The Lost Pilots Read online

  Lancaster and Jessie flew across the sea to the northern tip of Bangka Island, east of Sumatra, where they had a bumpy landing on a makeshift runway angled down a modest hill. When Jessie hopped down from the plane, the grass rose up to her waist. But the island’s Dutch residents had turned out in full force to greet them, and the aviators were cheered by the hospitality they were shown. The Dutch, Jessie wrote, “had fixed up a reception at the club for us that night, [where] a long speech was read in near perfect English. They had the whole story of the flight itemized, and did not miss one detail of importance.” About a hundred people attended the gathering, and Jessie and Lancaster gleefully clinked champagne-filled glasses with all of them.

  Early the next morning the two aviators climbed back into the Red Rose. The entire Dutch community, in a grand show of support, was there to see them off. Despite the runway’s downward slope, Lancaster achieved an easy liftoff into the humid tropical air. Jessie was just peering down from her cockpit to wave goodbye to the crowd when the plane, having climbed to 150 feet, abruptly lost power. With no engine noise, the air went eerily silent. A puzzled Jessie thought Lancaster was planning to land again, until she realized he was madly attempting to restart the engine. As he struggled, the plane gave a sickening lurch.

  Lancaster’s options were nonexistent: he didn’t have enough altitude to turn back to the runway, but all he saw in front was a hillside covered in trees and houses. Trying to avoid certain death, he tipped the plane on its side so the right wing would hit the ground first, absorbing the shock and preventing Jessie, who was seated up front, from being killed by the engine. The moments began to crawl; to Jessie, hours seemed to pass before the earth came rushing up and the Red Rose collided violently with the ground. The force of the crash flipped the plane head over heels, ripping the landing gear from its bottom. As the Red Rose somersaulted, Jessie’s consciousness went blank.

  When she recovered from her shock, Jessie was hanging upside down; the plane was flopped on its back, and only the seat straps kept her from plunging headfirst to the ground. Hot fuel from the broken tank was raining down on her face, popping and sizzling as it went, pouring into her nose, and searing her blurry eyes. Jessie tried to move but she was ensnared within a jumble of wires. Again and again she called out Lancaster’s name; receiving no response, she pictured him crushed in his cockpit. She was sure that at any moment the plane would burst into flames.

  Then she spied a possible exit. Jessie took off her helmet and began to squirm feet-first through a small opening. As she later described it, a “screw being taken out its socket was nothing [compared] to me wriggling round and round to negotiate that opening to freedom. I took all the skin off myself in the process. But you cannot imagine how glad I was to be standing outside the broken machine instead of being imprisoned under the debris.”

  When she got clear of the wreckage Jessie spotted Lancaster sprawled on his face in the dirt several yards away. Though she could barely walk, Jessie forced her lurching body to where he lay. She turned him over and saw blood pouring from his mouth. Worried about internal injuries, she held him up so that he wouldn’t choke. Lancaster’s body remained unmoving, as if he were dead, and his teeth protruded straight through his bottom lip. Still, Jessie could see his shallow breathing. She pulled his lip free from his teeth and tried to stop the bleeding, but it was no use.

  A group of Dutch soldiers who had witnessed the crash came sprinting up. As Lancaster regained consciousness, they helped Jessie pull him to his feet. Despite his injuries Lancaster was desperate to go examine the plane’s damage, and the Dutchmen had to struggle to get him into a car instead. They drove the battered pilots to the nearest hospital, where a doctor slathered Jessie with iodine and informed her that she’d sustained a broken nose. She had a massive bump on her forehead and two black eyes. Lancaster, meanwhile, had suffered a concussion and needed stitches in his lip. But he had it fixed in his mind that, for insurance purposes, he needed to take photographs of the damaged Red Rose immediately; medical attention could wait. The doctors had to physically restrain Lancaster to prevent him from leaving the hospital.

  When Lancaster and Jessie returned to the crash site the following day, they were aghast at what they saw. The plane looked practically demolished. As Lancaster inspected the wreckage, he realized that the crash had been due to human error—his own. In keeping with his characteristic absentmindedness, he had accidentally left his fuel switches in the “off” position when the plane took off; with no fuel, the engine had simply stopped.

