As well as learning to fly and navigate, Francis was learning the system, the endless amounts of paperwork and protocols that any form of travel took in those days – and of which the newfangled sport of flying attracted even more. In his words, ‘The only way to cross a country quickly is not to stop in it’. Every landing had the same routine, often liable to delay by officials who were overcurious or officious or lazy – or simply not there. First he had to check in with local police, who would examine his passport and visa, the obtaining of which itself was often the subject of obscuration back in London. Next, Customs wanted to inspect his carnet-de-passage, a sort of insurance bond guaranteeing that he would not try to sell the plane in their country, as well as rifle through his bags. Next the military would search the plane for anything suspicious, including camera equipment. Lastly, aerodrome officials would wade through the plane’s documents looking for the proof of this and the stamp for that.
Only then, and often after several hours of frustrating delay in foreign tongues, could Francis get on with his trip tasks: checking the Elijah’s oil and sparking plugs, refuelling, checking over the airframe and flying surfaces, asking for the latest weather report, telegraphing the next destination and stocking up on food and water.
This extract from the Bucuresti Dimineata newspaper of 14 November 1929 is quite amusing, giving a flavour of Francis’s adventures, officialdom and newspaper accuracy in the remoter parts of Eastern Europe:
Jassi, 12 November: An English aeroplane landed here yesterday for a short visit, piloted by Mr Chicesterc of New Zealand, Director of Godvin Chicesterc Aviation Co of London.
Mr Chicester is flying one of the company’s planes. He left New Zealand last week, Touched at London, then at Paris where he picked up another aviator. On approaching Zagreb his propeller broke at some hundreds of feet and the aviators were in great danger.
The aeroplane, of unusual shape and colour, attracted crowds to the aerodrome of Tecuci. At Vaslui the pilots met fog and were obliged to force land at Codaesti. After satisfactory explanations he flew to Jassi accompanied by Advocate Popovitch. At Jassi Mr Chicesterc was met by a whole of corps of officers headed by Major Argeseanu. After a reception given in this [sic] honour the aviators left for Warsaw and London.
Francis also learned about supplies or the lack thereof, sustenance for himself and petrol and oil for Elijah. It was hard enough finding bread and fuel at his stops in Europe and he could only imagine the supply problems across North Africa and Asia. He knew now, if he didn’t before, that most of December back in London was going to be taken up dealing with carnets, visas, licences, permits, firmans and authorisations, and with securing fuel dumps along the way.
On he flew to Warsaw, Poznań, Reppen, Leipzig, Dessau, Osnabrück, Jeggen, Abbeville again, and home. I hope you have a flavour of his adventures and so I won’t take up more space by recounting every joy and despair of his crash course of continental flying or we’ll be here all day.
I’m also not going to take up much space with the flight to Australia or we’ll be here all night too. For readers interested in the blow-by-blow, I can recommend Solo to Sydney, his first and in many ways brightest book, written the following summer in the von Zedlitzes’ garden in New Zealand. Suffice to say here, he failed to break Hinkler’s record for reasons I shall go into over the next few pages, but he succeeded in making the journey in good time and in one piece. Considering his amateur status compared with Hinkler’s, Francis’s achievement was very remarkable and could stand proudly on its own.
The Von Zedlitz garden, where Francis wrote Solo to Sydney
I should still like to mention some highlights – and lowlights – of his flight to Sydney. Just as by now he knew that a good landing starts with a good approach, so a good flight to Sydney starts with good approach in London. December was indeed a whirr of preparation as Francis hurried from Stanford’s map emporium to the Air Ministry, from Shell’s offices to the Meteorological Office, from ordering a rubber dingy to requesting permits to fly over fifteen countries – one permit at a time – then on to square the insurance and then off to de Havilland to pick-up the auxiliary fuel tanks, back to the Air Ministry to research this landing strip against that landing strip, which meant a trip back to Stanford’s, and the round repeating itself daily. In the meantime he was buying all the bits and pieces needed for the flight, plus all his sheepskin and tropical clothes, navigation tools, survival food and water, sixty-three spare parts, the dingy with mast, sail and oars, and so on and so forth.
