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Our Most Renowned Aviator Sir Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith, known to the world as Smithy remains one of the most celebrated pilots of international aviation's golden age. For seven years, from 1928 to his death in 1935, he was the most revered public hero in Australia. His epic and dangerous oceanic flights, through destructive weather in fragile aeroplanes, were followed on radio around the world like the moon missions of 40 years later. At the end of his great pioneer journeys crowds of 200, 000 would flock to Sydney's Mascot aerodrome to cheer and chant and hoist him shoulder high.
He was treated like royalty and infinitely more publicised than the countrys leaders, or any Hollywood star. A small man with a craggy face, rapid wit and speech, whose party trick was to drink beer standing on his head, his trademark was a famously broad grin around the jutting cigarettes he chain-smoked. His life was lived frenetically and often outrageously. From the horrors of the First World War, in which some of his toes were shot off in aerial combat, he emerged with a contempt for authority and a determination to live life hedonistically and recklessly. He created for himself a world compulsively ruled by flying, alcohol and women. Yet he was universally loved and worshipped.
He remained totally unaffected by fame quite disarmingly humble and accessible, constantly drawing into his orbit men and women dazzled by his warmth, his enthusiasms and his unique charisma. But behind the permanent grin he wore and the stream of his repartee, behind his image of flying genius and indestructibility, there lay a more frail human being increasingly affected by the stresses of his often terrifying flights and the awesome pressures of great fame. Smithy was born at Hamilton, Brisbane Australia on February 9 th 1897. In the 1914 - 18 war he served in the Royal Flying Corps, was injured and awarded the Military Cross. In 1918 he became an instructor in the Royal Air Force and then moved to commercial flying in 1919. The Fokker Trimotor The Fokker Trimotor, more correctly known as the Fokker F.
VII- 3 m, was the plane which opened up the first really long-distance routes to air traffic. The most famous of the Fokker Trimotor's was the Southern Cross, owned and piloted by the Australian Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith (known as Smithy to his friends and admirers. ) Southern Cross was built from the wreckage of two damaged Fokker's. Kingsford-Smith, a former squadron leader in World War I, and Charles T. P.
Ulm decided to try the first crossing of the Pacific. In 1927 they bought, from the Australian polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, the Fokker wreckage without engines or instruments. With the help of the Boeing company, the plane was rebuilt and modified with new engines for increased range. She was filled with the newest radio and navigation equipment. Named Southern Cross, and later affectionately nicknamed the old bus, the plane was to become the most popular individual aircraft of its era.
After getting financial support from a wealthy Californian, Kingsford-Smith and Ulm made test flights to determine the maximum fuel load which would allow the Southern Cross just barely to take off and fly. A flight around Australia in just over 10 days was used as a test for the Pacific crossing and the Southern Cross was shipped to North America early in 1928. Crossing of the Pacific Aviation's last great ocean barrier, the Pacific, was conquered in 1928 by Australians Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm in the Fokker F. VII/ 3 m Southern Cross. The Australians employed two Americans, Harry Lyon and James Warner, as navigator and radio operator.
Aware that it would take bulls-eye accuracy to hit their refueling stops, the Hawaiian and Fijian islands, they equipped their tri-motor Fokker with the latest blind flying instruments and radio equipment. During flight tests they gradually increased the Fokker's take-off weight to 15, 800 pounds over twice its empty weight enabling them to carry the 1, 300 gallons of fuel required on the critical 3, 200 -mile Hawaii to Fiji leg. The flight from Oakland to Hawaii went without a hitch, but the 33 -hour haul to Fiji was a nightmare of storms, torrential rain, headwinds, and turbulence. It frequently took the combined strength of both pilots to control the plane and at one stage it appeared they would run out of fuel before reaching Fiji. They eventually landed on Fiji's largest clearing a 1, 300 -foot athletic field.
With no brakes, Kingsford-Smith performed a controlled ground-loop to prevent going into the trees. After taking off from a nearby beach on the final leg to Brisbane, Australia, the airmen again encountered terrible conditions. One after another, rainstorms charged us. There was no lull. We flew in a black void as raking winds jolted the plane, Kingsford-Smith recalled. Smithy Acknowledged by Government In 1932, Kingsford-Smith was knighted for his services to aviation.
He made his last flight in Southern Cross in July 1935. The plane was acquired by the Australian National Museum in Canberra in 1941. It was restored to flying condition in 1945, made its last flight in 1946. In 1958 it went on permanent display in its own hall at Eagle Farm Airport, Brisbane. Other notable flights undertaken by Smithy included breaking the existing record of Squadron Leader Hinkle by flying from England to Australia in ten and a half days in October 1930, flying the first all-Australian air mail flight to England and back in 1931 and beating his own record by flying from England to Australia in seven days, 4 hours and 50 minutes in 1933. A plague has erected in the Passenger Terminal at Archerfield airport commemorating the first flight across the Pacific Ocean from Australia to the United States when Sir Charles Kingsford Smith took off from Archerfield Aerodrome on 21 October 1934.
The Final Flight The fate of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith remains one of aviation's great unsolved mysteries. At dusk on 7 November 1935 he and his co-pilot mechanic, Tommy Pethybridge, took off from Allahabad in India to fly non-stop through the night to Singapore. They were seen to pass over Calcutta, Arab and Rangoon which they overflew at 1. 30 am. Sometime around 2. 50 that morning, 8 November, another Australian pilot, Jimmy Melrose who was heading south from Rangoon in a much slower plane, a Percival Gull, was excited to see the Altair overtake him over the Andaman Sea. On arrival in Singapore later that day Melrose was surprised to learn that the Lady Southern Cross had not arrived. Despite a huge search of the entire Rangoon-Singapore route by squadrons of RAF aircraft no trace of the Altair was found for 18 months.
In May 1937 its starboard undercarriage leg was picked up by Burmese fishermen on the rocky shore of Aye Island off the south coast of Burma about 140 miles south-east of Rangoon. The theory grew that Smithy had flown into the 460 -foot top of the jungle-covered island and the aircraft had plunged into the sea, the wheel breaking off and floating ashore. But an Australian expedition to the island in 1983 searched the seabed without success. However, if Melrose had genuinely seen the Altair overtake him, and they were the only two aircraft in Burma airspace that night, then Smithy would have crashed at least 100 miles south of Aye and the wheel drifted north. The conclusions that five years research into the mystery led Ian Mackersey finally to arrive at are fully detailed in his book.
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