  Though their journey now appeared over, Lancaster and Jessie were praised for their gumption. Flight magazine affirmed that the Red Rose “had put up a splendid flight of greater distance than any hitherto made with a machine of such low power. . . . [T]o have got as far as it did is a very fine performance.” The London Aeroplane seconded that opinion, though the editor didn’t sound the final trumpet just yet.

  The Aeroplane noted that the potential record was now threatened, however, by the emergence of Herbert John Louis “Bert” Hinkler, the so-called “Australian Lone Eagle,” another pioneering aviator who had logged time with the Royal Air Force during the war, and then become a test pilot for Avro in subsequent years. Hinkler had already set a number of flying records, including a nonstop flight from England to Latvia, but his earlier attempt to fly from England to Australia had ended in a disastrous crash over Europe. Now that Lancaster and Jessie had apparently failed, too, Hinkler announced his renewed intention to fly a light airplane from England to Darwin in a brisk two weeks.

  Despite their injuries, Lancaster and Jessie were not quite ready to call it a day. They decided their best option was to return to Singapore, where the remains of the Red Rose could be sent for repairs. The sympathetic Dutch on Bangka Island arranged passage for the two aviators on a Chinese boat. When they climbed on board, the Chinese captain looked shocked: he didn’t know about their plane crash, and he was taken aback by their decrepit appearance.

  After arriving in Singapore, Lancaster and Jessie were taken to the British colonial secretary’s cozy bungalow. There they languished for a week without money, until, to their supreme relief, a wealthy local British rubber broker named Sam Hayes, who admired the pluck they’d shown in traveling so far, offered his financial support to fix their plane. Like many in Singapore, Hayes believed that Lancaster and Jessie deserved to claim their world record. Yet despite Lancaster’s mechanical expertise, the Red Rose’s potential repairs proved to be beyond his capabilities.

  Here, at their lowest point, Lancaster and Jessie were buoyed by some remarkable news: a contingent of RAF engineers was just at that moment docking in Singapore’s harbor. The lead officer had followed the Red Rose’s progress with admiration, and so he was taken aback when he finally met the daring aviators: Lancaster’s stitched face was still raw with scars, while Jessie presented a bandit-like appearance, with deep black rings around her eyes. He quickly realized that appearances were deceiving, and that the pair still burned with the ambition to reach Australia. So with Sam Hayes providing the money, the RAF engineers agreed to perform the repairs.

  For the next two months, until the replacement parts arrived, Lancaster and Jessie lingered in Singapore in a hazy state of suspension. Lancaster lived at the British Government House at Seletar, fourteen miles outside the city, while Jessie stayed with a member of the Singapore Flying Club. With so many eyes upon them, the two aviators were forced to keep up the illusion that they were business partners only and were yearning to reunite with their spouses once the journey finally ended. Much of their socializing during this period occurred separately; Lancaster, in Seletar, dutifully made the rounds of the governing British colonial set, while Jessie had greater involvement with the RAF engineers in the city.

  As the days stretched by, the aviator Bert Hinkler’s proposed record-setting flight to Australia turned into a reality: on February 7, Hinkler departed from Croydon Airport in London—in an Avro Avian, no le
ss. He was scheduled to arrive in Singapore twelve days later, much to the outrage of local members of the Singapore Flying Club. To them, Hinkler was committing the criminally unsportsmanlike offense of exploiting Lancaster and Jessie’s misfortune for his own selfish glory. In retribution, Lancaster and Jessie’s supporters threatened to sabotage Hinkler’s plane during his stop-over. Jessie was furious, as well—she felt that Hinkler was exploiting their misfortune.

  Lancaster, however, was wholly gracious, at least in public. (The fact that Hinkler’s wife and Kiki Lancaster were close friends may have played a role.) He announced that Hinkler was perfectly justified in attempting his flight, and on the night of Hinkler’s arrival, he bedded down in Hinkler’s cockpit to protect the plane from saboteurs, while Hinkler slept in more comfortable quarters.

