Four magnificent men in their flying machine
ON THE morning of November 12, 100 years ago, four young airmen blew warm air into their cupped hands and stamped their feet against the bitter cold on Hounslow Heath, not far from where Heathrow Airport would later be built.
The men were about to climb aboard a flimsy aircraft made of fabric, wire and wood, open to the elements and built only 16 years after the first Wright Brothers’ flight, which had lasted just seconds.
On the wing was the plane’s registration code, G-EAOU. Someone nervously joked that it stood for “God ’elp all of us”.
You have probably never heard of dashing pilot Ross Smith, his navigator brother Keith and engineers Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers but the perilous journey they were about to embark on was one of the greatest feats of aviation, an adventure of incredible bravery and derring do which, a century ago, made the world a smaller place.
I flew between the UK and Australia more times than I care to remember during my years as Sky News’s Sydney correspondent. Without fail though, at some stage, as I tucked into a hot meal or gazed out of the window I would spare a thought for Smith and his crew, and wonder what they would make of me flying at 40,000ft flicking through movies and sipping a gin and tonic in the calm, dimly lit cabin.
In 1919 Australian prime minister Billy Hughes wanted to connect his new, isolated country to the rest of the world after the Great War. He offered a £10,000 prize to the first aircrew to fly from London to Australia within 30 days.
Most put the chance of success at 50/50. Of six planes that left London, only Ross and his men made it within the set time – in 28 days – landing in a hot, dusty Darwin, thousands of cheering locals drowning out their two Rolls-royce engines.
Lainie Anderson is author of Long Flight Home, a novel about the Great Air Race. “It was an incredible human endeavour,” she says. “Little wonder the feat was likened to Columbus discovering the Newworld.”
Conditions that morning could not have been worse for the first leg, to Lyon.
Ross Smith wrote in his diary: “This sort of flying is a rotten game. The cold is hell and I am a silly ass for having ever embarked on the flight.”
The men had squeezed into the First World War Vickers Vimy bomber with no cockpit cover and were open to the elements with little more than a compass for navigation. Even crossing the Channel was an achievement. The next day a rival plane took off from Hounslow Heath but crashed minutes later, killing the crew. Two other aviators ran out of fuel and crashed off Corfu. Rescuers failed to reach them.
Smith and his crew had moments when they, too, thought they would not make it. They had to be dug out of mud in Italy and, flying into Calcutta, a flock of birds flew into one of the propellers. Smith just managed to stop the plane hitting trees before landing on a racecourse. In Indonesia, hundreds of locals took bamboo matting from the walls of their homes to make a runway.
The bravery of the crew was matched by their ingenuity. “They landed in jungle clearings and on golf courses,” says Anderson, adding that the men even used chewing gum to fix a broken pipe. At 3.40pm on December 10, 1919, the Vimy made history, landing in Darwin, winning the £10,000 prize. A message came from King George V: “Your success will bring Australia nearer to the mother country and I warmly congratulate you and your crew.”
The remarkable flight has inspired others. In 1994 Lang Kidby and Peter Mcmillan flew the same journey in a replica plane. “In the air it was exactly as they had experienced in a dog of an aircraft,” recalls Kidby. “I think we would have had similar emotions when we touched down in Darwin after all the fatigue, trials and tribulations but there can only be one ‘first’.” The Vimy that brought northern and southern hemispheres closer now sits in an unloved hangar at Adelaide airport. However after a long campaign it is to get a proper home, in the airport’s new terminal. The journey is different now – on March 25, 2018, the first scheduled non-stop flight between Australia and the UK arrived at Heathrow. Qantas flight QF9 completed its 9,009-mile journey from Perth in 17 hours. But it is the men who made that first flight who will never be forgotten...