaking hold in Hughes’s mind. New deeds, he sensed, rather than oldexhortations to honour, were needed to reinvigorate the bonds of Empire afterfour terrible years of conflict.
The previous Christmas, Hughes had visited woundedAustralian troops at Cobham Hall in Kent. Eager to return home, some of theairmen dreamt of flying their aircraft –their “machines”, as they were known at the time – all the way toAustralia. At first, Hughes thought the idea too risky.
In 1918 no aircraft had yet crossed an ocean, let alone flown anything like the immense distances needed to reach Australia. They were now not being shot at, but aircraft still fell from the sky with depressing frequency.
The idea nevertheless persisted, and in February 1919 Hughes cabled his cabinet back in Melbourne with a proposal. Acting prime minister William Watt responded officially a month later: “With a view to stimulating aerial activity, the Commonwealth Government has decided to offer £10,000 for the first successful flight to Australia from Great Britain.”
In his appeals to cabinet, Hughes claimed the venture would“concentrate the eyes of the world on us”. That undoubtedly would be so, butwhat if the latest breed of flying machines proved incapable of reachingAustralia? The whole thing could turn into a tragic flop, and nearly did. Withhis government facing an election later in 1919, Hughes, despite his post-warpopularity, was taking a significant political risk.
The government’s offer matched a standing prize staked in1913 by London’s Daily Mail newspaper for a trans-Atlantic crossing. Delayed bywar, it was not until June 1919 that John Alcock and Arthur Brown in a modifiedVickers Vimy bomber successfully crossed the Atlantic from Newfoundland toIreland. The pair spent more than 15 hours above turbulent waves, demonstratingthat a flight to Australia might be feasible.
Inevitably, the naysayers back home were quick to savageHughes’s idea. Melbourne’s The Age dismissed the race as a “circus”, and a “poorlydisguised attempt at self-advertisement” by the government. “As usual,” The Agewhined, “the person who pays is left wondering what practical value he is toget out of the generous spending of his money.”
Its equally stuffy rival, The Argus, thought governmentencouragement was unnecessary, because “private enterprise may be trusted todevelop aviation”.
With no appreciation of the dangers ahead, The Arguscommented that the “achievement would, after war experiences, be something of acommonplace in aviation.” With typical bush terseness The Cowra Free Press feltthat as many politicians as possible should be bundled aboard the “experimentalvoyage” and left “somewhere else”.
But come what may, the race was on.
RULES WERE QUICKLY drafted and refined by the UK’s RoyalAero Club. Only Australian airmen were eligible for the prize; they had tosupply their own British-made machine; a time limit of
30 days was set; and all entrants were to depart fromHounslow Heath Aerodrome west of London or, for any seaplanes entered, Calshotnear Portsmouth. Darwin was set as the end point, and the prize would remainopen until the end of 1920.
Six Australian crews duly entered the race. Most of the menhad seen service with the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) over the Western Frontor the Middle East. A seventh, unofficial, entry came from French aviatorÉtienne Poulet.
From the start, the trials and tribulations of each entry made a mockery of the armchair judges and their “commonplace” dismissal of the event. Apart from daily confronting the nerve-racking fragility of their machines, the airmen had to fly in open cockpits through a freezing European winter and storm-tossed Asian monsoon.
When they chose to land, or had an emergency descent forced upon them, stretches of open ground that even remotely passed for an airstrip would be terrifyingly scarce. In the end, only two aircraft to attempt the flight completed it.
On 21 October, the first machine left Hounslow and soonfaced trouble. The Sopwith Wallaby (G-EAKS) of George Matthews and Thomas Kaywas delayed by engine trouble and storms while crossing Europe, and, as wartimetensions lingered, the pair was temporarily imprisoned as suspected Bolsheviksin Yugoslavia. Their journey came to an abrupt end with a crash in Bali inApril 1920.
Three weeks after Matthews and Kay departed Hounslow, therace claimed its first casualties. On 13 November 1919, Roger Douglas andLeslie Ross were killed when their Alliance P2 Seabird (G-EAOX), namedEndeavour, spiralled out of control shortly after take-off, also from Hounslow.
