Badgerys Creek airport: Whose name will it carry when finished?

THE airport is a certainty — now the battle over what to name the Badgerys Creek facility is taking full flight. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Gregory Edwards, distant relative of Aviator William Hart, hopes the new airport at Badgerys Creek will be named after the pioneering airman. Picture: Adam Yip

• Turnbull gets tough on airport deadline
• Fifty years on, Badgerys Creek lifts off

THE airport is a certainty — now the battle over what to name the Badgerys Creek facility is taking full flight.

Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher is already being lobbied to name the airport after a number of people, including iconic Sydney engineer John Bradfield and 19th-century landholder James Badgery.

Then there are famous aviators Nancy Bird Walton, Captain Del Badgery and Lawrence Hargrave.

William Ewart Hart was the holder of the first Australian flying licence.

But there is also a grassroots push for little-known but influential Western Sydney aviation pioneer William Ewart Hart.

“I think Hart International Airport has a nice ring to it,” retired schoolteacher and Hart relative Greg Edwards said of the man known as the Parramatta Flying Man, who taught himself to fly in 1911.

At age of 26, in November 1911, he held what was then the Australian record for the longest cross-country flight when he flew from Penrith to Parramatta, and in December that year was granted the first pilot’s ­licence by the Aerial League of Australia.

“He was a local hero and I don’t know why more people haven’t heard of him,” Mr Edwards, 66, said.

“He was everything Australia admires — taking chances, having a go.”

A former dentist and car salesman, Mr Hart won Australia’s first air race, Ascot to Parramatta, had Australia’s first air crash at Rooty Hill and began the first flying school in 1912 at Ham Common, now Richmond RAAF base. He also starred in silent movies including The Camera In The Clouds and Australia Calls.

Mr Hart also took Bert Hinkler on his first powered flight before the Queensland-born aviator became the first person to fly solo from England to Australia.

Nancy Bird Walton, one of the world’s first female pilots, in a 1935 photo.

Nancy Bird Walton had a Qantas Airbus 380 airplane named after her.

John Bradfield.

Lawrence Hargrave.

Mr Hart was even flying before pioneering aviator Nancy Bird Walton, Australia’s youngest female commercial pilot, was born.

Mr Edwards said his relative was also an inspiration for Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, who made the first trans-Pacific flight from the US to Australia in 1928 — and after whom Sydney Airport is named.

Mr Hart was also flying before Captain Del Badgery, whose parents farmed Badgerys Creek, who left Australia in 1913 to study flying in England.

There is also a push to name the airport after engineer Lawrence Hargrave, whose experiments with box kites at Stanwell Park Beach in November 1894 inspired the Wright brothers’ successes with powered flight — but he already has the scenic Lawrence Hargrave Drive named after him and featured on the $20 note.