Life in a great flying machine
With the notable exception of Charles Lindbergh, who quit while he was ahead, most of the great pioneering aviators of the 1930s shared a common fate. Think of Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson and Antoine de Saint-Exupery - they each took off one day from some dusty airfield in a rickety aircraft and vanished into thin air.
For these famous names, their mysterious ends were the beginning of a legend. But for Sir Charles Kingsford Smith (1897-1935), it was a flight into oblivion.
He is still revered within his native Australia, lending his name to Sydney's international airport and its surrounding district, while his portrait graces the country's $1 coin. But his epic voyages that once made him among the most famous people in the world seem to have been largely forgotten elsewhere - undeservedly so.
His feats were roughly on a par with the first moon landing more than 60 years later. He was the first to cross the Pacific by plane, in 1928, the first to fly to New Zealand, the first to fly successfully across the Atlantic east to west and breaker of records on the England to Australia run.
'It is difficult for a generation accustomed to crossing the oceans at 10 miles [16 kilometres] a minute watching movies far above the weather, to begin to imagine the fear and suffering that were the constant companion of Kingsford Smith and his crews on those great journeys,' biographer Ian Mackersey writes of Kingsford Smith's epic voyages in the fabric-covered Fokker tri-motor Southern Cross, still preserved today in Brisbane.
'Wrestling with the great bicycle-wheel control columns, he and his co-pilots had sat, unable to move about or stand up properly, for up to 50 hours at a stretch. Through the open sides of the flight deck they had been blasted by freezing air and drenched with rain. Their hearing had been bombarded to insensibility by the roar of three unsilenced engines . . . How did they manage to find small islands in mid-Pacific? To survive, unstrapped in their wicker seats, in bone-shattering turbulence amid great explosions of lightning, on crude, blind-flying instruments with no radar to warn them of the atomic forces that threatened to annihilate them inside every storm they so innocently tried to penetrate?' In this latest - and according to his own account, least hagiographic and most thorough - biography of the aviator, Mackersey tries to answer these questions and more. He tells the story of how a Brisbane-born bank manager's son grew up to become one of the bravest aviation pioneers of the age.
Showing an early affinity for recklessness, Kingsford Smith graduated via the horrors of Gallipoli and aerial combat in World War I, through dare-devil stunt flying and barnstorming to work in Australia's embryonic air transport industry. The twin dreams that gripped him were to run his own airline and to find fame and fortune pioneering long-distance routes. He was a visionary who saw the potential of long-distance aviation decades before it was feasible, yet he was feckless and uninterested when it came to the mechanics of business.