Souvenir handkerchief of Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s flight across the Tasman to New Zealand in September 1928.
‘Comfort, Safety and Speed’: Passengers aboard one of ANA’s inter-city service flights enjoy a picnic lunch during the five- or six-hour journey between Sydney and Brisbane.
In February 1934, Ulm carried the first official airmail from New Zealand to Australia in an attempt to secure a government contract for a regular service.
In the wake of the tragedy, newspapers in competition with The Sun launched a smear campaign against the Southern Cross crew. Allegations circulated that Ulm had planned the forced landing as a publicity stunt, something he vehemently denied, and an official inquiry later absolved him of. Nevertheless, the rumours took the sheen off the public image the aviation partnership had previously enjoyed and, in particular, tarnished Ulm’s integrity as a businessman.
Three months after their disastrous first attempt, in June 1929 Kingsford Smith and Ulm flew Southern Cross to Britain in 12 days and 18 hours, taking three days off the record Bert Hinkler had established the previous year. For Australian National Airways they purchased five Avro X aircraft, a near identical design to Southern Cross, and hired pilots, most of them ex-war fliers who, like Kingsford Smith, had cut their teeth over the Western Front a decade earlier.
Ulm looked less than his typically dapper self after surviving two weeks in remote north-western Australia following Southern Cross’ abortive flight to Britain in March 1929.
Australian National Airways started daily services between Brisbane and Sydney on 1 January 1930. For the return journey, which took around eight hours, passengers paid £18 17 shillings and sixpence, about the equivalent of A$1,300 today. Despite the premium ticket prices and the developing financial Depression, Australian National Airways initially did a healthy trade, carrying 1,244 passengers during the service’s first three months. At the beginning of June it added a Sydney to Melbourne route and then, in January 1931, a service to Tasmania.
Finding the daily route flying monotonous and still hoping to complete a circumnavigation in Southern Cross, in early 1930 Kingsford Smith planned a trans-Atlantic flight. Ulm intended to join him, but the company directors ordered him not to go. He sold his half of Southern Cross to Kingsford Smith for Australian National Airways shares. It foreshadowed the breaking of their partnership; they would not fly together again.
In June 1930, with a crew hired in Britain, Kingsford Smith flew Southern Cross over the Atlantic, from Ireland to the United States, via Newfoundland. He then flew across the American continent to San Francisco, becoming the first airman to circumnavigate the globe by a route crossing both hemispheres. Returning to Britain, Kingsford Smith purchased a single-seat Avro Avian and named it Southern Cross Junior. He flew it back to Australia in just under ten days, shaving a third off Hinkler’s solo record. The press proclaimed him ‘the greatest long distance flier in the world’ and the RAAF appointed him an honorary Air Commodore. In December, with Ulm as his groomsman, Kingsford Smith married Mary Powell, daughter of a wealthy Melbourne entrepreneur who he had met on a sea voyage the year before.
After a reasonably promising first year, things turned bad for Australian National Airways. In March 1931, Southern Cloud crashed in the Snowy Mountains en route from Sydney to Melbourne, killing six passengers and two pilots. The disaster, combined with the deepening economic crisis, forced the company’s directors to suspend daily services. Ulm attempted to revive business by organising a Christmas airmail to Britain. He secured ample public and official support for the venture, but it turned into a costly disappointment when Southern Sun, carrying the mail, had an accident in Malaya. A relief aircraft flown by Kingsford Smith ‘rescued’ the mail and completed the journey, but in Britain this machine was also damaged, delaying the return mail until well after Christmas and topping off a rough year.
The pressures of 1931 strained Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s relationship. Despite its intimate portrayal in the media, their association was fundamentally about business while personally they shared very little in common. The airline’s collapse and Kingsford Smith’s general lack of interest in commercial affairs created distance between the two airmen. Then, in November 1931 when Kingsford Smith’s ghost-written autobiography began to be published in serialised form, Ulm was angered by what he perceived as insufficient acknowledgement in the text. Lawyers became involved, securing Ulm the right to amend Kingsford Smith’s manuscript. Their colleagues recalled that subsequently they were seldom seen together.
