Early Aussie aviators ‘made space look easy-peasy’, says astronaut Andy Thomas

When Andy Thomas became the first Australian astronaut to travel into space in 1996, he carried a token of an earlier Aussie flight mission.

Astronaut Andy Thomas with the Vickers Vimy at Adelaide airport. Picture: James Elsby

When Andy Thomas became the first Australian astronaut to travel into space in 1996, he carried a token of an earlier Aussie flight mission he regards as more dangerous, more demanding and more momentous than anything he did with NASA.

Thomas travelled on board the Space Shuttle Endeavour with a piece of cloth taken from the wings of the Vickers Vimy aircraft used by Ross and Keith Smith in the 1919 Air Race as both a good-luck charm and a symbol of our aviation history.

The astronaut had been obsessed with the ­history-making flight since he was a boy, and would travel at first light with his father to watch planes take off and land at Adelaide airport, which until its upgrade in the 2000s displayed the Smith brothers’ Vimy in its main terminal.

“One time we drove by the hangar of the Vimy and I said: ‘What’s that?’ ” Thomas says. “My father explained it was the first aircraft to fly from ­England to Australia. I was ­enthralled by it. It is such a gorgeous piece of engineering, but ­beyond that, a simply ­staggering achievement.”

The heroics of the Smith brothers and their mechanics Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett should be common knowledge for every Australian. The action-packed tale seems more amazing with the passage of time. Of the six teams in the race, four crashed, with Ross and Keith Smith hailed as heroes when they nursed a plane made of wood, wire and cloth all the way from London’s Hounslow Heath to Darwin, winning the £10,000 prize put up by the ­Hughes government in Canberra.

Jim Bennett, Ross Smith, Keith Smith and Wally Shiers in 1919.

But 100 years on, the story of their 28-day, 18,000km journey has almost been lost to time, the Vimy shunted off to one side at Adelaide airport’s long-term carpark, unloved in a seldom-visited hangar.

It’s for this reason that Thomas jumped at the chance to narrate the documentary The Greatest Air Race that will screen on SBS on Sunday to commemorate the centenary and bring the flight back to life for new generations.

“There have been parallels drawn between their flight and flying in space,” Thomas says. “Both were national enterprises, both were high-risk endeavours, both pushed the boundaries of the technology of the day — but there was a fundamental difference.

“When we fly in space, we have a cast of thousands on the ground monitoring us, monitoring the vehicle, making recommendations about what should be done. You are not alone. You might be in space, but you have got this whole network supporting you.

“When Ross and Keith Smith made that flight, once they left they were on their own. They had to decide where they were going to fly to next, they had to make decisions about the quality of the weather, the health of the aeroplane. Each night they had to find somewhere to land, flying into countries where no one had ever seen an aeroplane, where there were no landing fields.”

It’s a tale that captured the imagination of older generations of Australians, not just because of the magnitude of the achievement, but also because dashing pilot Ross Smith was one of our country’s earliest and best-loved celebrities.

The producer of The Greatest Air Race, journalist Lainie Anderson, says the names Ross and Keith were hugely popular for children born in the 1920s and 30s. They included Test cricketer Keith Ross Miller, whose parents were so impressed by the Smiths’ achievements that they named their son after both men.

“Australia couldn’t get enough of them,” Anderson says. “It really entered the popular culture. But from the 1950s onwards, knowledge of their achievement has just ebbed away. When I started learning about it, I thought, ‘Oh my, why aren’t we all learning about this?’

“The voyage itself is one thing, but the life of Ross Smith is remarkable — one of our most decorated airmen in World War I, Lawrence of Arabia’s pilot, served with the Australian Light Horse and a few years later flew back from Europe in a plane made out of wood and fabric, via a route which basically had no airfields beyond India. He was Australia’s first international superstar.”

Thomas shares Anderson’s bewilderment at the fact the story has been lost to time.

“As I travelled the country making the documentary, we would tell people we were making a film about the voyage of Ross and Keith Smith and we would get these vacant looks,” he says.

Thomas says the flight played a major role in boosting national morale and giving Australia a sense of its future after a conflict that killed 60,000 Australians. The documentary draws on footage of the flight and provides a compelling technical account of the challenges faced by the four-man crew, with Ross Smith as pilot, Keith as navigator, and Shiers and Bennett rattling around in the hold of the plane during flights, and working into the night after landing to maintain it.

Thomas says the documentary does a great job chronicling how so much of the success of the mission came down to Ross Smith’s planning. “The fact Ross and Keith Smith were successful is largely due to three things,” he says. “One was the meticulous planning Ross Smith did before the flight, flying parts of the route in another aeroplane, a Hanley Page, and getting as far as India, and then scoping out the rest of the route by sea and looking at potential landing sites, which included fields and racecourses.

“The second thing was he chose the right type of aeroplane — (one) with two engines so that if there was an engine failure, he wouldn’t fall out of the sky.

“He also knew he had to pick the right crew. The two mechanics … were pivotal to their success because they worked like trojans. Their contribution is underrated.

“It was a fine tribute to the democratic values that Ross Smith wanted to promote that he had the prize money split four ways, equally among them. He was a great man.”