First solo flight of the Tasman
In 1931, a daring Australian crash-landed in New Zealand. Brad Flahive reports on the first solo crossing of the Tasman.
As half a dozen settlers worked their fields a foreign noise could be heard in the skies above Harihari, on the West Coast. A single-engined Avro Avian biplane flown by a young aviator could be seen searching for flat ground to land.
The year was 1931, an era when only 7 per cent of New Zealanders owned an automobile, so a plane was a rare sight indeed.
Farmer Alfred Walls was ‘‘greatly amazed’’ to see the aircraft land in a nearby swamp and spectacularly flip upon impact.
He rode out on horseback to greet the unannounced visitor, who had fallen from his cockpit into the mud.
Emerging from the Harihari swamp, shortly after 3pm on January 7, was 21-year-old Australian Guy Menzies, the first man to fly across the Tasman solo.
Walls escorted the young pilot to a neighbour’s house, where, over a cup of tea, he spoke freely of his trip.
His journey began in ‘‘good weather, but after covering 200 miles he met bad weather, and had to steer solely by compass’’, Walls told the Auckland Star.
The aviator had left Sydney under the cover of night 12 hours earlier. So secret were his intentions that not even his mother knew of the venture.
Such a stir had been caused by the young Australian that the Harihari residents urged him to stay for the night, but he told the Star he needed to push on to Hokitika, to see his principals, the Atlantic Union Oil Company.
By the time he made it to Hokitika word had spread, and, despite the rain, the whole town gathered to meet the celebrity airman.
The crowd escorted him into the township, and when trying to reach the door of his hotel, ‘‘Menzies became the centre of a press of womenfolk seeking to embrace him’’, the Auckland Star reported.
‘‘Some did, but unfortunately for others the police rescued the young man and cleared a way for him.’’
The fans gathered outside his hotel and cheered when he appeared on the balcony, a reception common for the brave aviation pioneers of the time.
‘‘Not unless somebody gave me 50,000 quid would I take on the trip again,’’ Menzies said in his first interview the next morning.
‘‘It was a hard job, but I got through, and I am proud of myself.
‘‘Fog and cloud enshrouded the Southern Alps and prevented me from going on to Christchurch,’’ he told the Star.
‘‘I could not see very far, and I did not know whether the mountains were 2000 or 12,000ft high. I could not take the risk, so I looked for the nearest landing ground.
‘‘My pick was bad, for the ground turned out to be soft and marshy, but it was too late to worry.
‘‘I got a few scratches on my lips, but nothing much.’’
He told reporters his biggest battle was against his subconscious telling him he was being carried off course.
‘‘All the time there was something urging me to turn north after I had covered 500 miles.
‘‘I knew that would have been fatal . . . many fellows have come to grief through following promptings instead of instruments.’’
The 1716km distance had taken
‘‘It was a hard job, but I got through, and I am proud of myself.’’ Guy Menzies in his first interview the morning after his flight
12 hours 12 minutes, more than two hours faster than the first crossing, made by his fellow countryman, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, in 1928.
Captain Leggatt, the man who gave Menzies his first flying lessons, told the Evening Post the flight was ‘‘fine but foolish’’.
‘‘Nobody could detract from the greatness of the achievement, but any airman, no matter how skilled, who attempts a solo flight across the Tasman in a single-engined machine is foolish,’’ he said.
Menzies went on to be a Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and was killed when his aircraft was shot down over the Mediterranean in 1940. He was 31.
He is commemorated at the Alamein Memorial in Egypt, a long way from the swamps of the West Coast where he once told locals he ‘‘felt the happiest man in the world’’.