An Airman Remembers

Clip 1: An epic flight

Taken from the TV program An Airman Remembers (1964)

Original title classification PG – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

This clip recounts the story of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and his aeroplane the Southern Cross. It includes archival footage of the record-breaking 1928 trip across the Pacific with Smithy and his colleague Charles Ulm, and their arrival in Honolulu.

Curator’s notes

An ABC announcer is used throughout the film to narrate over the remarkable archival footage of the earliest days of Australian aviation although, at other moments of the documentary, the laconic Sir Gordon Taylor GC MC talks to camera to tell in his own words some of those remarkable journeys in which he too was a pioneer. The style is simplicity itself, but the effectiveness of the script and editing makes the story compelling. Sir Gordon Taylor is telling the story of a man with whom he flew on many occasions.

The feature film Smithy (1946), from which much of this material was taken, was directed by Ken G Hall, one of Australia’s leading filmmakers of the time. Smithy was made to commemorate the life of an Australian hero and one of the world’s great aviation pioneers, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.

Janet Bell, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This black-and-white clip shows Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith and his aeroplane the Southern Cross. The early scenes from the 1930s introduce Kingsford Smith – in an air commodore’s uniform, holding his baby and at the controls of various aeroplanes, including the Southern Cross. The following scenes, filmed in 1927–28, show the plane being modified to fly across the Pacific. The final sequence shows the four-man crew and the first leg of their record-setting flight to Honolulu, Hawaii. Orchestral music and fanfare accompany the commentary.

Educational value points

The clip celebrates Charles Kingsford Smith (1897–1935), a great hero of Australian aviation and the first to fly across the Pacific, in 1928. A decorated pilot in the First World War (1914–18), Kingsford Smith was also the first to fly non-stop across Australia, in 1928, and the first to make a successful flight from London to New York across the North Atlantic Ocean, in 1930. In his famous aircraft the Southern Cross he became the first pilot to fly around the world, in 1930.

Kingsford Smith and his partner Charles Ulm (1898–1934) conceived the Pacific flight as a way to kick-start their stalled aviation careers. They hoped to win the financial rewards – £5,000 in this case – offered by the Australian Government for first flights connecting Australia with Europe and the USA. With two Americans, Harry Lyon as navigator and James Warner as radio operator, they took off from California on 31 May 1928 and reached Brisbane on 9 June.

The Pacific flight consisted of three legs – Oakland, California to Hawaii, Hawaii to Fiji and Fiji to Brisbane – and while the first leg was easier than the other two, it was far from the ‘plain sailing’ that the narrator describes. The leg took 27 h and 28 min and for most of the time the aircraft was without its directional radio beam. With Lyon navigating by dead reckoning, they found the airfield at Honolulu and landed to the enthusiastic reception seen in the clip.

The Southern Cross, as modified by Kingsford Smith and Ulm, was a Dutch Fokker F.VIIb-3m monoplane fitted with three Wright Whirlwind engines. With a wingspan of 21.8 m, a length of 15.0 m and a height of 3.9 m, in 1928 it was thought to be ‘enormous, capable of anything’, as the narrator describes. It had a cruising speed of 150 km per h. Fully loaded with its crew of four, the plane weighed 6,840 kg, of which 291 kg was crew, 3,541 kg benzene and 109 kg oil.

The Southern Cross had been acquired in 1927 from Australian polar explorer George Hubert Wilkins (1888–1958) and historical footage in the clip indicates that its body was modified according to specifications that Kingsford Smith designed for the Pacific flight. Linen was glued to the wooden wing spars and fuselage longerons to create the wings and the desired shape of the fuselage, which was then possibly covered with three-ply.

As revealed by the actuality film footage, the attempt on the Pacific was news even before the Southern Cross took off, and when it landed in Brisbane, Kingsford Smith was already a celebrity. Broadcasts from the cockpit had been relayed to radio stations throughout Australia during the flight. His continuing heroic status is reflected in the narrator’s comment that ‘Smithy flew up and down and round the world as easily as you and I cross the street’.