How Hudson Fysh’s terrifying ride won Qantas a new aircraft

The problem of his “temporary redundancy” was solved after they were approached by thirty-year-old Charlie Knight, a leading stock and station agent from Longreach. Knight had bought one of two B.E.2e war surplus machines imported into Australia to promote the Perdriau Rubber Company, a business that would eventually merge with Dunlop. Knight wanted Qantas to deliver the now-famous machine to Longreach.

Six months earlier, Fysh’s mate Jack Butler, Perdriau’s chief pilot, had made headlines with what was to become Knight’s new machine. The jockey-sized Butler took off from Mascot at 7:50am on 9 July; after dropping off special issues of the Sydney Sun newspaper at various towns along the way, he landed at Brisbane’s quarantine ground in Lytton at 5:11pm, becoming the first pilot to travel between Australian cities in one day. But aircraft of the time were fickle things, and pilots often came unstuck.

Just a few weeks later, Butler was flying the machine over Longreach and carrying a passenger, Herb Avery, who owned the Western Motor Works in Magpie Lane. Butler was flying too low; after almost crashing into the parapet of the Imperial Hotel, he slammed into the telephone line across Duck Street, grazed a blacksmith’s shop and crashed into a tree. The aircraft’s tail was left pointing to the sky, while the front portion of the plane resembled a concertina and the propeller was splintered. Butler and Avery escaped with their lives, but Avery, who had occupied the front seat, sustained a cut face. The aircraft was eventually rebuilt. Butler limped away from the wreckage with “a cut nose and the prettiest pair of black eyes imaginable”.

Fysh’s belly was understandably full of butterflies on the morning of 31 January, when he and McGinness prepared to take their two aircraft from Mascot to Winton two thousand kilometres away. Fysh was given the B.E.2e to fly, even though he had spent only thirty minutes on the model in Egypt. He and McGinness planned to reach the NSW country town of Moree before nightfall, taking a course north to Newcastle before turning inland. Storm clouds were massing along the coast to the north of Sydney, and Fysh’s heart beat faster with the knowledge it would be a rough ride.

McGinness was piloting Qantas’s first aircraft, the 504K, and was taking the company’s first paying passenger, Hugh John Teahan, a station overseer from Kynuna who sat in the rear cockpit. Alexander Kennedy still had dibs on the first ticket for the airline’s regular scheduled services. Fysh had Arthur Baird as his passenger on a machine with the words “KNIGHT Longreach” emblazoned along the fuselage in large white capitals, an example of the latest hi-tech medium of advertising.

Only a few weeks earlier, Butler had piloted the rebuilt B.E.2e to second place in the handicap section of Sydney’s Aerial Derby behind a 504K flown by Nigel Love. Now at Mascot, Baird swung the B.E.2’s four-bladed propellor and, as Fysh revved the ninety-horsepower V8 engine, he climbed into the passenger seat in the front cockpit. McGinness started the Dyak engine using a crank handle located between his knees. Each pilot then taxied their aircraft to the end of the grass runway, opened the throttles, and lifted off into the great and dangerous adventure. In the event of becoming separated during the flight, Fysh and McGinness had agreed to rendezvous at Singleton.

Fergus McMaster was busy preparing for their arrival. He had informed the press that the two war heroes and their passengers would be in Queensland’s central west soon and that the triplane would quickly follow, with low fares on offer between Winton and Longreach. He organised three and a half tons of petrol and three cases of engine oil to be stored at the home of Frank Cory, a Longreach stock and station agent, before they were taken to a storage shed. But McMaster was facing difficulty finding insurance for the pilots and the machines, after Queensland’s State Government Insurance Office told him that it couldn’t give cover to his pilots under the Workers’ Compensation Acts because their pay exceeded £400 a year.

Each aircraft had a magnetic compass that swung all too easily with the erratic motion of flight, as well as an inclinometer, a rev counter, and an air speed indicator. The B.E.2 had a top speed of just 116 kilometres per hour, and if it flew slower than 76 kilometres per hour it would stall and drop out of the sky. The spinning propeller drove air backward in a spiral pattern, so Fysh had to push constantly on the left rudder bar to keep the wood and fabric machine in a straight line.

