Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  The bottom line was that if Smithy flew without such a propeller, the likes of Scott and Campbell Black would have 400 miles extra range on long hops, meaning that he had no chance of winning. And if he couldn’t win, what was the point? So it had to be an American plane, where variable pitch propellers were readily available off the shelf. Oddly enough, Smithy was fully supported in this decision by former RAAF Wing Commander Lawrence Wackett, who had so bitterly criticised him and Ulm six years earlier when they had decided to fly a Fokker across the Pacific. Their relationship now repaired and firm, Wackett accompanied Smithy in May 1934 when he went to see Robertson to tell him that the logic of buying an American plane with a variable pitch propeller was unalterable. With some passion—this is important, Mr Robertson, as there is simply no other way the race can be won—they explained that even if Smithy didn’t get a Northrop Gamma, which was proving to be prohibitively expensive, then he likely could at least get a second-hand Lockheed Altair, which had much the same performance for a fraction of the price.

  Robertson finally agreed and Smithy began to make his arrangements. As it was effectively against the law to bring in an American plane because the United States was not a signatory to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the only way Smithy would be able to secure one would be to go to America, purchase one, and ship it back home to have it certified in Australia.

  Done!

  Before leaving, however, the Controller of Civil Aviation himself, Captain Edgar Johnston, personally told Smithy to be sure to get a Certificate of Airworthiness from the American Department of Commerce, affirming that the machine conformed substantially to the ‘normal’ category of the commission’s regulations.34 Although America was one of the few developed countries not to be a signatory to that convention, its Federal Department of Commerce—which governed aviation in the United States—had an equivalent, the Approved-Type Certificate, which Australia recognised. The point, Johnston told Smithy, was that without that certificate his plane would neither be able to fly in Australia, nor able to participate in the Centenary Race, under Rule 16(v) of its conditions of entry: Each aircraft must bear a certificate from its country of registration that it conforms substantially to the minimum airworthiness requirements of the ICAN normal category.

  Smithy was wryly amused at the warning, recognising that Johnno must have been aware of his reputation in the matter of paperwork. True, he wasn’t renowned for crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s, but he assured Johnno that he would see to it. Blah, blah, blah.

  Things were starting to break his way, and he was also pleased to secure as his navigator and co-pilot for the coming race Bill Taylor, with whom he had been working on and off over the last five years, first with ANA and then on his New Zealand trips. It was Smithy’s view that the quietly spoken Bill was one of the best in the business, totally professional, entirely unflappable and precisely the kind of man he wanted for backup. As to Taylor, he felt that he and Smithy were a great team, no matter, or perhaps even because of, the difference in their temperaments—Smithy being an extrovert and Bill a very careful, considered, introverted man of quiet habits.35

  After sailing to America with Mary in mid-May—for the first time leaving the eighteen-month-old Charles Jnr behind with the family nanny—Smithy looked around and quickly decided that the best plane for him was indeed a particular Lockheed racer he saw in a hangar in Burbank, which had been previously designed and built as a Lockheed Sirius for an attempt on the New York to Paris record that had never happened. A pioneering airman’s dream, it was a single-engined, tandem-seater—one behind the other, with dual controls—and variable pitch propeller, powered by a massive 542-horsepower supercharged Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine that was almost as powerful as the three engines of the Southern Cross put together. It could fly at over 200 miles per hour and go as high as 15,000 feet, which would be enough to get him above most storms (even if one couldn’t stay up there long for lack of oxygen). Now, now the Comets in the Centenary Air Race would have some competition!

  Smithy loved the Altair from the first moment he saw it and quickly made arrangements to buy it from its previous owner for the equivalent of £6000. This was more than he could raise on the spot, but the retail magnate Sidney Myer had once again offered to help, with another £500, and his father-in-law, Arthur Powell, also contributed. Smithy immediately made plans to make modifications to the plane, starting with putting in extra petrol tanks. Normally, the Altair had capacity for 150 gallons—which was nowhere near enough for him to make the big 2500-mile hops across the world he would need to win the Centenary Race. Smithy wanted to have four more tanks put in, to get it up to 418 gallons, which would give him a cruising range of 2800 miles.

  For their part, Lockheed, while thrilled that one of their planes might win such a prestigious race with such a famous pilot, were also more than a little anxious. They pointed out to the Australian that the changes he wished to make were extremely unlikely to get the tick of approval he needed from the US Department of Commerce, an Approved-Type Certificate, which was certification that the plane was airworthy.

  Not to worry, said Smithy. He had a lot of influence in Australia, would have the public behind him, and the man who was sponsoring the race, Sir Macpherson Robertson, was also backing him and his plane.

  ‘If I can’t get this plane into the race,’ Kingsford Smith said to Robert Gross, the president of Lockheed, ‘then nobody can.’36

  So strong was Kingsford Smith in his confidence, so insistent that there would be no problem that couldn’t be overcome once he got the plane back in Australia, the executives at Lockheed reluctantly agreed to expand the fuel capacity, and even agreed to do it at next to no cost. They also fitted a single canopy over the dual cockpits, installed a new engine and a new wing with retractable undercarriage and the extra petrol tanks. No problem.

  All done, Lockheed’s specially licensed test pilot flew it to the facility at the Department of Commerce’s aerodrome for certification. Alas, all he came back with was an Experimental License of Airworthiness, which would expire in a matter of weeks, on 30 June 1934. Lockheed was not surprised. The company never believed that its Altair, set up as it was with over-sized fuel tanks, would get the full airworthiness certificate.

  Smithy—in a glorious daze as to what a fine machine it was, and what an excellent chance he had of winning the race and the £10,00037 that was going to fix everything—didn’t worry particularly. This, notwithstanding the fact that, from Australia, the Controller of Civil Aviation had again, via John Stannage, repeated his earlier message: ‘Make sure you tell your boss, to get that Certificate of Airworthiness.’38

  For Smithy, paperwork had always been the thing that Charles Ulm and various minions had taken care of while he had concentrated on the glorious flying part of the operation. And yet even beyond Lockheed’s warnings, it wasn’t as if he wasn’t aware that there might be a problem upon his return. A journalist with The Age interviewed Smithy while the pilot was in America, and quoted him saying that ‘the controversy…over the Melbourne Centenary race is far from settled…’39 And yet, the journalist noted, Smithy ‘intended to seek approval of his entry when he returned home and, although he expected considerable opposition, he was confident as to the outcome, because he believed public opinion would support him.’40

  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 ai
r,’ 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 fa
ctory, 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?