Charles Ulm : The untold story of one of Australia's greatest aviation pioneers by Rick Searle

Author:Rick Searle [Searle, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-07-24T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Coffee Royal

The disappearance of the Southern Cross, and the series of events that followed, which became known as the Coffee Royal affair, marked the beginning of a change in the public perception of Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith. People would begin to question their credibility and their competence. Their image as infallible and intrepid aviators would start to tarnish.

The flight did not begin well. Twelve minutes after leaving Richmond, as Litchfield opened a cabin window to obtain a drift reading, he accidentally bumped the release mechanism for McWilliams’s trailing receiver aerial, which rapidly unwound to its full length, broke away and was lost overboard. The Southern Cross could no longer receive any radio messages.

They had covered only 30 kilometres and it would have been a relatively simple matter to return to Richmond, replace the aerial and start again. But it would have meant dumping more than 3000 litres of fuel, and Smithy did not want to do that. He decided to fly on.

It was a fateful decision, because they had no up-to-date knowledge of the conditions at their destination. A senior official of the Atlantic Union Oil Company had been sent to Wyndham to locate suitable landing grounds and, before the Southern Cross left, he had cabled that prolonged monsoon rains had inundated the whole area. The cable further stated that, although the weather was now fine, the landing grounds were probably still too soft for a landing. The official had promised to check the condition of the surface personally and report back later in the day.

Kingsford Smith, in a hurry, had decided not to wait. This was unfortunate, because the next cable reported that the conditions in Wyndham had deteriorated further. But by the time it was received in Richmond, the Southern Cross was incommunicado and on her way.

The flight across the continent, although bumpy, was uneventful, but at about 7 p.m. Ulm, who had begun sending regular reports to The Sun, reported that they were flying blind in thick cloud. In the early hours of the next morning it began to rain heavily. As morning dawned, after a long night of instrument flying, Smithy eased the Southern Cross down. They came out of the cloud at 50 feet above rocky and desolate country. It was difficult, dangerous flying, but it was essential to keep the ground in sight if they were to locate the coast. Shortly before 10 a.m. it appeared, but they could not match the scanty detail on Litchfield’s small-scale maps with the terrain that was unfolding below. He had three pages from The Times Atlas, which were small scale, with limited detail, and two small-scale Admiralty Charts, of ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ Australia, designed for seafaring and with no detail inland from the shoreline. All were virtually useless for Litchfield’s purpose. They flew about for hours, hopelessly lost.

At one stage they circled a small settlement and dropped a message asking for directions to Wyndham. They flew off in the direction indicated by a man

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