His refuelling calculations were based on beating Hinkler’s record. Hinkler had averaged 640 miles a day. Francis reckoned:
It was not much use trying to beat his time by a few hours, so I divided the distance as nearly as possible into five hundred-mile stages. I would try to make two of these stages each day. To do this would necessitate daily average of 12½ hours in the air and the only way to manage that would be to leave every morning in the dark, at about 2 o’clock.
So for the ten days before departure Francis took on his record attempt routine. He would get up at 2 am to familiarise himself with the monastic timetable. He worked on his maps, mostly. From London to Rangoon/Yangon the scale was perfect at a millionth, or 16 miles to the inch. After that they became less useful, and over what was the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, more or less useless. He marked every possible landing site on his route, every forty-mile/half-hour ‘peg’, every change in magnetic variation and time zone heading east, then cut the maps up into nine-inch strips, joined all 71 feet of them together and made five scrolls. Later, still before dawn, he would work on Elijah’s final fettles. Now a new sense of urgency drew in: the de Havilland finance company wanted a guarantor for the £275 still owing, in case he crashed and burned. Clearly the manufacturer’s bankers did not share their customer’s belief in himself. Francis calculated correctly that the best way of finding a guarantor was to escape without one.
Finally, finally, the great day came. At Croydon airport – the Heathrow of its day – at 1.30 am on 19 December 1929 Francis ‘stowed away some bacon and eggs’. At 2.30 am he had the weather reports and went through the starting procedure. In the hangar was a familiar face he couldn’t quite place, which said: ‘Aren’t you Chichester?’ Francis confirmed. ‘I’ve just arrived here in my own kite. I shall never forget you turning up in Liverpool in a new machine without a compass and that ridiculous map of yours. Have you had any flights since?’
‘Yes,’ replied Francis modestly, ‘I’ve flown all around Europe.’
‘Great heavens! But you’ve only just got your licence. Perhaps you are planning to fly back to New Zealand!’ he joked.
‘Well, as a matter of fact I am.’
‘Not possible! When?’
‘Just now,’ Francis replied, heading towards Elijah. ‘Oh by the way…’
‘Yes?’ the man replied.
‘I’ve just realised, I’ve forgotten to stow something important.’
‘Can I help?’
‘You couldn’t spare me a corkscrew could you?’
He could; and did; and so Francis fired up Elijah, fully equipped for the great adventure.
Outside it was pitch black as the airfield lights were down, so Francis found a couple who agreed to walk ahead of him in the dark so that he didn’t taxi into the hangar. It was bitterly cold and he was so wrapped up that it’s hard to imagine how he could feel any of the controls. They waved him goodbye. ‘The girl was particularly nice in the way she said “Goodbye!” to me. I sang out “Cheerio!” and with a wave, off we went.’
He got lost in the freezing fog over the Channel and eventually arrived an hour late at his first stop, Lyons, where he refuelled Elijah with fuel and himself ‘with an enormous omelette washed down with a bottle of red wine’, while he enquired about the day’s best route over the Alps. The recommended minimum height was 10,000 feet and Francis knew Elijah could not manage that so fully laden. He had, however, by now learned to fly her
by rudder alone, having learnt the knack of trimming her for level flight by changing the trim lever gears and using the rudder to yaw her, lifting a wing to keep her straight as well as level – and so freeing up both hands – thus solving one of our White Waltham how-did-he-do it mysteries.
