‘My plane almost crashed over India’
Retracing aviation pioneer Bert Hinkler’s monumental first solo flight from England to Australia almost killed Brisbane adventurer Lang Kidby.
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Lang Kidby had just lifted off the runway in Kolkata when India’s tropical rain attacked the open cockpit of his tiny silver biplane with unusual ferocity, smashing him in the face with wave after wave of stinging pain.
He’d been an aviation enthusiast all his life but rocking about in a 1927 aircraft over the twisting rivers and man-eating tigers of India’s Sundarbans jungle he wondered if he would ever make it to the airfield in Yangon, Myanmar, 10 hours away.
“It was the worst day’s flying of my life,’’ the 72-year-old says of that nightmare flight in 1998. “I couldn’t see a thing and could hardly get the plane above 50 feet (16m) as I headed for the Bay of Bengal. For hour after hour the rain blasted down and a lot of the time I was flying just 10 feet (3m) above the water.”
Lang had bought the little Avro Avian when it was just rotting junk inside a Mt Gravatt garage. But realising it was the same type of aeroplane that Bundaberg’s Bert Hinkler had flown on the first solo flight from England to Australia in 1928, Lang thought he’d have a crack at retracing the aviation hero’s monumental effort.
The aircraft had started making pioneering runs around South Australia 70 years before and Lang had the idea that it somehow could still fly him from England to Australia over Hinkler’s old route.
What could possibly go wrong?
Lang and his long-suffering wife Bev mortgaged their house as he started a 12-month restoration project at Caboolture airport but eight weeks before he was due to start his journey, the aircraft was smashed to smithereens in a wheat field outside London.
“I was supposed to fly with Lang that day but couldn’t make it,’’ Bev, 73, explains. “Just as well. The passenger cockpit took the worst of the impact and I probably would have been killed.’’
Lang walked away with hardly a scratch and with the Avian rebuilt again, he eventually began his six-week odyssey to Australia.
Bev followed him on commercial airlines and when Lang touched down in Darwin to begin an outback tour of triumph, she followed in a car selling commemorative T-shirts so that Lang could pay for fuel for each new leg of the flight home.
The wide mouth of the Pine River spreads out in front of the Kidby’s lounge room in the suburb of Griffin, north of Brisbane, but Lang and Bev are more interested in talking about revisiting the rivers of the Sundarbans late this year for a 300km expedition
in an electric boat to promote Indian tourism and renewable energy.
Lang is flopped in a large leather armchair, bare feet up as the river drifts slowly by behind him. He has just returned from a scouting mission, driving beside the Yamuna and Ganges Rivers in India with an old army mate. Flying blind over the Sundarbans in 1998 was good practice to negotiate 4000km of India’s cluttered highways where traffic often travels at night without lights and on the wrong side of the road.
For more than half a century, Lang and Bev – now suburban grandparents – have been among Australia’s most travelled adventurers and while they now prefer land-based travels to flying ancient aircraft, they are not slowing down.
They estimate they’ve owned 400 cars and clocked up millions of miles travelling everywhere from the Simpson Desert to the beaches of Normandy. They’ve ridden motorbikes through Vietnam, driven jeeps through the mountains of Bangladesh, taken a 1928 Austin 7 to Cape York and led a convoy of 17 Russian-built World War II motorbikes on a six-week trek from Ukraine to Italy.
They were part of the historic vintage car rally from Peking to Paris in 2005 and two years later circumnavigated the globe, covering 35,000km in a tiny 1969 Fiat Bambino.
Next month they will take their OKA off-road vehicle to Corowa on the Murray River to show off their World War II Enfield motorbike at a gathering of restored military vehicles.
On Anzac Day they’ll lead a tour of 10 couples from Budapest through the Balkans and in July and August will drive a 1941 American Dodge army truck from Alice Springs to Darwin in a convoy of 150 restored military vehicles commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Bev knew of the aventurous Lang long before she met the truck driver who carried off her heart and took her to the most distant parts of the earth.
In 1966 Bev White was a Melbourne radiography student from the “most conservative background you could imagine in East Kew” but family friends had already told her all about Lang, an almost mythical creature driving a
12-ton Commer on the long-haul run to Perth, about his lust for life and a restless yearning to see the world as few people had ever seen it.
They met while Bev was on a weekend away with some friends at Marysville, north of Melbourne, and Lang came roaring through in the old truck. A year later they were engaged and Lang, having amazed himself by passing the entrance exam, was at Point Cook in Melbourne training to be an Australian Army pilot.
