Excerpt from:
LOST!
Colonel Roscoe
Turner's Story of the London-
to-Melbourne
Air Race as
written
by
Franklin M. Reck
PICTURE: "Hello, Folks, (says Turner) meet my ship!" [Col. Roscoe
Turner in his lionskin coat with one arm up waving to crowds and
illustration of Boeing plane above him.]
Left: Col Turner inspects the gas tanks that fill the cabin.
Above: Here they are, Turner, Pangborn, Nicols, partners in
danger.
Flying from Los Angeles to New York in 10 hours 2 minutes is one
thing. You have a familiar terrain, beacons, and a chain of
well-lighted, hard-surfaced fields to give you aid.
Flying from London to Melbourne over a strange course, with
landing fields few and far between, is quite another. It's on such a
trip that you're likely to encounter the package of grief peculiar to
flying - the dismay of sitting in a cabin somewhere between earth and
sky, your gas running out, pitch-black night outside, and no place to
land. If you have to get lost, get lost on the ground. Not over a
jungle populated by tigers and a river inhabited by playful crocodiles.
That, however, is the climax to this yarn, so I'll save it for later.
I had to get into the London-Melbourne race. The Fate that runs
my life, bless her heart, wears hobnail shoes and spends most of her time
kicking me into trouble. Anyhow, the idea grew upon me that America
ought to be represented in what promised to be one of the greatest air
races of all time.
The occasion was Melbourne's hundredth anniversary. First prize,
10,000 pounds. The course, from London via Bagdad, Allahabad, Singapore,
Darwin, and Charleville, to Melbourne. Something over eleven thousand
miles of mountain desert, jungle and ocean. You could make as many stops
as you wished, but you had to hit those five control points.
The competition was something to think about. There was the team
of Scott and Black. There were the Mollisons, and O. Cathcart Jones and
K.F.H.Waller- the cream of British flyers, all flying the specially built
DeHavilland Comet Racers. There were Parmentier and Moll, pilots of the
Royal Dutch Airlines, in an American-built Douglas. There was the team
of G.J. Geysendorfer and D.L.Asjes, Dutch aces, flying a Pander S.4.
Many of them had made the trip before. Scott had broken the
record from London to Melbourne with monotonous regularity. parmentier
and Moll had flown over most of the course on their regular run from
Amsterdam to Batavia. All in all, it promised to be a stiff test.
A book could be devoted to the cost of preparing for the race, so
we'd better omit finance in this story. I borrowed a new Boeing 247-D
from United Air Lines- a commercial cabin plane exactly like those flown
on the airlines of this country. According to the rules of the race we
were supposed to use standard A.T.C. commercial planes.
My ship had two 550-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engines.
It was built to carry 1125 gallons of gas. The cruising speed of the
Boeing was around 185 miles per hour.
I could have picked a non-salaried crew from the scores of
voluntary offers that came in, but I decided to pay my crew and pick the
best. For co-pilot I selected Clyde Pangborn, the man who hopped the
Pacific from Tokyo to Washington state. I consider him just about the
best long-distance flyer in the business. My radio operator was Reeder
Nichols, who built and installed the radio we carried.
Getting the big plane to England was a task in itself. I finally
found a liner with enough deck space to hold the plane, but when we went
to hoist it aboard we discovered that the hoisting machinery lacked six
feet of being large enough. At an expense of $500 the gear was remodeled
to accommodate the plane.
The captain of the liner said that he would land me at
Southampton. Instead, due to a change in sailing ordrs, he dropped me,
my crew and my Boeing at Havre.
Then followed a battle with governmental red tape that makes me
see red to this day. Let's not go into it. I finally got France's
permission to take the plane out of the country and found an American
ship captain who would get me across the channel.
The question was, could we get the plane on his ship? We paced
off hs deck and found that with the nose hanging over one rail and the
tail over the other, the Boeing would fit nicely, except for various
obstructions that cluttered the deck. The captain accomodatingly took a
blow torch and cut off the obstructions flush with the deck. And that's
how we got to England.
We thought our troubles were behind us when we finally arrived at
the Mildenhall Aerodrome, but our biggest shock was yet to come. The
officials put our ship on the scales and found that it weighed exactly
right- without the crew.
