The Wrights showed us how to fly but Australian pilots then took it a lot further, writes Bruce Harris.
Average speed through the air 31 miles longest 59 seconds inform press home christmas Orville.
With this telegram to his father on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright signalled the start of a revolution that transformed the world in a way no one could have foreseen. His conquest of the air with his brother Wilbur at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aroused little interest. Only four newspapers in the United States carried the story.
Now, 100 years later, hundreds of thousands of travellers across the world are flying every hour of the day. In Australian skies, almost 180,000 people fly each day between Australian cities and regional centres at altitudes of more than 12,000 metres.
The Wright brothers showed us how to fly, but when it came to demonstrating that people could travel long distances by air, it was daredevil Australian pilots and navigators who were up there pointing the way.
Many of those Australians began flying in World War I with the British Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Navy Air Service and, later, in the Australian Flying Corps.
Among them were Charles Kingsford Smith, Patrick Gordon Taylor, Bert Hinkler, Ross Smith, Hubert Wilkins, Wilmot Hudson Fysh, Sydney Cotton and the air aces Major Roderic Dallas, Captain Robert Little, Captain Arthur Cobby and the VC winner Lieutenant Frank MacNamara.
Australian airmen quickly appreciated the promises of aircraft. In 1919 a £10,000 prize was offered for the first plane to fly across the North Atlantic non-stop from Newfoundland to England. Harry Hawker, an Australian wartime test pilot, aircraft mechanic and designer, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve, a Royal Navy navigator, took off in their Sopwith Atlantic biplane with a dinghy in the aircraft fuselage - "just in case". They were forced to ditch in the mid-Atlantic, miraculously finding a Danish tramp steamer. Hawker went on to lead the aircraft company bearing his name.
Australia's prime minister, Billy Hughes, offered £10,000 to the first Australian to fly from England to Darwin in 30 days. That started the 1919 great air race, which would take aircraft further than they had flown before.
On November 12, the Aussie competitors started taking off from Hounslow, west London. Within minutes, two of them, Roger Douglas and Leslie Ross, died when their aircraft, Alliance Endeavour, crashed.
Three more aircraft crashed along the way, and two airmen, Captain Cedric Howell and Lieutenant George Frazer, drowned in the Mediterranean.
Only a big, lumbering Vimy bomber, entered by the Vickers Aircraft Company, was left. With a crew of four huddled in open cockpits, it ploughed on, finally reaching Darwin 27 days and 20 hours later. The pilot, Ross Smith, and his brother Keith, the navigator, were accompanied by Sergeant Wally Shiers and Sergeant Jim Bennett to maintain the engines and airframe.
Only one other entrant finished. In a battered De Havilland De H9 biplane, Ray Parer and John McIntosh were late starters and later finishers. But they were the first to fly a single-engined plane from England to Australia.
Among the first to congratulate the Smith brothers were two other Australian former flying officers, Wilmot Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, who had driven overland surveying landing sites across Queensland and the Northern Territory to help air-race planes make their way down to the cities.
Just a year later, Fysh, McGinness and a wealthy grazier, Fergus McMaster, would register Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited.
Captain Henry Wrigley, DFC, and Sergeant Arthur Murphy, DFC, of the Australian Flying Corps, had set off from Point Cook in Victoria to check the suitability of landing sites selected by ground teams. They flew a little BE2E single-engined former World War I reconnaissance machine with twin cockpits, fitted with extra fuel tanks on the wings. It took them 46 days. They arrived in Darwin two days after the Vimy but they were the first to cross the continent by air.
In 1920 the Vimy and crew made a triumphal tour of the southern capital cities. They wound up in South Australia, where the Smith brothers were born and where the Vimy is kept on display in Adelaide.
For the next 30 years Australian airmen would be a big force in the development of long-distance aviation.
Bert Hinkler, a Queenslander, was one. A wartime pilot in the Royal Navy Air Service, he then joined the aircraft company AV Roe and Co as a test pilot and engineer. In 1920 he shipped a tiny Avro Baby to Sydney. He flew from Sydney to Bundaberg non-stop, setting a new long-distance record for a light aircraft.
In 1928 Hinkler made the first solo flight from England to Australia in an Avro Avian. Tin Pan Alley celebrated with a hit song, Hustling Hinkler, Up in the Sky.
Edgar Percival, an Australian light horseman, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and fought as a pilot-captain in the Middle East. By 1924 he was back in Australia as a civilian competitor in air races, before leaving for Britain to race in the prestigious King's Cup. He set about designing and building his own two-seater racing aircraft. Handicapping kept him from winning King's Cup races, but his Percival Gull was often the fastest plane.
Leading racing pilots of the day were soon flying the Percival Vega Gull, or the smaller Mew Gull. Charles Kingsford Smith and Jean Batten, a New Zealander, would break long-distance records in Percival's machines.
In April 1924 two more wartime pilots achieved a distance record of another kind. They set off from Point Cook, Victoria, to survey and circumnavigate the coastline. Their aircraft was a Fairey 111D single-engined biplane with a wing-span of 14 metres - a seaplane of wood and fabric, fitted with wooden floats. Wing Commander Stanley "Jimmy" Goble was leader and navigator. Flight Lieutenant Ivor McIntyre was pilot.
They flew 13,570 kilometres, fixing damaged floats along the way and replacing the engine at Broome, Western Australia. They returned to Point Cook after a 44-day marathon. One of Britain's top aviation experts was recorded as saying: "This is the finest flight in the history of aviation."
But Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm were about to set the bar far higher.
Kingsford Smith had won the Military Cross as an audacious fighter pilot with the Royal Flying Corps. By 1927, with record-breaking flights within Australia, he had earned the admiration of the man in the street. People fondly called him Smithy.
In 1928 he and Ulm found a second-hand Fokker FV11B-3M trimotor in the US. It was renewed, fitted with extra fuel tanks and named Southern Cross. Kingsford Smith, the captain, and Ulm, the organiser and second pilot, were joined by Americans Harry Lyon as navigator and Jim Warner as radio operator. They took off from Oakland, California, on May 31, 1928, exactly one year and one week after Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight from New York to Paris.
Lindbergh had covered 5740 kilometres. The Southern Cross was to fly more than twice as far - 12,231 kilometres across the Pacific, refuelling in Honolulu and Fiji.
Southern Cross reached Eagle Farm, Brisbane, on June 9, to be greeted by a crowd of thousands and worldwide acclaim. They had flown a total of 83 hours and 11 minutes to become the first airmen to fly across the world's biggest ocean.
Another Royal Flying Corps pilot, a friend of both Kingsford Smith and Ulm, was Patrick Gordon Taylor. In 1934 Kingsford Smith and Taylor flew a reverse flight across the Pacific from Sydney to California in a Lockheed Altair, the Lady Southern Cross. They chalked up another record: the first Pacific crossing in a single-engined aircraft.
Taylor continued to survey air routes, first across the Indian Ocean then opening up new routes across the Pacific, including Australia to Chile via Easter Island. Knighted for his services to aviation, he died of natural causes in 1966.
Ulm, trying to retrace his earlier Pacific crossing in a twin-engined Airspeed Envoy with co-pilot and navigator, disappeared before reaching Honolulu in December 1934.
Kingsford Smith, who had been knighted in 1932, and his co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge, crashed somewhere off Burma trying to set an England-to-Australia record in November 1935. The only remnant of his Lady Southern Cross was a wheel and strut, now part of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum collection.
Bruce Harris is co-author of Dreamers, Doers & Daredevils - Celebrating 100 Years of Aviation, Five Mile Press, $39.95.
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