Cold, very cold
He crossed the Aiguilles d’Arves pass at 6,000 feet and minus 20 degrees Celcius, ice and snow everywhere and no immediate prospect of finding an emergency landing field. Ahead, ‘the Alps presented an impenetrable snow-capped wall, backed by innumerable humps and mounds covered in snow and stretching for a seemingly endless distance. The sun shone in flawless weather.’ So high, so alone, he was close to heaven literally and metaphorically: Francis swathed from head to toe in layers of wool and sheepskin, Elijah and he at one with each other, the instruments for company, the intense whiteness all around, broken only by the four blue flames from the Gipsy’s exhaust, the profound silence outside contrasted with the Gipsy’s urgent throb, Mont Blanc towering over on the wing-tip, the wing-tip towering over the valleys deep below, the compass offset for Pisa four hours away, somewhere beyond the jagged, lonely, snowy range. With some fuel burned off, he climbed to 9,000 feet to cross the Cenis Col, descend over the Piedmont, which he had crossed a month before, and on through some stormy weather into Pisa for a night landing and a bout of chaotic Italian officialdom: ‘My wants were simple enough, merely petrol, oil, engine work, sleep, food and a 2.00 am start. It took me four and a half hours solid talk and argument to arrange everything bar the sleep.’ After twenty hours of intense wakefulness, including flying 780 miles in a tiny biplane over freezing fog at sea and freezing air on high, being bashed about by a storm, sometimes lost and always on his wit’s edge, he was so tired he couldn’t sleep.
Francis failed to beat Hinkler’s record because the next night he crashed in Tripoli, now in Libya, then an Italian colony. The new prop took ten days to arrive and fit, and that time taken meant the end of the record attempt.
After leaving Pisa he had a fast run down the Apennines, past Vesuvius, across to the Straits of Messina to Sicily, to refuel in Catania. He was running late due to Sicilian paperwork chaos but was assured that there was night landing at Homs airfield (now Khoms, next to Leptis Magna) on the north African coast. When he arrived at what he thought was Homs, he only saw a reddish light. He dived to look ‘and was disgusted to find it appeared to be a bonfire lit by some Arab peasants (or whatever they are)’. Later he was to learn that this was in fact Homs: in the absence of electricity, the Italians had helpfully lit a bonfire to show him the landing spot. Chagrined, he reluctantly flew west, away from Sydney to the certainty of the main Italian Air Force base at Tripoli.
The weather was worsening, the altimeter was malfunctioning and Tripoli was not where it should be. Francis became frightened and disorientated. The right side of his brain was telling him that as long as he was flying west along the coast he must eventually see the town; the left side was imagining that Homs wasn’t Homs and he was miles to the east – or west – of anywhere. Lost. In the dark. With lowering weather. And the Italian Air Force’s Mellaha airfield near Tripoli not expecting him. Maybe unlit. Both sides of his brain had been flying solo for the last twenty-six hours out of forty, with less than an hour’s snatched sleep, all the while on the limit of alertness, constantly anxious, frequently occupied by raw fear, exposed to unnaturally loud noise levels, reacting to his cold and cramped body, fixated on breaking someone else’s record.
Ahead, through the gloom, he saw a flashing light. The airfield! He dived. It was the sea- and not the airport lighthouse; but it was Tripoli. Then a minute later, another flashing light. The airfield! But this time it was a car playing silly buggers with its headlights. Then ahead, a searchlight moving. The airfield! It was. Francis dived past to let them know he was arriving and the searchlight followed him briefly in acknowledgement.
And then – after all the hostages to fortune – he had some simple bad luck. Maybe a fully functioning Francis would have sensed that something wasn’t quite right. He knew that the British Empire’s air forces used searchlights to light up the runways. He didn’t know that the Italian Air Force, then still called the Regia Aeronautica, used them to light up the dangers. The searchlight settled on a hangar and collateral light showed space to land but not enough to go round again should the landing not be right first time ‘and it was very unlikely that I would make a good landing first shot after so long in the air and in the dark on a strange ’drome’. Francis circled slowly and low and ‘noticed a splendid square of ground enclosed by trees and the hangars. There was plenty of water about but I didn’t worry too much about it as water makes sand hard’. He did two practice runs ‘to get my eye in’. The third time he touched down sweetly. Joy, relief, at last! Then, a second later, ‘Wonk!, which is the noise an aeroplane makes when it goes over on its nose’. For the third time in four months Francis was suspended 10 feet above the ground, held only by his seat belts and his feet braced against the pedals.
