Michael Molkentin - Flying the Southern Cross: Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith

Michael Molkentin

FLYING THE SOUTHERN CROSS

Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

Published by the National Library of Australia

Canberra ACT 2600

National Library of Australia 2012

Text Michael Molkentin

Foreword John Ulm

Books published by the National Library of Australia further the Librarys objectives to interpret and highlight the Librarys collections and to support the creative work of the nations writers and researchers.

This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 , no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Dewey Number: 629.13092

Commissioning Publisher: Susan Hall

Publishers Editor: John Mapps

Designer: Elizabeth Faul

Image coordinators: Felicity Harmey and Gina Wyatt

Special photography: Digitisation and Photography Branch, National Library of Australia

Production: Melissa Bush

Printed and bound in Singapore by Imago

Cover image: see pages

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

My earliest recollection of my father Charles Ulm dates to a few days after he completed the trans-Pacific flight in June 1928, when he came to my new home where I was living with my mother and stepfatherbringing a Hornby train set for my seventh birthday.

In his final six years I was with him for odd weekends, maybe a total of ten days.

His newly appointed secretary Ellen Rogers happened to live in the next street. By arrangement she would pick up little Johnny steam train to the Quay ferry, tram to Martin Place, and his Australian National Airways CEOs office in Challis House. Then in the tiny black Triumph with Rog and a typewriter in the dicky seat to his Dover Heights bungalow where with his big Zeiss binoculars I would watch the great Sydney Harbour Bridges arches edging together.

I recall a day on his yacht with him holding me by shorts and shirt over the side for fun; and being ordered below by Captain Ulm when she heeled over defying the Southerly Buster. He explained how wind suction over sails led to the design of aeroplane wings.

John Ulm, 14 years old in 1935 with Charles Kingsford Smith.

School friends asked whether my dad was going to fly in the 1934 LondonMelbourne Air Race. He wrote saying no, because he was planning his survey flight for the first regular trans-Pacific airmail services. When he was lost, strangers touched me in the street. They knew who the little boy was. It brought it all in on me.

In 1935 (his own last year) Smithy kindly had me in my fathers pilot seat alongside him for the last flight of the Southern Crossme wearing my fathers trans-Pacific flying helmet and waving proudly to my school assembled below.

It was after flying in my own war, and with a career developing aviation journalism and Australian international airline expansion, that I came fully to appreciate the centrality of my family name and my fathers towering stature in our aviation history, attested by contemporaries and historians.

Loyal to her last day, Rog collated the records which we lodged in the libraries: the Charles T.P. Ulm Collection. Papers and memorabilia keep coming in to me, though, the latest being his last cabled message to The Sun from Fiji before taking off for Brisbane and triumph.

The Pacific flight raised the eyes of a distant, insular Australia to a world now brought near. Today, a million Australians live and prosper abroad, and we catch planes like buses.

Technical record that it is, my fathers log is about four people: Charles Kingsford Smith and his flying skills, Charles Ulm and his organising ability, and the vital Americans, radioman Jim Warner and navigator Harry Lyon. (Many years later, Harry confided to me: The latest model drift recorder Charlie Ulm had acquired for me was so awkward to hold out the little door to take readings that I threw the goddamn thing into the Pacific. His dead reckoning saved them all.)

Michael Molkentin has mined the lode from this stuff of history, uncovering the character of the cast memberstheir personalities, pluses and minuses, strengths and weaknesses, foibles and failings.

With exacting research, insight and historical integrity he has masterfully crafted his gripping account of Australian achievement. It will sit well with the treasures carefully tended in our pillared National Library, itself Australias richest treasure.

John Ulm

AUTHORS NOTE

Each chapter in this book begins with an extract from Charles Ulms log presented as a facsimile page from the original document, together with a transcription.

Ulms log has previously been published on two occasions. In 1928, during the trans-Pacific flight, Sydney newspaper The Sun carried extracts from the log. Later that year, an account of the flight ghost-written by journalist Hugh Buggy, The Story of the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Flight 1928, also included a transcribed version of Ulms log. In both cases Ulms words were edited to varying degrees (and at times extensively). In this book transcripts of the log appear for the first time unedited from the original document, held in the National Library of Australias Charles Kingsford Smith papers (MS 209, Item 1). The entries are transcribed without corrections to spelling, grammar or punctuation.

The National Library has digitised the log and made it freely available online at http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.ms-ms209-1.

Curiously, three pages are missing from the original log, containing, it appears, entries describing Southern Cross arrival in Honolulu, Suva and Brisbane. There is no trace of when and how these pages were separated from the original. However the versions published in 1928 contain these now-missing extracts, allowing us to fill these gaps in the original documents chronology.

The crew of Southern Cross described their experiences in various memoirs, articles and interviews. These are quoted freely throughout the narrative, though quotations from Ulms log are always attributed as such. A full list of references for quotations from other sources is available at http://publishing.nla.gov.au/refs or www.michaelmolkentin.com.

Throughout the flight, Ulm recorded time based on the time zone of their point of take-off. Occasionally he noted the time at their current location but prefaced this as ships time. The initials PCT in the log stand for Pacific Coast Time.

For clarity, measurements in the chapter text are converted to metric values with the exception of altitude, which remains in feet, as it does in modern aviation vernacular.