Flying Far

The centenary of the 1919 England to Australia Air Race provides a chance to remember this largely forgotten chapter of aviation history and honour the courageous men who pioneered modern international flight.

- Alasdair McGregor

THROUGH THE CHILLY darkness of an early Sunday morning in March 2018, a Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner landed at London’s Heathrow Airport to complete a historic milestone in Australian aviation history. The 17-hour non-stop journey of QF9 from Australia was “game-changing”, said Alan Joyce, Qantas Chief Executive and a passenger on board.

A Qantas 747 Jumbo had made an experimental flight without a break to Sydney in 1999, but QF9 from Perth to London was the first flight of a regular non-stop service between Australia and England. Alan Joyce was right: for Australians at least, the new 14,498km route was a major step forward in global interconnectedness.

Stepping back almost 100 years to the dawn of long-distance aviation, the first aircraft to fly between the two countries took roughly 40 times longer than QF9 to complete a comparable journey from London to Darwin. But rather than being a mere game-changer for 1919, that first flight was a monumental groundbreaker, arguably one of the greatest single advances in aviation history. Andy Thomas, Australian astronaut and veteran of four space missions for NASA, describes the 1919 feat as the “moon landing of its day”. Yet the Australians who first flew halfway around the planet are today unjustly absent from the pantheon of national heroes, and, beyond the ken of aviation historians, their daring deeds are often overlooked.

PRIME MINISTER Billy Hughes claimed to speak for “60,000 dead” Australians at the end of World War I in 1918. Through that battlefield blood sacrifice, Australia was, at Hughes’s insistence, entitled to its own seat at the diplomatic table, a seat he himself would occupy. While peace negotiations proceeded through early 1919 at Versailles, the pugnacious and energetic Hughes was flown back and forth from London to Paris in a converted Handley Page bomber.