"Sorry," they said regretfully. "I guess there's nothing to do
but seal up some of your gasoline tanks."
They cut our gas supply to 850 gallons and our cruising range
went down accordingly. This meant that instead of cutting a straight
course to Australia via the five control points we had to go zigzagging
down to the other side of the world in thousand to fifteen hundred mile
hops. Our maps were useless. We had to arrange stops at additional
points along the course.
Sixty-four ships were entered in the contest but when the morning
of October 20, 1934, rolled around only twenty were ready to start. And
of those, only nine were to finish.
The first plane took off in the chill haze at 6:30 a.m. The rest
followed at 45-second intervals, and inside of 16 minutes every
competitor was in the air, headed southeast for a destination half a
world away. We were the second ship to take off.
Clouds shrouded Europe from our gaze, and we had to fly by
instrument, without check points. We knew, however, that the
snow-mantled peaks of the Alps were on our course, and we waited eagerly
for our first sight of them. When we finally glimpsed the Matterhorn
thrusting its head up above the clouds we felt a comforting sense of
relief. Our instruments, then, were accurate and our calculations
correct.
We sat down at Athens, the only hard-surfaced two-way airport on
the course. Leaving Athens was like kissing good-by to civilization.
The fabled city of Bagdad was next to feel our wheels, then the
town of Karachi on the western shore of India. Meanwhile we took catnaps
on the floor of the plane with our rolled-up coats for pillows. We had
less baggage than you would take on an overnight trip to the Joneses'.
We had a week's supply of canned goods and water in thermos bottles in
case we came down in desert or jungle and had to hike our way back to
civilization.
From Bagdad to Karachi, a country of rocky desolation, we saw not
a single living animal or man. And now, gird your loins and steel your
nerves for the pleasant mental torture of our next hop- the thousand-mile
leap over the interior of India to Allahabad. I still sweat when I think
of it.
We left Karachi in the afternoon, still up in the race, and with
a good chance of finishing first. Scott and Black, Parmentier and Moll,
were somewhere ahead.
We had plenty of gas to reach Allahabad but not much extra for
detours. The route was totally strange to us. Visibility was poor. We
knew it would be night before we landed.
In other words we had to fly by dead reckoning. We had to set a
compass course, allow for drift, figure our speed, and from these
calculations deduce when we would arrive at our destination. When the
hour arrived we would gaze below and there would be Allahabad, pretty as
you please. At least, that's what we hoped!
So we sailed eastward over India, remembering that it was the
search for a westward route to this country of fabled wealth that led to
the discovery of America. Wishing, too, that we could stop long enough
to go through some maharajah's palace and maybe take a ride on his pet
elephant.
Dusk fell and deepened to night. The hour arrived when Allahabad
should be directly below us, but there was no beacon, no field light, no
dark outlines of a city.
We didn't assume instantly that we were lost. Very probably we
hadn't covered as much ground as we had supposed. We had complete
confidence in our instruments and our alertness in staying on the course.
Somewhere just ahead the beacon would soon pierce the black curtain of
night. The thing to do was to stay on our course and barge straight
ahead. This we did until a flash illuminated the horizon.
"That's it!" we decided and headed toward the flash. But it
didn't reappear and we began to have that gone feeling in the pit of our
stomachs. The flash was not a beacon after all-it was lightning.
Reeder Nichols, sitting in his chrome-nickel chair with green
leather upholstery (it had been presented to him by a London automobile
dealer), was sending messages to the operator at Allahabad.
"Give us a radio bearing," he requested. "Give us a radio
bearing."
But for some reason we couldn't establish two-way communication.
All the time we were requesting help, the operator at Allahabad was
blithely announcing to the world, "Colonel Turner is lost. The Americans
are overdue." We could hear him announcing it, but we couldn't get him
to answer us.
In the meantime the needles on our gas guages swung closer and
closer to empty. Vainly we searched the ground for some check point, but
there was nothing in the blackness below to give us an accurate
indication of where we might be.
Very soon the motors would sputter and die. Before that should
happen, however, it was important to have some plan in mind. We wanted
to land at an airport. If that was impossible, we wanted to save the
ship. Barring that, we hoped to save our lives.
