Francis did not wear this adulation well. Instead of being proud of seeing his photograph on every front page, he withdrew into himself, noting that he had been at work for over 350 hours in three weeks. However, his exhaustion came not from the flying but from the agoraphobia from which he had begun to suffer. He dreaded interviews and ran shy of any spotlight. He grew a beard, solely to hide behind it. And then the nightmares were becoming worse, now visiting him ‘every night almost without fail for nine weeks between three and four o’clock. Usually I woke to find myself clawing at a window or wall, trying to escape’. But the high of flying overrode the low of the nightmares:
Flying is the most fascinating sport in the world. That feeling of cutting out big distances in an apparatus controlled only by you; the attempt by you, a solitary should from among two thousand million to do something that none of the other 1,999,999,999 has done, it tickles your vanity, your sense of power, your sense of romance, your love of excitement, as nothing else in the world can do.
He was already planning the next one, the big one, crossing the Tasman Sea westabout. There was a lot of thinking time during those 350 hours aloft: ‘I found myself planning how within a month of finishing one flight … I can make and save enough money to do the next’.
But first he had family business to which to attend, a welcome break from the maelstrom of attention in Sydney in the quiet of the von Zedlitzes’ garden in Lower Hutt, Wellington.
Elijah and Francis shipped back to New Zealand. His own house on top of Blue Mountain was rented out, so he took a cottage in the von Zedlitzes’ grounds, rescued George and set about making enough money with Geoffrey to go flying again.
Rescued George? Hardly. Since Muriel had died two months previously, the 4-year-old George had been brought up by his aunt and grandmother in their family home. He was a quiet and timid little chap and was as happy as he could be hanging off the skirts of his elderly relations. Then out of the blue this strange action man, his father, apparently – although they had never really met – arrives to take him away from his cosy certainties to a new life with new people. Muriel’s family, the von Zedlitzes, the Goodwins, everyone warned against it. But Francis was stubborn and determined that George should have the father-centric childhood he never had. He took George swimming but George was frightened of the water. George had good eyesight, unlike Francis, so his father determined he must play catch; but George hated ball games. Friends were throwing a house party up-country; Francis was never allowed to go to anything as frivolous as a party, so George must come with him and join in the charades. But shy George didn’t enjoy charades. Instead in reaction he developed asthma, which made him even more withdrawn. At last, having made enough of a stab at fatherhood to have convinced himself that he had done his best, Francis handed poor George back to the comfortable bosoms he had craved all along.
George, second from left and Francis, second from right.
Francis’s other ventures were more successful. He rushed out Solo to Sydney, his first and best book, while he and his flight were still hot news. The book had good reviews and sold well. The slump was still on, so property sales were slow, but he and Geoffrey made enough from forestry interests to keep some money coming in. He joined the Territorial Air Force, so someone else paid for his flying.
Thus passed the rest of 1930, with Francis working and earning, fathering a little and flying when he could. But it was never going to be enough; those nightmares of crashing in a void had been replaced by daydreams of solo flights and world records. Elijah was down at the ’drome and Francis was up in the hills. It’s a big, wide world out there. At some stage Francis, Elijah and the big, wide world were going to meet again – and in the New Year, New Zealand summer of 1931 they made plans to do just that.
There is no such thing as an impossibility.
CHAPTER 5
Spot On!
THE CRAZIEST IDEA OF ALL CRAZY IDEAS came to Francis when he was shaving. It was as 1930 was turning into 1931. For six months, since his return to New Zealand, he had been brooding about long distances and world records, about completing a circumnavigation by flying Elijah around the world back to London, working on the permutations, the scenarios and the routes. Every dawn of a bright idea was soon followed by the dark dusk of seemingly intractable problems. The more he brooded the more he felt trapped in the small, comfortable world of minor prosperity in New Zealand.
To fly anywhere he first had to cross the Tasman Sea. Only Charles Lindbergh had managed to cross a serious ocean, the Atlantic, and he had financed that by public subscription to convert a Ryan monoplane, the famous Spirit of St Louis, for the task. Could Francis do the same? No: Francis was not a Lindbergh extrovert, quite the opposite, and backwoods New Zealand was not the continental USA, also quite the opposite. To raise money for any sort of attempt he took passengers joyriding, hundreds of them, but by then professional barnstormers in properly powerful Curtiss biplanes – and even flying circuses – had made poor old Elijah seem rather tame and the enterprise did what is known locally as a ‘fizzo’: it fizzled out. Without a similarly adapted purpose-built plane to carry enough fuel to make the crossing, Elijah would have to carry her own weight in fuel, which in turn meant she would be too heavy to fly. No matter which way round he held the chart, it simply couldn’t be done.
And then came his eureka shaving moment. A globe was next to the handbasin and between shaving strokes he noticed two small dots in the middle of the Tasman Sea. Why hadn’t he thought of them before? They would break the journey neatly into three equal parts, distances he knew he could fly in a day. Splashing the soap off, he looked more closely: Norfolk Island, off the north-east tip of New Zealand, and Lord Howe Island, a smaller hop off the coast of New South Wales. Then he looked at the scale: New Zealand to Norfolk, 480 miles; Norfolk to Lord Howe, 560 miles; Lord Howe to Sydney 480 miles. Doable! Yes, by Jove, very doable! And once Sydney had been breached, then he knew that the land route back to London via Asia and America was doable too.
