Travellers' Checks | How the ill-fated first flight from Portugal to Macau ended up in Shenzhen

When three Portuguese airmen took off from Lisbon 95 years ago, little did they imagine how fraught their journey would be

Having first crashed in India, the pilots set off in a new plane, only to crash-land in a cemetery

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Portuguese pilots José Manuel Sarmento de Beires (left) and António Jacinto da Silva Brito Paes, who attempted the first flight from Portugal to Macau, in 1924.

Adam Nebbs

Published: 2:30pm, 27 Sep 2019Updated: 2:30pm, 27 Sep 2019

On a restaurant wall, on the 26th floor of the Club Lusitano building on Ice House Street, in Central, hangs a broken aeroplane propeller. It is a relic of the first-ever flight from Portugal to Macau. Or at least what was supposed to have been. Portuguese pilots José Manuel Sarmento de Beires and António Jacinto da Silva Brito Paes, and engineer Manuel António Gouveia, left Lisbon in a French three-seater Breguet biplane on April 2, 1924, hoping to “bring news from the Motherland to old Macao and all her scattered sons in the Far East”.

After a troubled journey, they crashed in India on May 7 and had to buy a new two-seater aircraft, leaving Gouveia to follow on by train and ship. The plane eventually reached the skies above Macau on June 20, but bad weather prevented a landing. The aviators made instead for Hong Kong but were blown off course and crash-landed in a cemetery across the border, in Shenzhen.

They had to travel to Kowloon by train. What remained of the aircraft was later retrieved. Gouveia arrived in Hong Kong by ship on June 24, and the following day a Portuguese gunboat was sent from Macau to collect the three men.

The people of Macau were forgiving of the misplaced landing and their delight at hard-proven potential air links with Portugal was made clear. “When the aviators stepped ashore the jetty was invaded by the crowds,” reported The Hongkong Telegraph. “Young ladies showered flowers on the airmen as they landed, His Excellency the Governor being the first to greet the aviators. Then amidst the cheers of the onlookers, the party moved to the Town Hall, flowers being thrown out of the windows all along the route.”

However, it would be more than 70 years before the first commercial flights from Portugal to Macau began. TAP Air Portugal launched a scheduled service just after the opening of Macau’s airport, in 1995, but it was not sustainable and ended after a couple of loss-making years. Air Macau marks its 25th anniversary this year, but currently flies only as far west as Bangkok, Thailand, and seems unlikely to ever set its sights on Lisbon.

Photographs and an article about the 1924 flight, as well as a photo of the wall-mounted propeller, can be found at clublusitano.com.

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