The suspension of Australian National Airways’ services forced Kingsford Smith back onto the barnstorming circuit in 1932 to make a living. For most of the year he toured country towns with, as one newspaper put it, ‘his historic airliner’, or ‘the old bus’, as he affectionately referred to Southern Cross . The monotony of joy-rides was broken only by the announcement of his knighthood in June and the birth of his first son, Charles, in December. Some in the ever-fickle press once again turned on Kingsford Smith, commenting that barnstorming was an unbecoming profession for a knight of the realm.
Meanwhile, Ulm spent 1932 working on proposals to save Australian National Airways from insolvency. He approached the government to subsidise a joint venture between several Australian airlines for an Australia to Singapore service to link up with an Imperial Airways Limited route to Britain. Behind the scenes, the British company lobbied the Australian government, besmirching Ulm’s name. He missed out on the contract and in February 1933, Australian National Airways went into voluntary liquidation.
In his indomitable way, just days after news of the company’s collapse, Ulm announced the formation of a new company, British International Airlines Limited, to bid for the Australia–Singapore route. It would be a ‘wholly Australian’ enterprise, using local capital, pilots, mechanics and, where possible, Australianmanufactured equipment. Ulm invested all his personal finances in the purchase of one of the old Australian National Airways Avros and dubbed it Faith in Australia. To prove his point—that Australia did not have to rely on international expertise—he planned a global circumnavigation tour and hired ex-Australian National Airways pilots Scotty Allan and Bill Taylor as crew.
Ulm left for Britain in Faith in Australia on 21 June 1933 but, disappointingly, engine trouble prevented them breaking any records; the journey took 17 days. For the second leg, Ulm planned to follow Kingsford Smith’s 1930 route and fly across the Atlantic, from Portmarnock Beach in Ireland to Newfoundland. Preparations went smoothly until just a few hours before take-off. While being refuelled on the beach, Faith in Australia’s undercarriage collapsed, badly damaging the aircraft. Through good fortune, a British philanthropist interested in aviation funded the repairs, but by the time they were finished favourable flying weather over the north Atlantic had passed for the year.
Kingsford Smith was also in Britain at this time. Bored with a second year of barnstorming, he had gone there and purchased a Percival Gull (Miss Southern Cross) to attempt to break the latest Britain to Australia solo record. Starting on 4 October 1933 he reached Wyndham in Western Australia in just over seven days, taking almost two days off British aviator Charles Scott’s previous record. Thirty thousand people greeted Kingsford Smith’s return to Sydney and the government awarded him £3,000—the equivalent of over A$250,000 today.
In the repaired Faith in Australia, Ulm and his crew left Britain nine days after Kingsford Smith. Although dogged by mechanical problems and atrocious weather, Ulm managed to beat his old colleague’s new record by almost 11 hours. The press lauded Ulm, calling for his knighthood, but there were no official rewards forthcoming. Nonetheless, he graciously told reporters that his and Kingsford Smith’s flights couldn’t be compared. ‘One was an extraordinary individual effort, while three pilots had shared in the success of the Faith in Australia.’
Ulm’s record of achievements failed to convince the government that an all- Australian company could run the service to Singapore. In Apr
il 1934 the contract went to Qantas Empire Airways, a partnership between Imperial Airways and Qantas. Ulm thereafter returned to the formidable ambition he had harboured in 1928 of establishing a trans-Pacific service. In September he invested all his personal assets in yet another company, Great Pacific Airways Limited. Embarking for Britain, he planned to purchase an aircraft and make a demonstration flight home from America. Ulm recorded his feelings about the significance of this new venture in a short memoir that he wrote during the sea voyage.
Premier Bertram Stevens christens Ulm’s plane Faith in Australia in 1933.
Ulm speaks with American aviatrix Amelia Earhart at Oakland aerodrome, 3 December 1934, just before embarking on his final flight.
‘I have no doubt in my own mind’, he wrote, ‘that I am standing at last on the threshold of vast possibilities of which I have dreamt, and for which I have worked for many years’.