He and McGinness cruised over Sydney Heads and past the bridgeless harbour towards Manly, then followed the coast north. But in their noisy open cockpits, the airmen were assaulted by strong winds and constant turbulence as the sky darkened. McGinness, the far more experienced pilot, flew the Avro through gaps in the thickening clouds and came down to just 500 feet (160 metres) in order to dodge others. Fysh’s old feelings of apprehension made his nerves taut and his palms sweat; he feared that with his limited experience as a pilot he wasn’t up to blind flying through cloud, but other than turn back there was nothing he could do except plunge hopefully into the thick billowing blackness. The compass began to gyrate wildly. Sitting on the front pew, Baird wondered what the hell Fysh was doing as the B.E.2 was tossed about by the weather. He knew in these sorts of conditions there was the likelihood of hail, which would tear the plane apart.

Fysh, enveloped by the storm cloud, quickly became disoriented. Then the engine cut out. The aircraft began to spin as Fysh grappled for control. As the B.E.2 plummeted, he feared that the cloud was on top of a hill. Spinning wildly, he wasn’t sure which way was up. A ray of light appeared in the darkness. Through their goggles, Fysh and Baird glimpsed a valley below. Fysh’s disorientation lifted with a point of reference, but he could see no way through the clouds ahead and didn’t want to risk another dizzy spell. There wasn’t enough flat ground for them to land safely; there was, though, a bushy hillside near a mining pithead.

“Fysh, enveloped by the storm cloud, quickly became disoriented. Then the engine cut out. The aircraft began to spin as Fysh grappled for control.”

Fysh turned in towards it and — with McGinness far ahead, looking around and wondering what had happened to his mate — the less experienced pilot jolted along to a bumpy but safe landing as he and Baird tore through the bushes on an uphill slope.

The aircraft stopped next to a miner’s cottage. As Fysh and Baird, every nerve trembling, climbed out to inspect themselves and the machine for damage, the startled miner’s wife ran from her home to check on these visitors from the heavens. Relieved that they had survived, she said she’d put the kettle on and make them a cuppa while they waited for the weather to lift. She told Fysh and Baird that they were at Redhead near the Lambton coalmine, just south of Newcastle; she later sent Fysh a photograph of the mine as a souvenir.

He and Baird drank the kind lady’s tea, thanked her for her hospitality, turned the aircraft around to give it a downhill runway, cleared some of the bushes and, when the clouds started to break, took off again. They followed the road to Singleton, where McGinness and Teahan were waiting anxiously for their arrival. When McGinness constantly teased Fysh about his unexpected tea-break, Baird thought the ribbing was too much and told McGinness to shut up or he would leave them and get the next available transport back to Sydney. The four of them stayed in Singleton for the night. At 7am the next day they flew on, following the railway line to Narrabri and then on to Moree.

The frightening experience of the forced landing had taught Fysh important lessons: “don’t fly in heavy cloud, always keep a line of retreat open in bad weather, and don’t get overtaken by darkness”. Safety was something he would drum into all the pilots who worked for Qantas over the next decades.

After stopping in Moree he and McGinness continued on to St George, flying for two and a half hours against a cold, bracing headwind at about 5,000 feet (1,600 metres). Fysh was the first of them to land in Wilga Park at 11am on 2 February, stirring up the dust like the pre-war polo games on the historic ground. Only one aircraft had visited the town before, but after a large crowd rushed to the rudimentary airstrip to shake hands with the famous pilots, the local paper declared, “Now the flying machine has come to take the place of the horse, or car.” Removing his goggles, Fysh smiled “as if pleased to be on terra firma again”.

After lunch, the pilots took off and circled steadily over St George with the intention of leaving for Mitchell. Owing to the “warmth of the atmosphere and the peculiar nature of the air currents making the ascent difficult”, they came down and waited till the following morning. Baird made some minor repairs, and at 6:30am the next day the two “planes rose gracefully and ascending to a great height soon became specks in the far away distance”.

Teahan had a ball throughout the journey, admiring the countryside from on high, and at times defying the bumps of air pockets and the blast from the propeller to read a book. The aircraft reached Mitchell, then Charleville, where Fysh and McGinness were the first airmen to land on the newly cleared aerodrome. Fysh thought it rather funny that the townsfolk had an ambulance on standby for their arrival.

