This is one of Australia’s oldest mysteries and greatest legends. There’s a war hero, adventurer, the world record attempt, the sudden disappearance and the small clues hinting of their tragic end.
But after almost 75 years of intrigue, the final resting place of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith may have been found by a small film crew. He was the first to circumnavigate the globe by air, the first to fly across the Pacific from the US to Australia– and then the first to fly back again.
On November 8, 1935 “Smithy” and his co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge vanished on route from England to Australia in their Lockheed Altair 80 aircraft, Lady Southern Cross. They were attempting to break the light speed record between the two countries. Over Burma, their last contact was 1.30am. They never arrived in Singapore. The world was on edge for news, but it never came.
For decades the disappearance remained a mystery. Clues surfaced over the decades, theories abounded, but no proof surfaced. Until Damien Lay came along. In 2009, he located what he believed to be an aircraft, about two miles off the Burmese coast, in a hundred feet underwater. That discovery ignited a 20 year journey to piece together what really happened, stripping away the myth that clouded Charles’s memory and bring closure to the families who endured in their absence.
This is a true story, epically told through the intimacy of historical fiction. Its also a story of the women who bore the weight of that silence and of a son, just shy of his third birthday when his father crashed and who for 90 years, knew him only through the history books. Set against the turbulence and glamour of the 1930s, this is both a mystery unravelled and a legacy reclaimed.
Award-winning Australian writer, filmmaker, and explorer, Damien Lay has released his long-awaited book “OF AIR AND MEN”, offering the final unwritten chapter in this amazing story. The pieces of wreckage that Lay and his team found in 2012 included timber and components such as fuel lines, each piece corresponding to his sonar imaging. This follows the extraordinary research of Jack Hodder, an Aussie aviation engineer, adventurer and explorer who in 1937 conducted multiple expeditions in search of the wreck after a wheel surfaced on a beach. His work was followed by Australia’s foremost aviation historian, Ted Wixted who conducted research for 50 years.
Lay began his research in 2005 and announced that he had located the aircraft in 2009. At that time, his findings were questioned and highly controversial. The author has spent 20 years and around $5 million researching Kingsford Smith’s arial journey and believes that he has worked out how the aircraft and its pilots met their fate. He concludes that the plane was damaged by a bat strike while passing over an uncharted island and forced to make an emergency landing on a sandbar. Lay suggests, Kingsford Smith and Pethybridge were able to repair the Lady Southern Cross and take-off again only to hit a headland and be forced into the sea. His theory about the location of the plane received support from Kingsford Smith’s 92-year-old son Charles Jr.
OF AIR AND MEN makes for riveting reading both as a mystery, an adventure and is written in a style that is not easy to put down. Loved it.
