QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Hinkler remembered

1978

Above: Australia Post marked the 50th anniversary of Hinkler’s epic flight in 1978. Britain commemorated the 60th anniversary with a special first day cover. Left: Hinkler’s actual Avro Avian G-EBOV is one of two significant machines preserved and on display at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane; the other, Hinkler’s experimental-model Avro Baby G-EACQ, in which he made a record-breaking solo flight from Sydney to Bundaberg in April 1921, was relocated in July 2012 on a five-year loan to the Hinkler Hall of Aviation in Bundaberg. Image courtesy of Queensland Museum

70th anniversary flight

1998

Adventurer Lang Kidby fields the media on arrival in Darwin on 25 October 1998, after the 725km overwater crossing from Timor in Avro Avian VH-UFZ, the end of an 18-country, 43-day long journey following in Hinkler’s steps.

Discovery of a 1927 Avro Avian in need of loving restoration under a house in Brisbane sparked the idea for retracing Hinkler’s record solo flight, a project which took Lang Kidby 18 months to bring to fruition for the 70th anniversary in 1998. In an amazing counterpoint, the restored Avro was freighted to Britain aboard a Boeing 747 so it could begin its re-enactment. “Following Hinkler’s path as closely as possible I droned across 450 miles of Mediterranean Sea then down the Nile to overfly the pyramids,” Kidby later wrote, in the Flight Safety Australia February 1999 issue. “The little aircraft carried me along day after day over the red Arabian desert – in strong headwinds cars below were passing me!” Kidby had less luck with the weather than Hinkler, with monsoons active from India to the Indonesian archipelago: “Hour after hour I struggled to keep visual contact with the trees below. Rain filled the cockpit, my clothes were soaked, my boots filled with water and my maps assumed the consistency of porridge.” At the next landing, after that 10-hour sector, Kidby discovered the torrential rain had worn away the edges of the wooden propellor blades!

146