The memoir would never be published and this comment would shortly after inherit a tragically ironic significance. At the beginning of December 1934, in a twin-engine Airspeed Envoy named Stella Australis and with an inexperienced crew hired when his regular colleagues Allan and Taylor declined to join him, Ulm made final preparations to fly from Oakland to Sydney, more or less reprising the flight that had launched his career. In San Francisco, a few days before leaving, Kingsford Smith’s and Ulm’s paths crossed once again. A few weeks earlier, Kingsford Smith and Taylor had crossed the Pacific in the other direction in a twin-seat Lockheed Altair named Lady Southern Cross. ‘Ulm’s old partner greeted him cordially’, reported a journalist, ‘and they decided to spend the remainder of the day together’.
Stella Australis took off from Oakland at 3.41 pm, Monday, 3 December 1934, bound for Honolulu. Throughout the evening, Ulm’s wireless operator reported ample progress and ideal flying weather. At some stage after 2 am, however, Stella Australis encountered a storm, and despite climbing to 12,000 feet failed to clear it. Around dawn, the messages began to sound alarming: Ulm’s navigator didn’t know where they were and they had very little fuel left. Just after 9 am, Stella Australis began transmitting ‘SOS’. Twenty minutes later Ulm radioed that they were about to ditch in the water.
Despite a massive air and sea search, the United States Navy failed to find any trace of Stella Australis or her crew. When the Americans called off the search after a week, Ulm’s wife chartered a schooner to search the outlying islands, following the sea currents as far as Midway. After nine months it too found nothing.
‘Standing at last on the threshold of vast possibilities’: Ulm perceived his survey flight in Stella Australis as the culmination of all his efforts.
Ulm’s death shocked the nation and overwhelmed his family. His son John, then 13 years old, recalls that when his mother told him the news he broke down. ‘Suddenly and immensely I was devastated.’ He also remembers how the tragedy brought home his father’s significance. ‘Walking to and from school’, he explains, ‘people touched me in the street—strangers, but to them not really’. The worldwide aviation community responded with an outpouring of tributes. A central figure in the nascent Australian aviation industry, Lawrence Wackett, believed Ulm ‘probably the greatest living exponent of the future of aviation’ but lamented that ‘his country failed in its real appreciation’. Ironically, the nation’s gratitude came just too late. Years later, John Ulm learned from records released by the National Archives that in December 1934 Prime Minister Joseph Lyons had recommended his father for a knighthood. It would have been announced at the flight’s completion.
Ulm’s death shattered Kingsford Smith, whose health, by the end of 1934 was on the verge of collapse. The strain of long-distance flying, years of heavy drinking and smoking and the fact that he was approaching 40 weighed on him. Nevertheless, financial problems forced Kingsford Smith on yet another barnstorming tour in Southern Cross during the early months of 1935. Business proved poor, neither he nor flying being the novelty it had been in 1928, leading him to consider more permanent ventures. As Ulm had, Kingsford Smith turned to the government for support, proposing a trans-Tasman airmail service. Lacking the business and political skills of his late colleague, he made little headway, turning instead to what he knew best: a sensational, press-hyped feat to win popular support.
Ulm bought this caricature at the Eiffel Tower when he and Kingsford Smith visited Europe in 1929 to purchase aircraft and hire crew for Australian National Airlines.
With Bill Taylor and another old flying mate, John Stannage, Kingsford Smith organised for Southern Cross to carry a special ‘Jubilee’ mail from Australia to New Zealand on 15 May 1935. What followed became one of the most celebrated incidents in the ‘Smithy’ legend. Six hours out over the Tasman, the exhaust on Southern Cross ’ tired old centre engine broke off, a piece of debris smashing the starboard propeller. Kingsford Smith turned the aircraft around and headed back to Sydney, hoping to make it on two engines. They did so barely, and only because Taylor climbed out of the aircraft onto a wing strut to transfer oil from the ‘dud’ engine into the port one, using a thermos and briefcase.
Although it provided matter for a compelling legend, the whole sorry affair can hardly have helped Kingsford Smith’s business prospects, especially given that he was forced to jettison the mail over the Tasman. Apparently undeterred, in June 1935 Kingsford Smith established ‘Trans Tasman Air Service’ with a group of mates. Together, they could only scrape together a meagre starting capital of £575. To make ends meet, Kingsford Smith sold Southern Cross to the government. The best he could manage from the Lyons administration was £3,000, what he and Ulm had paid Wilkins for it minus engines and instruments eight years earlier.