Over Australia’s inland plains, he noted, “the air is good for flying up to 11am, after which time an air traveller can expect to meet with “rough air””. The small air pockets disturbed the even progress of the machine, but the big air currents were of an “entirely different calibre”.

Already possessing an eye for marketing and publicity in the aviation industry, Fysh wrote to the Melbourne Herald to say these currents were “apparently formed by columns of ascending or descending hot or cold air, and in negotiating these the aeroplane either goes at a great pace or sinks, despite all efforts to climb”. “These currents,” he wrote, “do not form to any extent close to the ground, as the earth forms a cushion for the flowing currents of air. Bumps and air currents are of no danger and their relation to the calmer flying is just that of a calm sea to a stormy one. The Northwest is evidently the ‘Bay of Biscay of the air’, at any rate during the hot summer months of the year.”

The following day the four flew on to Tambo, then Blackall, and finally on to Barcaldine, cruising over the vast Mitchell grass plains of western Queensland that stretched away to the horizon and were occasionally marked with patches of dark timber. McMaster had caught the train from Rockhampton to join them on 5 February in Barcaldine. The summer heat was stifling, but that wasn’t the only reason he was sweating: he had agreed to fly the hundred kilometres to Longreach with McGinness and then the 180 kilometres from Longreach to Winton, showing his public support for this bold adventure.

He knew that selling joy flights to all those who saw the Qantas men in the air was the best way to make some fast money for the business, so he had to demonstrate to locals that flying was not just the thrill of a lifetime but also perfectly safe. To his dismay, McMaster found the “so-called aerodrome” at Barcaldine “was a small clay-pan completely surrounded by gidyea stumps”.

Away to the west, towards Longreach, whirling columns of dust rose across the dry mile-wide stock route. The two aircraft came into sight on schedule, passing the Barcaldine train along the way, and landed safely, guided by a large pillar of smoke “with only inches to spare”. After something to settle his nerves at the Shakespeare Hotel, McMaster climbed nervously into the Avro behind McGinness, who as usual seemed as cool as ice despite the summer sun. He turned the machine around and, with a cloud of dust and pebbles, taxied to the edge of the claypan. He swung the Avro around again, then opened the throttle. “If ever anyone realised that he was in the hands of God and the pilot,” McMaster recalled, “I did.”

The Avro roared across the claypan and cleared the gidyea stumps. McGinness and McMaster were off the ground, rocking from side to side as they circled the airfield waiting for Fysh to take off in the B.E.2. Despite the rising panic that McMaster felt while sitting in the flimsy aircraft, he tried to calm himself so he could enjoy “the splendid view of the surrounding country”. As McGinness aimed the machine west, McMaster was soon over Kelso, one of his properties between Ilfracombe and Longreach, and he saw five of his dams in a way he had never seen them before.

Soon he was more focused on the approaching lightning as they came into land, amid rough weather in the late afternoon, before a cheering crowd at Longreach. The stormy weather produced gusty air currents that had tossed both aircraft about like corks in a wild ocean, and McMaster was delighted to touch the earth again. The ride had been nailbiting, but the practicality of air transport was reinforced to McMaster and the crowd when the mail train from Barcaldine arrived twenty minutes after the airmen despite a head start of more than two hours.

That night in the Shire Hall, Longreach hosted a “Smoking Concert” for the aerial party and about fifty guests. The celebration was organised by an Englishman, Dr Archibald Hope Michod, who ran his own private hospital in town. He proposed a toast: “Success to the Central Queensland & Northern Territory Aerial Services”. He told Fysh and McGinness that the townspeople were proud to see Longreach “being made a centre for aviation” and that McMaster, Ainslie Templeton and Charlie Knight were also “to be congratulated on their enterprise”.

Knight, the first agent to purchase an aeroplane in Longreach, was heartily cheered. McMaster promised a tremendous future for aeroplanes in the west and that aviation would play a great part in Australia’s welfare, “both commercially and from a defence point of view”. He told the audience that the revolutionary Avro triplane was expected to arrive in Longreach shortly.