  Perhaps Lancaster’s generous actions were another example of his inherently genial nature. Or maybe he was simply distracted by the most prominent—if secret—facet of his new life: his profound love for Jessie. Theirs was a love that couldn’t be acted upon at the moment, as conventional society, in Singapore and elsewhere, would have reacted in shock to their illicit union, but their social separation didn’t diminish the extent of their feelings for one another. If anything, the clandestine nature of their relationship, and their inability, due to their public profile, to express their love physically after their lone night in Iran, only heightened its effect.

  The Red Rose’s replacement parts finally arrived from England, but the complicated repairs took weeks to complete. Finally, on March 12, Lancaster and Jessie returned to the sky. Jessie packed only a tennis dress, a change of shirts and shorts, and a toothbrush; the rest of their luggage was left behind in Singapore. After flying to Batavia (the present-day city of Jakarta), they skirted eastward over the Dutch East Indies islands of Java and Sumatra. At some identified spot along the way a hungry mosquito infected Jessie with malaria; for months afterward she battled its deleterious effects. Five days later, the aviators landed in a scrubby clearing in Atambua, Timor. Darwin, their final destination, on the other side of the Timor Sea, was a mere five hundred miles away. Their life-altering journey was almost complete.

  Torrential monsoon rains delayed Lancaster and Jessie’s plans for takeoff. A Royal Dutch Shell official cabled them that the landing ground at Darwin had become a swamp. Lancaster and Jessie didn’t know, however, that a portion of the runway had been cleared for them. The news of the Red Rose’s arrival had electrified the town; seemingly every man, woman, and child in Darwin had gathered at the airfield to welcome it. The officials there were unaware of the Shell representative’s message, and so, as the hours ticked by with no sign of Lancaster and Jessie, the crowd began to worry that the aviators had plunged to their deaths among the reefs and uninhabited islands of the Timor Sea.

  Killing time in Atambua, Lancaster and Jessie were oblivious to the drama unfolding at their hoped-for destination. As night fell, Lancaster cabled Darwin with the latest update: he and Jessie planned to depart at 7 a.m. the next morning. He received nothing back, which he took as silent confirmation. The next morning, after takeoff, the Dutch officials at Atambua cabled Darwin with the news.

  Hardly had Lancaster and Jessie leveled off, though, when they were assaulted with the slashing rain and battering wind of the worst storm they had yet encountered. The sheer mass of water cascading down from the sky seemed almost incomprehensible, and yet its volume kept increasing. Just as things seemed at their worst, the Red Rose’s engine began to malfunction. At moments it would settle down and the plane would gain height, but then it would sputter and the plane would drop precipitously. For ten minutes, Lancaster worked furiously to keep the plane horizontal. Then the engine gave an explosive cough, and the Red Rose started to sink.

  Jessie immediately comprehended the dire nature of their situation. As she struggled to reconcile herself to her onrushing death, she felt a tap on her head, and glimpsed down to see that Lancaster was handing her a message through the cockpit’s trapdoor. Unfolding the note, Jessie read Lancaster’s parting words: “I’m afraid she won’t stay the course. I don’t think we’re going to make it, but we’ve done our best.”

  Jessie may have been in love with Lancaster, but in some respects they were still coming to know each other as people, and Lancaster’s note had the effect of deepening Jessie’s appreciation of him even further. The note wasn’t sentimental or melodramatic or filled with woe—it was as straightforward as Jessie prided herself on being. What’s more, it bespoke respect for Jessie as a pilot, not just a woman. Despite her terror, she removed her seat belt, turned around in her seat, and gravely shook Lancaster’s hand.

  Hours passed with no relief from the torrential rain, or from the Red Rose’s continual gut-wrenching plunges downward. At one point the plane plummeted to within seven hundred feet of the ocean’s roiling waves, and Lancaster kissed his hand to the sea and sky. But even as the hours ticked brutally by, Jessie sensed that Lancaster remained fully focused on his flying; he evinced not the slightest hint of worry. With catastrophe looming at every moment, his strength was a balm.

  After nearly eight pummeling hours in the air, Lancaster and Jessie spotted Darwin in the distance. They looked at each other and turned their thumbs up at the exact same moment. As they circled above the airfield, they could see, even through the lashing rain, that it looked abandoned; the ground had turned into a lake. Lancaster buzzed the plane in a circle, looking for the least waterlogged place. Spotting his most promising option, he brought the Red Rose sliding down into a muddy, soppy mess. The plane’s wheels skidded though two inches of water before finally slowing to a halt. “My God, what an awful landing-ground,” Lancaster moaned. Completely spent, he and Jessie could at first do nothing but sprawl limply in their cockpits. They didn’t even have matches to light their desperately yearned-for cigarettes.