Bev had just started working as a radiographer when Lang’s mum Joyce rang to say there’d been a terrible accident and one of the young pilots had been killed. “There were only eight of the pilot cadets at the academy so my heart was in my mouth,” Bev recalls. “It took forever for Joyce to tell me the full story and it seemed like an eternity before I finally realised it wasn’t Lang. But I thought, ‘Good God, if I’m really going to tie up with this fellow I’ll have to steel myself for these sorts of things’.”
Three years later when heavily pregnant with their first child she bounced around in the passenger seat of a Jeep as Lang launched it over the humps, mounds and furrows of a paddock behind a car dealership on Moorooka’s Magic Mile.
“All that leaping around induced the birth,” Lang says. “So I lifted Bev out of the Jeep and into our car and we sped off to the hospital. That was in 1969 and our eldest daughter Katrina was born an hour later on our first wedding anniversary.” Their second daughter, Kylie, was born in Lae two years on, while Lang was in the New Guinea highlands with an air patrol. He pretended his plane had a mechanical problem so he could rush back to base to see the birth.
Lang’s adventurous spirit appears to be genetic, way back in 1936 when his dad Richard and his uncle Lester cycled from Melbourne to Townsville and back for a dare, covering 6000km in 45 days. Richard enlisted for World War II in 1940 at the age of 22, joining his dad (Lang’s grandfather), Dick Kidby, who was 52 but told recruiters he was 38.
When Lang was 10, he and his parents, sister Rhonda, 9, and a labrador named Bonnie, all piled into a tiny Standard Eight motor car for a trip across the Nullarbor from Perth to Melbourne. Lang fell in love with the endless vista.
He left the army as a major in 1980 and together with another army pilot, Mick Reynolds, worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week building up a marine construction business along the Queensland coast. Then Lang opened a workshop in Redcliffe restoring vintage aircraft for collectors. He loved the work so much that he nurtured the idea of flying a vintage plane from England to Australia.
“We couldn’t afford it, so Lang organised a vintage air rally in 1990,” Bev explains. “It was for pre-1950 aircraft. We had 26 people sign up from around the world. We only charged them $2500 each [for an entrance fee] but it was the event of a lifetime.”
In the end only 14 of the planes completed the 20,000km journey from the White Waltham Airfield near London to Caboolture Airport. Some gave up because of mechanical trouble, some because of fear over crossing the wide expanse of the Mediterranean and some baulked at crossing Saudi airspace. San Francisco stockbroker Peter McMillan had such a good time flying his 1942 Harvard aircraft that two years later, while camping on a beach at Moreton Island, he let Lang talk him into the Kidbys’ greatest adventure. At first it seemed absurd.
Lang wanted to recreate the first flight from England to Australia in a replica of the first machine to make the journey, a lumbering 1919 Vickers Vimy bomber. All Lang needed was $1.5 million. McMillan eventually raised some of the money, Shell kicked in a million and Bev quit her job as a radiographer to move to San Francisco for a year as she and Lang built a Vimy from spruce wood and unbleached bed linen, sewn together by Bev’s hand with 7000 stitches.
Lang took off for Australia from the Farnborough International Air Show south of London on September 11, 1994. He reckons the Vimy was “a dog of a thing to fly”, sometimes going slower than suburban traffic and prone to rock with every puff of wind between London and Caboolture. Bev followed the Vimy in a support aeroplane with a crew filming the expedition for National Geographic and at one of their stopovers, at Ha’il in northern Saudi Arabia, she was made an honorary man so she could eat at a celebratory banquet at the local palace.
The Vimy made it all the way to Sumatra when one of its engines failed and it skidded to a thundering halt amid farmers ploughing their paddies behind water buffalo.
“We were in the middle of nowhere and we weren’t too popular with the local farmers after wrecking their paddy,’’ Lang says, “but we had a new engine sent over from Jakarta and we paid ten local guys $1.50 a day to build an airstrip out of bamboo across the rice paddies so we could get out of there and make it home.’’
Four years later Lang retraced Hinkler’s journey in the Avian.
The Kidbys still spend almost half the year travelling and next year hope to tour Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
“We’re in our 70s now,” says Lang, “but so what? We’ve been lucky with health and we reckon age is just an attitude. There’s still a lot of the world we both want to see.” ■
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