Despite the enthusiasm of the audience and the conviviality of the town, McMaster didn’t sleep well at Longreach — he knew he would have to follow the rough flight from Barcaldine with another to Winton the next morning. This time Templeton squeezed into the passenger cockpit next to McMaster on the Avro as McGinness led the two aircraft off the ground after breakfast on 6 February for the final leg of the 2,000-kilometre odyssey from Sydney. Fysh had Knight as his passenger. Despite the summer heat all the men wore coats because it would become freezing up high. A telegram was sent to Winton to say the aircraft had left, and to ask for a large plume of smoke to be billowing by 11am and for the landing ground to be clearly marked. The 180-kilometre flight would take just ninety minutes, or so the men thought.

McMaster and Templeton were supposed to know every road and track between Longreach and Winton, and McGinness didn’t bother studying the ordnance map. But from 10,000 feet the terrain looked very different, and they couldn’t get a bearing. Half an hour out from Longreach, when there should have been open country around them, McMaster saw only the hills and rough terrain of the Opalton Range. It was far too windy and noisy for him to shout to McGinness over the Dyak engine as the Avro was being pushed along by a tailwind and topping 160 kilometres per hour. So McMaster wrote a note in pencil and passed it to the pilot sitting in front of them in his tight-fitting leather helmet and goggles.

McGinness was cool — “too cool for Templeton and myself,” McMaster recalled. “He kept pointing to his compass, which showed west.” McMaster tried again with another note: “One hour from Longreach. Too many mountains on our right.” Still the wiry man in the helmet was unmoved. A third note said: “Should be open downs country on the right.” But as the Avro droned on, McGinness calmly maintained his course west. McMaster scribbled so hard on the fourth note that he nearly snapped the pencil. “Winton,” he scrawled, “is north north-west of Longreach.”

McGinness, who was often strong-willed and cocky, had been steering west for two hours and overshot the town by thirty minutes. He finally took out his map to check his position. As McMaster and Templeton said their prayers, the pilot turned off the engine so he could read the Lands Department map without being distracted by the blast of the propellor. The machine seemed to hover for a while, then McGinness switched to the reserve fuel tank above the wing and started up the Dyak again. He now headed in the right direction.

Before long, McMaster sighted a faint discolouration on the ground in the far distance and then a slate-coloured patch “the size of a dinner plate” that gradually, as they flew closer, resembled a settlement. Templeton passed a note to McMaster: “Thank blazes we are somewhere!”

It would not be the last time that McGinness’s personality would grate on the nerves of his Qantas partners.

Three hours after leaving Longreach, McGinness and Fysh, who had been following the lead plane, arrived over Winton. On the hill to the north of the town’s artesian bore, a large crowd had assembled, and they were wondering about the fate of the famous airmen. Young Harriet Riley — who as an infant was one of the first people to hear the song “Waltzing Matilda” — had organised a large white bedsheet to mark the landing field. She was the niece of Sarah Riley, the poet Banjo Paterson’s long-time fiancée in the 1890s. He and Sarah had holidayed together on the huge stations around Winton, and he wrote the song there with Sarah’s best friend Christina Macpherson — a very close collaboration that reportedly ended the engagement. Harriet’s late father, Fred, had once run the 100,000-hectare Vindex station; seven years after his passing, his son Fred Jr had an office for the family’s stock and station agency in Elderslie Street, Winton.

Fysh and McGinness circled the town, and McGinness touched down first. With fuel in their tanks for only 15 minutes more flying, they had made the trip from Mascot with 17 hours, 30 minutes of flying time at an average speed of 68.5 miles per hour (110 kilometres per hour). That night they celebrated their arrival with another Smoking Concert before a sizeable audience at the North Gregory Hotel. The speeches celebrated a new epoch in the history of the district, recalling the days when “Cobb & Co coaches were the most up-to-date method of rapid transport”.

Charlie Knight might have preferred that slower ride, though. The next day, 7 February, Fysh and McGinness flew back to the railhead at Longreach, Knight again a passenger on his o

wn machine. Fysh missed the track before deciding to follow the Thomson River into town. It was a bumpy ride, and Knight felt like he’d been on board a sinking ship in a wild ocean. He said to hell with flying and told Fysh that nothing would ever induce him to go up in the air again. He sold the B.E.2 to Qantas for the bargain price of £450, though McMaster insisted that £200 of it was in shares. Qantas now had two aircraft and the triplane on its way.

Hudson Fysh by Grantlee Kieza is out now, published by ABC Books.