Australian Airmen Have Blazed Many Sky Trails.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18496, 23 June 1928, Page 19 (Supplement)

Australian Airmen Have Blazed Many Sky Trails.

Long List of Pilots Have Gained Fame and Honour.

Smith and Ulm, heroes of the Pacific epic, are the newest stars in a constellation of airmen, of which Australia is justly proud. When the deeds of these men, who braved the perils of the air to blaze new trails, pass by in review, one is amazed by the great record established by Australians, compared with the feats of the daring and skilful flyers of other nations of the world, says a writer in the “ Sunday News,” Sydney.

IT was the war which gave Australians their big chance to show what they could do in the air, and the records of these wartime flyers demonstrate to the full how T quickly Australians proved themselves "to possess all the necessary attributes of the successful pilot—courage, coolness, adaptability, and quick decision. As with Kingsford Smith, the man trhom the nation hails to-day, it is the lessons learnt in the hard school of war which have enabled Australian pilots in recent years to set new marks in aviation progress. Glorious Failure. Such a pilot was the intrepid Harry Hawker, whose glorious failure when he attempted to cross the Atlantic in 1919, accompanied by Lieutenant Grieve, thrilled the world. After weary days of waiting for the weather to clear, Hawker left Newfoundland on May 18. When he was more than 100 miles from the Irish coast, he sent a message that his petrol supply was giving out. Several days went by with no news of the airmen, and it was presumed they had perished. Search vessels could find no trace of them. Then, dramatically, came a message from a coastguard in the north of Scotland. The flyers had been rescued by the Danish steamer Mary. When a destroyer took the men off the Mary, they related how, off the

coast of Ireland, their engine failed, and they cruised about for two hours, until the}* sighted the steamer. They spent two hours in the water before they could be taken aboard. Hawker met his death eventually in a ’plane crash. The Smiths. Six parties set out from England in 1919 to attempt to win the Commonwealth’s prize of £IO,OOO for a flight to Australia. . Two of them succeeded, but four men gave their lives in the hazard—Ross, Douglass, Howell and Fraser. The Smith brothers—Ross and Keith —who were later knighted, performed the feat in twenty-nine days, with the aid of their mechanics, Bennett and Shiers. And in doing so, they brought home to an admiring world the fact that the flight was an essentially businesslikeThey created the feeling that the day was not far distant when such a flight would liecome almost a commonplace;, that the great future of the aeroplane was as a regular and speedy means of communication. The Vickers-Vimy machine which the Smith brothers used was regarded at the time as the last word in aircraft Its motive power was supplied by two Rolls-Royce engines, each of 350 horsepower. and the maximum speed was more than 100 miles an hour. Towards

the end of the war it had been planned to use a flight of similar machines for the bombing of Berlin. The Smith took off from the Hounslow aerodrome in winter, on Novembe. 12. 1919, and rain and storms assailed the 'plane all the way to Crete. At Pisa, in Italy, the machine landed in a bog, and was freed with great difficulty. In the air again, the flyers were battered by storms all the way to Rome; but the next stage, to Crete, was most dangerous of all. The weather was appalling, and in the midst of the driving smother the 'plane, flying at a height of 500 feet, nearly hit an island. On across Egypt, Persia, India Burma, and the Straits Settlements the airmen sped, until, on December 1C twenty-nine days after leaving England they landed at Darwin, having been ii the air for 135 hours. Sydney people who witnessed the ai rival of the Vickers-Vimv in Svdne; will never forget the thrill that swep over the city as the great ’plane swoop ed dawn out of the blue. Blazed the Trail. Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith ha< blazed the trail, along which later wer

to follow Parer arid MMntosh, Cobham, Hinkler, de Pinedo, and Captain Lancaster, It was in 1922 that Sir Ross Smith and the mechanic, Bennett, paid the price of the air. They were testing a new amphibian machine at Weymouth, England, when it nose-dived, and crashed, both .men being killed. While the Smiths were winging their wav to Australia, in 1919. two other Australians, Parer and M’lntosh, were gallant 1 y achieving what experts called the impossible. Without financial backing, in a sec-ond-hand machine, which possessed an engine that gave continual trouble, they were also getting to Australia. They left England before Ross Smith. They arrived in Australia months later —their flight occupied 206 days—but it was bulldog courage alone which got them here. When the battered little ’plane landed at Sydney—after a crash on the way—it was literally tied together with fencing-wire. Light ’Plane’s Value. Hinkler’s triumphant England-Aus- ' tralia solo dash in sixteen days, performed last February, proved conclu-

sivcly the value of the light ’plane. His baby Avian-Cirrus ’plane covered the 12,000 miles in 134 hours’ flying time—without repairs. Such a machine can be bought for £730, and the airman’s consumption of petrol and oil on the flight cost only £SO. Those figures, as the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Sainuel Hoare, told the House of Commons, are a striking indication of the great potentialities of aircraft for communications over the vast stretches of the Empire, where other means of communication are either non-existent or relatively undeveloped. Hinkler, Born Airman. Hinkler, who is a natiVe of Bundaberg, Queensland, gained a reputation for pluck and determination during the war, when he was in the anti-Zeppelin service, and a scout on the French and Italian fronts. He is a born airman. As a boy he experimented with gliders, and, just before the war broke out, he worked his passage to England to get a job in an aeroplane works. The war over, he put up some valuable non-stop feats. But the great flight to Australia was always his ambition. How nobly he realised it everyone knows. Sir George Wilkins. The flight across the North Pole on April 23 this year o# the South Australian airman; George H. Wilkins, earned him the knighthood, which was announced in the Birthday Honours recently. Xhe career of this picturesque Australian is a modern romance. After taking a course at the Adelaide School of Mines, he entered the moving

picture business in Sydney, and in 1912 went to England. Not long afterwards he and his movie camera were in the Balkans, where, running all sorts of risks, he secured a great series of war pictures. After a trip to Trinidad, Wilkins joined the Stefannson expedition to the North Polar Seas as photographer in 1913. The party drifted about in the ice for three years, and then Wilkins heard about the war. He joined the A.1.F., winning an M.C. and bar. Returning to Australia, he was in turn a member of the British Imperial Antarctic expedition and the Shackleton expedition. After a- tour of Australia, during which he collected specimens for the British Museum of Natural History, Wilkins journeyed to America in 1925. In the Arctic. Since then his name has constantly been before the public as an Arctic explorer. This year he decided to fly across the North Pole. After having been twenty-one hours in the air, Wilkins, who was accompanied by Lieutenant Eielson, of the U.S.A. Air Service, completed a flight from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitzbergen. k And now have come Captain Kingsford Smith and Ulm, to bring Australia again under the spot light of the world by a flight which has never been excelled.