Another disaster was narrowly averted on 8 December, when aBlackburn Kangaroo (G-EAOW), whose crew included Arctic explorer and fearlessbattlefield photographer Hubert Wilkins, crash-landed near a mental asylum inCrete. A series of inexplicable problems, including engine oil contaminatedwith iron filings, led the crew to suspect, but never prove, foul play.
Then, a day after the Blackburn Kangaroo’s race ended, tragedy struck a second time. A Martinsyde Type A MkI (G-EAMR), flown by Cedric Howell and George Fraser, ditched into the sea near the Greek island of Corfu. Both men drowned.
By 10 December just three aircraft remained. One was within hours of staking its place in history; in contrast, the Sopwith Wallaby staggered on, while a third machine was yet to start.
Even after the race had been won, an Airco DH.9 (G-EAQM), flownby Ray Parer and John McIntosh, took off from Hounslow in January, determinedto reach Australia. They flew over Mt Vesuvius, where billowing hot air “causedthem to drop 600ft in a few seconds”.
The machine twice caught fire and in Syria they fought off hostile Arabs. The pair took nearly seven months to complete their journey. Having succeeded against all expectations, McIntosh and ‘Battling Ray’ Parer received a hero’s welcome and were awarded consolation prizes of £500 each.
Theirs had been the first flight to reach Australia in a single-engine aircraft. And, symbolically at least, they also transported the first airfreight from England – a carefully stowed bottle of whisky from the DH9’s sponsor, Scottish distilling baron Peter Dawson. The whisky was a gift intended for Billy Hughes.
As Parer and McIntosh started their perilous trek, thewinning aircraft had been in Australia for almost a month. That momentousachievement had been realised on the afternoon of Wednesday 10 December 1919,when a Vickers Vimy MkIV bomber (G-EAOU), similar to that used by Alcock andBrown to traverse the Atlantic about six months earlier, “crossed the coast ofAustralia at twenty minutes past three o’clock” after a six-hour flight fromTimor.
The Northern Territory Times and Gazette reported that “lessthan half an hour later it had landed…and the longest [flight] in the historyof the world, was over.”
The extraordinary achievement took 135 hours in the air andcame 27 days and 20 hours after taking off from a snow-covered Hounslow. Onboard were: South Australian pilot Ross Smith; his co-pilot, navigator,cameraman and older brother, Keith; and mechanics Walter ‘Wally’ Shiers (alsofrom SA) and Jim Bennett from Victoria.
The team finally landed at a makeshift aerodrome hacked fromscrub alongside Fannie Bay Gaol. Darwin’s population was then less than 1500,but Ross Smith estimated “about 2,000…ordinary citizens” turned out to greetthem. Such was the frenzy of excitement surrounding the Vimy’s arrival, hecould be forgiven a little exaggeration.
Through THEIR JOURNEY, Smith and his fellow pioneeringaviators struggled with iced-up goggles and frozen flying suits over the Alpsand were battered by sandstorms at Baghdad.
To save weight they flew without a radio receiver, makingweather predictions guesswork. Their only navigational aids were a handheldcompass and rudimentary maps, and, when flying blind above cloud or over waterand featureless terrain, Keith relied on dead reckoning to approximate theirposition.
Ross worried the undercarriage might be wrenched off by treestumps erupting from a rough-hewn jungle airstrip at Singora in Siam(Thailand). He remarked it was “by the merciful guidance of Providence” thatthey came to rest safely. He had previously quipped that the registration, G-EAOU,stood for “God ’Elp All Of Us”.
The Vimy was nearly bogged without hope at Pisa in Italy andat Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies, where locals solved the problem bystripping bamboo matting from their houses to make a take-off strip. Such werethe trials of just a few of their 14 originally planned stops and 11unscheduled landings en route to Darwin.
As the race wore on, Poulet and his mechanic Jean Benoist in their Caudron G4 biplane looked like they might upstage the Vimy. On 14 November, The Sydney Morning Herald fretted that “if Poulet maintains his present rate of flight…chances of an Australian airman beating him…will depend on a possible accident”. The newspaper need not have worried.
