LATE CAMPBELL BLACK

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3829, 4 November 1936, Page 6

LATE CAMPBELL BLACK

TRIBUTE BY SCOTT. LOSS TO BRITISH AVIATION. - London, September 23. The death of Campbell Black, winner with C. W. A. Scott of the Eng-land-Australia Air Race in 1934, has caused profound regret throughout the country, more particularly perhaps by reason of the absurdly simple manner in which it occurred. His passing is regarded universally as a loss to British aviation, for he was ranked among the Empire’s best pilots. He was exceptionally popular, and was always unassuming about his flying, modest about his success. Much of Campbell Black’s experience was gained in East Africa, where he went after the war. He made thirteen flights between Nairobi and London when aeroplanes were far more difficult'to fly than they are now, and he was private pilot to King Edward, then Prince of Wales, in 1930 during a visit to Kenya. When he came to England he was engaged as a private pilot to Viscount Furness. Paying a tribute to Campbell Black, C. W. A. Scott said of him in the News Chronicle: —“In the air he was quite a different man to the man I knew on the ground. On the ground he was always ready to fall in line with a proposal. He gave you the impression that he did so because it was too much trouble to worry about an alternative. But in the air he was different. He knew his ground so well that he knew what was best in every case, and there was none of the casualness ne seemed to have on the ground. “In our race we fell out but once. This was after leaving Singapore and over some part of Borneo. We had been flying steadily since leaving Mildenhall some forty-odd hours before. We had just passed through the worst night of our flying careers and our

nerves were on edge. Melbourne seemed an infinity of distance away. We were both very tired. The cause of our difference was ludricrous in one way, yet important in another. Tom was flying the machine, and I was supposed to be resting. We were in high cumulus clouds through which we got rare sights of the ground beneath us. I suddenly thought Tom was steering a peculiar course. He was nearly 90 degrees off our magnetic track. I told him so. I told him to steer 135 instead of 45, on which course he was, in my opinion, wrongly flying. . . . For a few minutes he insisted he was right, and that I was wrong. 1 was chief pilot of the pair of us, and I gave him the order to fly the course I wanted. We had agreed that I should have the vote before we left London. Tom obeyed at once. . . . It is difficult to give a man such as Tom full praise for the efforts in that race. ’ It has been recalled that Campbell Black always regarded the period September-October as his fateful months. The race with Scott took place in October, 1934, and in October of last year he set off to break the Cape record in a Comet. Somewhere over the Sudan the machine burst into flames. He forced open the cockpit, jumped,- and landed safely with his parachute. And he only took a parachute because his wife, Florence Desmond, asked him to. Campbell Black was a busy man. He was a director of several companies, aviation director of a big newsreel company, and was writing highly-paid articles for a London newspaper. It is understood he was making about £3OOO a year.