He rushed to the Wellington Public Library to find out more. Norfolk Island was a glorified rock five miles square, about the size of a Kiwi sheep farm, with no landing strip of even the most imaginative kind. Lord Howe Island, on the other hand, looked like a crescent around a large lagoon, which would be perfect if it were made of concrete, but it wasn’t: the lagoon, annoyingly, was made of water. But then again the notations on the chart were so romantic: Sugarloaf Passage, Smooth Water Lagoon, Coral Reef Awash Here, Heavy Surf Here and Boat Passage at High Water. Francis knew he must fly there.
Looking at the chart in the library, Francis had his second eureka moment of the day. Of course! Convert Elijah into a seaplane. ‘The idea of blowing in and settling on the lagoon of an untamed island caught my fancy. I decided to learn seaplane flying at once.’ He looked again at Norfolk Island. There was no sheltered anchorage, only Pacific rollers pounding in to the 300-foot cliffs. That, Francis agreed with himself, would be a challenge; but he liked one of those.
Francis knew exactly the call he had to make: to the New Zealand Air Force’s Director of Aviation, Wing Commander Grant Dalton, the air chief who had enlisted Francis as a Territorial Pilot Officer. The NZAF had a seaplane – even better, a Moth-based seaplane – which had just returned from Samoa, where it had been hassling rebels as they uprose. TPO Chichester to WC Dalton: ‘Could I do seaplane training instead, sir?’ WC Dalton to TPO Chichester: ‘Of course, old boy, she’s all yours!’
Francis soon found the seaplane rekindled his joy of flying:
I found seaplane flying much more thrilling; there was something wild and free about it, and it called for more flying skill. You must rely on your own judgement for choosing the best water to alight on, estimate wind and tide, and survey the surface for rocks or even small pieces of wood which might pierce the thin floats. A seaplane needs more skill in handling because, with its big floats, it loses flying speed and stalls more easily. If too steep a turn is made, the floats c
atch the air and tip the plane over, possibly on to its back.
Francis now knew that flying a seaplane was the solution to flying around the world. He also knew that island-hopping from New Zealand to Norfolk Island to Lord Howe Island to Australia was the solution to flying across the Tasman Sea. And he knew that he had a related problem: actually finding the islands. He was totally confident in his ability to navigate overland by dead reckoning, that is, the calculations that interrelate speed, time and distance, which had taken him around Europe and from London to Sydney. Navigation over the sea posed a whole set of new problems. Radio navigation had yet to be invented. Compasses on small planes were notoriously distracted. Undetectable wind shifts out at sea would cause havoc with any dead reckoning calculations. On the one hand, using dead reckoning from Timor it would have been literally impossible to miss the massive island of Australia 320 miles to the south. On the other hand, using dead reckoning from New Zealand it would be equally impossible to find the tiny speck of Norfolk Island 480 miles to the north-east.
Francis and lady friend floating on water
Thus began the quest for what would become Francis’s greatest skill, one that even the likes of Bob Gibson find impossible to reconstruct today. ‘The only possible way of finding the islands’, he decided, ‘was by using the sun. I should have to take shots at the sun with a sextant to measure the height of the sun above the horizon, and work out my position from that.’
Bob Gibson had given me the experts’ view: ‘In a word, impossible’, he had said. ‘How could a man flying a plane solo use a sextant to take astro sights? For a start, a plane is going so fast that the sights will be instantly redundant. And the pilot would not be at sea level, so all reference points in the astro tables will be u/s [unserviceable or more popularly, useless]. And what happens in clouds? And who is going to fly the plane straight and level while the pilot takes the sights? And even if he could take a useful sight, where is he going to find the space in the cockpit to make all the calculations? And how is he then going to transpose them onto his charts? No,’ Bob shakes his head, ‘I just can’t see how it can be done. It simply cannot be done.’
Francis would have disagreed, of course. If I could put words in his mouth: ‘If a sea navigator can navigate a steamer by the sun, I can navigate an aeroplane by the sun.’ And he did.
I ask one of our Unicorn authors, Rear Admiral Kit Layman, author of The Wager Disaster, to explain how astronavigation works in practice. Kit says:
‘A sextant will measure the angle of the sun or moon or a star above the horizon. In the case of a star, the only time you can see both star and horizon clearly enough is at sunrise and sunset. You must note the time, accurate to the nearest second, at the exact moment that you take your sextant reading. These observations must be absolutely accurate: an error of only one degree in measuring the sextant altitude will place your position 60 nautical miles out. And an error of one second in time will place you a quarter of a mile out at the equator and much more at higher latitudes.
‘Given the time and the angle, you make some adjustments to both and then dive into a fairly complex book of tables. You can now calculate, not a position, but a position line, and this you draw on your chart. Your position is somewhere on that line, but you do not know where yet.