Finally overtaken by the Vimy, Poulet abandoned his flight after a “vulture dashed into his machine” in southern Burma [Myanmar]. The Vimy forged ahead, its twin Rolls Royce Eagle VIII engines droning on and on, and on.
Billy Hughes’s “eyes of the world” on Australia predictionwas fulfilled as news of the Vimy’s journey was keenly followed. When itreached Darwin, The New York Times called Ross Smith the “foremost livingaviator”.
The flight was described in the House of Lords as an “epochin history”. As well as being a momentous aviation accomplishment, the flightmarked the birth of airmail. The Vimy carried 364 self-addressed envelopes fromwell-wishers hoping for a souvenir of the great event. Once in Australia,specially printed “First Aerial Mail – England to Australia” labels were addedthen cancelled with local postmarks and crewmembers signed the envelopes. TheseRoss Smith “Vignettes”, were Australia’sfirst commemorative philatelic items.
Sweetly fresh-faced, Ross Smith was only 25 at war’s end,yet in those four years he had become one of Australia’s most celebratedsoldiers and airmen. The ribbons above his left breast pocket told a story ofconspicuous valour on land and in the air, with the award of the Military Crosstwice, and the Distinguished Flying Cross three times. Smith had fought atGallipoli, and in the bloody victory over the Turks at Romani in Egypt in 1916.
The following year, he volunteered for the AFC in Palestine.With No.1 Squadron, Smith undertook daring bombing raids, fighter attacks andaerial photographic missions. In 1918 he befriended Frank Hurley, Australia’sofficial photographer during the Middle East campaign. Hurley described Smithas a “born bird-man…perfectly en rapport with his machine”.
War had been quieter for Ross’s brother, Keith. Rejected asmedically unfit in Australia, he paid his own way to England where he joinedthe Royal Flying Corps, but was forced to cool his heels as an instructor.Nevertheless, by the time of the race, Keith was both a skilled pilot and anexperienced navigator.
Immediately post-war, Ross had flown a Handley Page bomberto India, then surveyed a possible route further east to Australia by sea.Connections to the upper echelons of the military, and Ross’s knowledge of theroute, opened the hangar doors to the great long-range bomber of VickersLimited. While other entrants struggled to find sponsors and suitable aircraft,the Smith brothers were already miles ahead and probably always going to win.
The Vimy didn’t linger in Darwin. The glory of its arrivalturned to frustration, first in the Northern Territory and later in Queenslandwhen a delaminating propeller and engine trouble forced a lay-up of more thanseven weeks. The delay allowed Frank Hurley to join his old friend Ross Smithand fly in and photograph the onwards progress of the machine that had, hesaid, “obliterated space”.
The Vimy reached Sydney on 14 February 1920, and Melbourne aweek later. Huge crowds gathered to greet the four celebrity aviators, theirevery move reported at length.
Knighthoods pended for the officer brothers. But the “mastermechanics”, who’d taken the same risks and used their ingenuity to keep theVimy flying, only had bars added to their existing Air Force Medals (AFM).Promotions to lieutenant came much later. In Melbourne, an exultant BillyHughes presented the winner’s cheque to Ross Smith, and, in a more egalitariangesture than that of officialdom, he distributed the prize in four equalshares.
After Melbourne, the Vimy made its final flight, westwardsto an adoring Adelaide; a glorious return for the crew’s three SouthAustralians and for Ross, there was a “greatest-of-all” homecoming to hisparents after “five long years”.
In a tragic postscript, Ross Smith and Jim Bennett followedthe same fatal path as so many young pioneering aviators. Both died in a crashin 1922 while preparing to fly around the world, their hopes snuffed out in aViking, another Vickers machine.
The “supreme pinnacle of wisdom…greatest of all things…since the dawn of Kings”, Frank Hurley gushed on meeting the Vimy atCharleville. But after the Vimy’s flying days were done, its story has notalways befitted such a queen of the skies.
For a time, it was displayed in Sydney and Melbourne, wherecompeting embryonic war museums coveted it as a prime exhibit. By 1941 the Vimywas in Canberra at the newly opened Australian War Memorial (AWM).