He clambered out. Splash! ‘Bless my soul’, he thought, ‘I’m in the sea; how on earth did I get here?’ The water was only up to his ankles. He tried to light his pipe, couldn’t, and set off towards the searchlight. The searchlight found him first, then shone on Elijah. ‘Write off’, he thought, distraught, and looked the other way, only to see dozens of figures silhouetted running straight towards him.
He was soon the Italians’ guest of honour, being cheered and suited in the officer’s mess, then congratulated by the commandant, Colonel Ranza, and ‘his extraordinary attractive wife. I must have been a queer object for society, unshaven, dirty, sheep-skinned and wet to the knees. I told him my bus was a complete write-off and fell asleep as I talked’. That night, the vision loss nightmare returned; but deep, restful sleep returned too.
The next morning all was clearer – and better. The Italians had righted Elijah and brought her back to the hangar for inspection. Francis had landed in a salt flat next to the airfield and – unbelievably – Elijah had only broken her prop and the interstrut, which had damaged but not snapped the wing spar. The fuselage damage was easily fixed by the crew there; the prop and interstrut would need shipping from England. Telegrams flew back and forth from Tripoli to de Havilland. There would be a delay of ten days. Francis was bitter-sweet: the record attempt had failed, but Elijah was still a flyer; when they weren’t bombing Arabs, the Italian Air Force were lauding him; and if Hinkler’s record was out of reach, Francis now sought a new record to beat – his own against himself, as yet undetermined, but still a target at which to aim.
It’s not known if old copies of the British newspapers ever reached the officers’ mess at Tripoli, but if they had this headline from the 21 December 1929 edition of Daily Mail would have made Francis laugh and his creditors cry:
RICH MAN’S AMAZING FLIGHT
12,000 MILES DASH ALONE TO AUSTRALIA
3 AM START, ACROSS FRANCE IN A DAY
One of the most audacious flights ever attempted is now in progress. At 3 o’clock yesterday morning, as exclusively announced in later editions of the Daily Mail, Mr. Francis Chichester, a rich young New Zealander, set out from Croydon Aerodrome to fly alone to Australia…
After leaving Tripoli Francis stayed the first night with the British consul in Benghazi. Bad news from New Zealand awaited him: Muriel had died during an operation. They had been separated for two years and the pathos of the mismatch and the tragedy of her young death put Francis in touch with a different set of realities than his mere survival – looking after young George, for one – and how he must not repeat the mistakes of his own father with his own son. That night, the same nightmare.
On he flew, leaving Italian-controlled Libya, flying along the Barbary coast to British-controlled Egypt; in fact he was to be flying in British skies all the way to Singapore – and from Cairo to Delhi, following the Imperial Airways route and stopping at Imperial Airways aerodromes.
Their Empire R
oute had been established nine months earlier, with passages from London to Karachi. The service took seven days and cost £130 and was deemed to be of more benefit to the mail – and all that quick mail meant – than to the passengers.
Even for the Imperial Airways passengers it was not an easy ride. The first day took them to Paris for refuelling, then on to Basle for the overnight wagon lits train through the Alps to Genoa. Awaiting the train at the port station was a Short S.8 Calcutta flying boat. If the passengers had not seen one before, they might have wondered how on earth this three-engined barge ever left the water. But somehow it must have done, for that day they would be refuelling in Ostia, Naples and Corfu before arriving twelve hours and a thousand miles later, shattered, shaken and practically deafened in Piraeus for the next overnight stop. The third day was slightly less far but possibly more fraught, flying over the expanse of the southern Mediterranean. They stopped at Souda Bay in northern Crete, now a large NATO base where our own yacht Vasco da Gama spent a happy week’s refuge from storms, and Tobruk for refuelling; then again along the North African coast, stopping at Alexandria for the third night stop at the Grand Royal Hotel, as was; then on to Cairo by slow train to meet the next plane.
Never Fear Page 8