  PART II A NEW WORLD

  5

  GRAND WELCOMES

  The next day saw Lancaster and Jessie in finer spirits. Having awoken to the news that the two aviators had arrived, Australian officials hurried to provide them with the grand welcome they deserved. The Darwin Town Hall hosted a stirring reception in their honor, while the prime minister’s office soon invited them down to Canberra, the nation’s capital, to celebrate their achievement within the regal confines of the magnificent white brick, three-story Parliament House. And that achievement was substantial indeed: the first two-person flight from England to Australia in a light airplane, and, of even greater significance, the longest flight ever made by a woman. Lancaster and Jessie’s feat had “fired the imagination of the people,” the Brisbane Courier crowed, while the London Aeroplane declared, “The arrival of the Avian Red Rose at Port Darwin marks the success, though not the end, of one of the pluckiest flights in the history of flying.”

  Aviators were the world’s thrilling new heroes: just one day later, in America, Charles Lindbergh was presented with the Congressional Medal of Honor for his first transatlantic flight. Three weeks later, the first ever east-west transatlantic flight by airplane took place from Ireland to Canada. With the world trapped in an uneasy peace post–World War I, and acts of political violence marring the landscape from Chicago to China, aviators remained a shining example of the upside of the technological upheavals that had placed destruction on a global scale within humankind’s reach.

  Jessie, weak with malaria, had been hoping to gather some much-needed rest after their journey, but Lancaster had scheduled a pre–6 a.m. appointment at the Darwin airfield on the morning after their arrival in Australia, squashing Jessie’s dreams of relaxation. Lancaster’s unwillingness to rest stemmed in part from financial reality. While the positive press from England, Australia, and elsewhere was heartening, it didn’t come with a paycheck. The aircraft, oil, and fuel companies that had sponsored the journey would provide necessary short-term cash, but Lancaster and Jessie knew that significant earnings would only result from them selling their story to newsp
apers and making lecture appearances in as many cities as possible. Already these fees would be less than desired because of Bert Hinkler’s earlier flight.

  As it turned out, the real star in Australia was Jessie, not Lancaster. The manager of Shell Australia, which had provided the flight’s fuel, sent a telegram expressing the common sentiment: “[Jessie’s] success in being the first woman to fly to Australia is a fitting culmination to splendid achievements [of] her countrymen.” Hinkler’s flight had robbed Lancaster of the opportunity to set the record as a male, and so it was Jessie whose accomplishment truly stood out. The “women of Australia should give Mrs. Miller a tremendous welcome,” declared one influential socialite, for putting “women on the map.” Women in the future, the head of the Country Women’s Association predicted, “may follow where she has not feared to lead.” By the end of the month, Jessie had signed a lucrative £250-a-week contract with Union Theaters for a lecture tour of her homeland. Jessie herself never failed to give full credit to Lancaster, but her story—an Australian citizen becoming the first female to fly to Australia—was simply irresistible. As Ralph Barker points out, three months later Amelia Earhart became famous “simply by flying the Atlantic as a passenger, an achievement not to be compared with Jessie’s.”

  Lancaster and Jessie remained firmly in love, and once the hectic initial onslaught of media attention had passed, they were able to sneak occasional time to be physical, which they hadn’t done since that ragged night in Iran. Their business affiliation, while still in place, was deeply emotional now. Jessie paid her husband a brief visit in Sydney, and she and Lancaster attended a horse race with him in Williamstown, but these were little more than photo ops; the marriage, as far as Jessie was concerned, was over. But Jessie insisted that she and Lancaster continue to send Kiki one-third of their earnings, as they had promised, while Kiki reciprocated with a warm telegram for Jessie: “Three cheers for your success; hearty congratulations. Love, Kiki.” Despite this interaction, Jessie remained unsure of the exact status of Lancaster and Kiki’s marriage. Perhaps, she thought, Lancaster was too careless an individual to give it much thought himself.