‘You must therefore take another observation preferably at right angles to the first one, which gives you another position line, and where the two position lines cross you have at last a fix. In practice one always takes three observations if possible, and if they all go through the same point, or nearly so, you can feel confident as to where you are.
‘On a stable platform it is quite easy with practice and good eyesight to take an observation of the sun above the horizon. Aboard a ship it is a bit more difficult as you have to contend with the movement of the ship. On a yacht it is much more difficult unless the sea state is very steady.
‘For air navigation, where you are most unlikely to see the horizon clearly enough, you have to use a bubble sextant. This recreates the horizon on the instrument itself in much the same way as the spirit level does around the house. As anyone who has tried to put up a shelf will know, balancing the bubble brings its own problems, and I would have thought taking a sight while trying to balance the bubble and while bumping around in a small aircraft would be at least as difficult as using a regular sextant on a yacht in a rough sea.
‘If all this sounds physically demanding, what comes next is equally mentally demanding. You have to perform a number of careful calculations from the tables.
‘You can do some of this work in advance on the ground for the sun, moon or stars you expect to see at certain times, and Chichester would certainly have done as much as possible. But remember, every observation gives you not a position but a position line, which must be related to the chart; and between observations of different objects the aircraft is moving its position, so that positional movement has to be taken into account before you can get your two, preferably three, position lines to cross on your chart. And there you have your actual position.
‘The more I think about how he did all this in his tiny plane the more extraordinary it becomes. To take a good sight in these circumstances would be close to miraculous. Taking the exact angle and the precise time, and then making the calculations – all this needs total concentration, whereas he had a plane to fly at the same time. And all the while in the background he had to contend with the certainty that failure to get it right first time meant missing the target and flying on to an ignominious doom.
‘To a simple sailor the word superhuman seems not an overstatement.’
The bubble sextant, mastering it aloft while flying a biplane seaplane not the work of a moment
Back on land Frances threw himself into mastering the sextant and logarithmic tables as only he could. He practised in the car at 50 mph and on foot. He practised in a dinghy and capsized for his troubles. When the sun went down he practised his mental arithmetic. He practised them both together in the air too: the first time his error was 108 miles and the second time 740 miles. If he didn’t know already, he was discovering quite how much of a challenge he had made for himself.
While all this micro-navigating practice was honing his skills, a macro-navigation question loomed. Given the inherent degree of inaccuracy of his astro, due to inexperience and the very nature of the challenge, how could he realistically hope to find the Norfolk Island needle in the Pacific haystack? The answer was that he couldn’t, so he arrived at the very solution that sea captains had been practising for years: the navigational tactic known as Aiming Off. Let’s say you want to navigate to Norfolk Island five hours away. In spite of your best endeavours, by the time you think you should be there, it is nowhere in sight. Now comes the dilemma: with limited fuel and daylight, do you gamble to turn left or right? It’s a form of ‘double or quits’ as you move away from or closer to the target.
The solution is to miss the target on purpose by Aiming Off, aiming deliberately off the island to an imaginary waypoint. When the time says you should be there you then turn at right angles on to a much shorter heading, knowing that your target is at least somewhere in that direction. So if Francis knew that after exactly, say, five hours and 40 minutes’ flying he would be south-west of Norfolk Island, all he would have to do would be to turn north-east and he would surely come across it. Surely? What could possibly go wrong?
By March 1931 Francis felt he had to go, if only because the Tasman weather was about to turn seasonally against him. On 25 March he plucked the date of 28 March out of thin air as the day to go – and was then delighted when the Met Office predicted perfect conditions. Grant Dalton was worried enough to write to him officially, urging the flight be called off for the sake of aviation’s image in the event of its certain failure. Luckily the letter did not work its way down the chain and Francis blagged a new pair of floats from the NZAF and then asked the Wellington Base Commandant, Squadron Leader Len Issit, to help hi
m fit them. Len, who was an experienced seaplane and flying-boat pilot, said, ‘I don’t like this flight of yours. I doubt if you can find your way alone by sextant; even if you can, suppose there is no sun? If you reach Norfolk Island there is nowhere to put down a seaplane; if you succeed in getting down, you won’t be able to take off again because of the swell. If there should chance to be no swell, it would be impossible to take off a Moth loaded up like yours without a stiff wind.
‘Don’t forget that you have ideal conditions at the moment. Strong breeze against you, tide with you, and choppy sea to break the suction of the water of the floats. I’d like to see you carry out a forty-eight hours’ mooring test to make sure the floats don’t leak; and also some long flights, to test your navigation farther.’ Francis noted: ‘It would certainly have been wise to do all this, but probably I would have had no flight if I had.’
But Issit was at heart a flyer and a sportsman and he knew that Francis had to do what Francis had to do. That night he joined in the team fitting the floats to Elijah, which in seafaring tradition went from a he to a she and now became Madame Elijah. At 5 am the next day Mrs Issit was cooking them both bacon and eggs. At 6 am they broke a bottle of brandy over the prop and fired her up. Len cast her off to the sea and Francis cast his fate to the winds.
Never Fear Page 10