There it might have remained, but as WWII ended, the AWM wasflooded with new acquisitions and quickly ran out of room for such large artefacts.Amid much “bureaucratic finger pointing in Canberra, no-one really wanted it,”says Mike Milln, from the SA Aviation Museum.
Because three of the four members of the Vimy’s crew werefrom SA, its fate was very much the concern of the proud people of that state.
In 1957 a public appeal raised £30,000 and plans to honourthe Vimy’s crew became a reality. It was to be moved to Adelaide to be thecentrepiece of a memorial at the entrance to the city’s new airport. Dismantledand loaded on two semitrailers, the Vimy headed for its new home, but onevehicle caught fire en route. The doped fabric “went up like a torch”, Mikesays. The propellers, and the entire upper wing, and outer lower wings, weredestroyed.
Restored and cocooned in a purpose-built, air-conditionedhangar at Adelaide Airport for several decades, the Vimy enthralled all whotook a close look. Then as air traffic increased, redevelopment of the airportfollowed. A new terminal was opened in 2005.
The Vimy remained in the same location, but rather thangracing the main entrance, the airport’s reconfigured layout consigned it tothe staff car park. Out of sight, and out of mind for many, it faded from view,its latter-day obscurity made worse by the installation of solid protectivescreens to save the aircraft’s fragile fabric from the ravages of ultravioletlight.
Growing up in Adelaide, Andy Thomas remembers beingawestruck by “this huge, wonderful biplane” at the airport.His illustriousaeronautical engineering career launched in the shadow of the Vimy’s wings,Andy, on his first NASA mission in 1996, carried the diminutive wings from theSmith brothers’ uniforms into space.
The wings are but scraps of cloth, yet their intrinsic worthis profound. Andy believed that such a deeply symbolic act would “inspire a newgeneration” and help restore the Vimy crew to their deserved place inAustralian history.
Now another symbolic, yet concrete, act of a totallydifferent order is being played out in Adelaide. As Australia’s fifth busiestairport, Adelaide handles more than 8 million domestic and internationalpassenger movements a year. The facility has outgrown its previousredevelopment, and a second phase of expansion is underway.
Brenton Cox from Adelaide Airport Ltd, lessees and managersof the facility since 1998, says that in contemplating the Vimy’s future hiscompany concluded “we’ve got to do better”. There are now plans to move theaircraft to an “entirely new atmospheric environment” in a second terminal.
In total contrast toits glory days with wings “armoured with ice”, or enduring tropical rains that“smote like hail” – as Ross Smith put it – light, temperature, humidity andeven vibration will be controlled to museum standards.
By necessity, the Vimy will remain in a “bubble”, Brentonsays. But it will be seen from many angles, including from above and fromoutside, and be located close to the terminal’s busiest areas. He admits “thisis hard work…this is a big, very fragile aircraft…old and precious”.
The Vimy will again need to be dismantled and reassembledand the work on the aircraft and the bespoke environment in which it will behoused come at significant cost.
Major events in 2019 have helped loosen public purse stringsto make the Vimy’s final move a reality. With a federal election and the airrace centenary in the same year, both major political parties promised $2million towards the move if elected. This figure was matched by the SAgovernment and Adelaide Airport, making a total pool of $6 million.
After Sir Ross Smith’s 1922 death, the 1919 England toAustralia race – with all its triumphs and tragedies, daring and drama – fadedfrom view like an old biplane slowly sputtering towards the horizon.
Commemorative events late this year to mark what isofficially known as the “Epic Flight Centenary” will surely bring thatmetaphorical biplane roaring back overhead. And with the move of the Vimy by2021 the remarkable legacy of four brave Australians will finally be accorded thetrue stature it deserves.
The program notes for a Sydney concert given in honour ofthe Smiths in February 1920 floridly proclaimed:
A message from themotherland they brought to us on high,
To bind us with atriple bond of earth and sea and sky;
And show to all thewondering world Britannia rules the air –
When the first flightis made to Mars, Australia Will Be There!
Forget Britannia and the motherland. If Ross and KeithSmith, Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers were around today, that flight to Mars wouldsurely be theirs!