"We can always bail out," was one pleasant suggestion.
"Yes," I replied. "Bail out at night into a jungle full of
tigers. They tell me the tigers always go looking for fresh meat at
night. Besides, if we bail out we'll lose our ship. The thing to do is
to try to land on a river."
"Didn't they tell us at Karachi there were crocodiles in the
rivers?"
I had forgotten the crocodiles and for the moment I acually
visualized myself standing on the wing trying to unfasten a propeller to
use as a weapon against the crocs. A sort of modern Saint George
battling the dragons with a sword of purest alloy steel.
Tigers, crocodiles, and no airport. Bail out and play tag with
tigers. Land in the river and annoy the crocs. Do neither and die. One
of the three fates seemed imminently to be ours. At that very moment, I
think, all of us must have known intimately the state of mind of all the
fliers who have gone to their dooms in ocean and wilderness, blazing new
trails for mankind to follow.
I looked at the guages and saw with shock that they read empty.
We were a couple of hours overdue. Why didn't we get a reply from
Allahabad?
"Send out an S O S," I told Nichols. An S O S would silence all
other stations on the air- even the Sparks at Allahabad who seemed to
feel special delight in telling the world we were lost.
Nichols was aghast. "That's serious business. You only do that
when you're on the spot."
"If we're not on the spot now we never will be," I replied
grimly.
So Nichols sent out the three famous letters. Then things began
to break all at once. They had to, if we weren't to be just another air
casualty.
The Allahabad operator heeded our request and sent us the bearing
we wanted. At the same moment we saw beneath us the Soune River.
Feverishly we searched our maps. Yes! We had located our position by
the Soune- we were cruising over the only part of the river that took a
due east-west course for approximately fifty miles.
We knew where we were then! A hundred miles beyond Allahabad
and fifty miles south. The tail wind must have been stronger than we
thought, the southward drift greater than we had figured.
We turned back, praying that our gasoline would last. As far as
our guages showed we were already riding on borrowed time. We caught a
flash of light and hoped that it wasn't lightening.
"Flash your beacon on and off," Nichols radioed to the ground.
Allahabad obliged and when we saw the intermittent flashing we
knew that our troubles were over. We coasted down to a landing and
taxied up to the gas tanks in front of the hangar. As we slowed to a
stop our two motors gave their last gasps. But we didn't care- we were
safely down, ship and all!
We had other thrills on that race. I shall never forget the
monsoons- those topical rains so thick with water that it's imposible to
fly through them. You must go above or around . . .
The dust storms, whipping up like gigantic clouds until all the
world is an impenetrable gray . . .
That strech of tiger-infested marsh along the Bay of Bengal, so
thick with reeds that once your ship lands you cannot take it off, so
deep and slimy that you cannot wade to safety . . .
The typhoon off the Malay Peninsula that made us change our
landing place from Rangoon to a spot called Alor Star . . .
The night landing at Singapore, where the field was marked by a
single row of lights and we didn't know which side to take. If we picked
the wrong side we might strike plowed fields and hedges that would end
our trip. We found when we landed that the lights were down the center
of the field . . .
The forced stop at Bourke, Australia, to take the cowling off the
motors in order to let the wind cool them. That stop, incidentally, let
Parmentier and Moll into Melbourne two hours and forty-five minutes ahead
of . . .
The thrill of Melbourne's wholehearted reception, and of taking
second place to Scott and Black when Parmentier and Moll decided to take
first place in the Handicap division rather than second in the Speed
division. The thrill of knowing that two of the first three ships were
standard American-built craft.
Thrills all along the 11,323 miles. Thrills coming at unexpected
moments during the 3 days, 21 hours, 5 minutes and 2 seconds of the
voyage.
But nowhere did the tension draw quite as tightly as when we
cruised over the Indian jungle southeast of Allahabad with our futures
hanging by the slender thread of a few dwindling gallons of gas.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Source: Colonel Roscoe Turner as told to Franklin M. Reck. The
American Boy Magazine, 7430 Second Blvd, Detroit, Michigan.
Clipping undated.
Data transcription by: Milton Sandy, Jr. May 13, 1993.