The briefcase Bill Taylor used to move oil between Southern Cross’ engines during the near-disastrous flight to New Zealand in May 1935.
Frustrated with renewed attempts to secure government backing, Kingsford Smith planned an overseas tour to raise more capital and purchase a passenger-carrying aircraft. With Tommy Pethybridge, a young pilot he had previously worked with on barnstorming tours, Kingsford Smith went to Britain via the United States to collect Lady Southern Cross. He had unsuccessfully tried to sell the two-seat Lockheed Altair in America and now intended flying her back to Australia for conversion into a passenger carrier. Kingsford Smith could not resist the temptation to make a new attempt on the Britain to Australia record, intending to beat the latest best time of just under two days.
In Lady Southern Cross, Kingsford Smith and Pethybridge took off from Lympne aerodrome in England in the pre-dawn dark of 6 November 1935. Kingsford Smith had been ill and a number of people, including his wife, had urged him not to fly. Nonetheless, he and Pethybridge pushed themselves hard, allowing only brief stops to refuel in Athens and Baghdad, before reaching Allahabad, 29½ hours out from England. Without pausing to sleep, they refuelled and were airborne within an hour, bound for Bangkok.
During the Second World War, Southern Cross was stored at the RAAF base at Fairbairn in Canberra. Despite the government’s promise in 1935, it would be over two decades before the aircraft went on permanent public display.
Lady Southern Cross never arrived. At some time in the early hours of 8 November, she plunged into the Andaman Sea somewhere off the Burmese coast, taking with her the most legendary of Australian aviators and his young protégé. Their bodies were lost; the only traces of the aircraft to be recovered were the starboard undercarriage and some metal fragments from the fuselage. The cause of the accident remains contentious among Australian aviation historians, most suggesting either a mechanical failure or Kingsford Smith’s loss of consciousness in his ill and exhausted state. In any case, with his and Ulm’s passing, the golden era of Australian aviation pioneers had finished.
The ‘Sir Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial’
On 18 July 1935, when Kingsford Smith delivered the ‘old bus’ to the RAAF base at Richmond, near Sydney, the Minister for Defence announced, ‘The Southern Cross now becomes the p
roperty of every Australian’. The government, he explained, would put the aircraft on display in Canberra as a national monument to Kingsford Smith and the remarkable era of aviation that he represented.
Nevertheless, for the next two decades few Australians had the opportunity to see Southern Cross. It would only make two brief public appearances in between spending years in storage sheds at Mascot and, for a brief time during the Second World War, at Fairbairn aerodrome in Canberra. In 1945 the film production company Cinesound convinced the RAAF to restore the aircraft to flying condition to appear in the feature film Smithy. Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s old flying partner Bill Taylor flew Southern Cross in the film’s airborne sequences. Two years later, in October 1947, the New South Wales branch of the Royal Aero Club secured permission to display ‘the old bus’ at its anniversary air pageant at Bankstown aerodrome. Then it went back into storage for another decade.
It was not until the mid-1950s that the government began to act on its 20-year-old promise to preserve Southern Cross as a permanent public monument. A committee headed by Liberal MP Bruce Wight raised funds by public subscription for what it dubbed the ‘Sir Charles Kingsford Smith Memorial’, a museum and interpretive centre to house Southern Cross at Brisbane airport, a few hundred metres from where it had landed at the end of the trans-Pacific flight. The committee planned to open the monument around the journey’s 30th anniversary.
John Ulm, who at this time worked with the managing executive of Qantas, proposed finding Harry Lyon and Jim Warner and bringing them out to attend the ceremony. After flying the Pacific, both men had eked out comparatively quiet lives. Warner opened a radio repair business in San Francisco, but its failure during the Depression forced him to return to the life of a travelling salesman. He served in the United States Navy during the Second World War and was, in 1958, living in quiet retirement with his sixth wife in California, close to where the events that had briefly made him famous began. Lyon proved more difficult for Ulm to track down, but he eventually traced him to the small town of Paris Hill, in Maine. After the Pacific flight Lyon had returned to his family home there and over the next several years attempted to organise a number of flying adventures. None of them ever got off the ground. Aside from a stint in the Navy during the Second World War, his remained a small-town life and he finished his working days as the town’s deputy sheriff.
Flying the Southern Cross Page 11
