SILENT HINKLER

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 52, 1 February 1932, Page 10

SILENT HINKLER

MODESTY OVER ACCOMPLISHMENT Squadron-Leader Bert Hinkler returned to England recently an unhappy man, although he came fresh from one of the greatest triumphs in the history of aviation (writes a London correspondent). He was disappointed—disappointed that the world had heard of his achievement and was determined to acclaim it. For his arrival marked the final 6tage of an epic solo flight from New York to London, via Jamaica, Venezuela, Brazil and the West Coast of Africa. Holder of many world’s air records, this secretive Australian pilot—small of stature, but big in brain and imagination—also retains the record of self-effacement. He is the least-adver-tised of all the great modem. airmen, and what little publicity he reoeives is thrust upon him. Happy, indeed, and clever is the newspaper man who can “draw” Bert Hinkler, for he emulates the reticenoe of the oystey and the shrinking modesty of the violet. When lie has a project in view he does not tell the world about it. He gets busy with the performance of it, and is indignant that the world should hear eventually what has been done. Nor does he go out of his way to laud the splendid qualities of the machines in ■which he flies. Just as he takes his own skill and powers of endurance for granted, so does he accept the products of British workmanship and engineering as matters of course. The world should not be told these things; th& world, in his opinion, should know all about them. He took no joy, therefore, in the official reception held in his honour at the Hanworth aerodrome. It rather frightened him.. It certainly made him uncomfortable, even to the point of blushing. For, in addition to a goodly crowd of enthusiasts and brother-pilots (all of whom concede him a place of supremacy), there were present on the field Lord Londonderry (Secretary for Air), Sir Philip Sassoon (Under-Secretary for Air), Lord Wakefield, who was keenly interested in the flight, the Duchess of Bedford, FlightLieutenant Stainforth, SquadronLeader Booth, and Colonel the Master of Sempill. Not one member of this group failed to realise that the little man who alighted with such agility from his ’plane was of the air’s elect; not one who did not feel proud to shake his hand. “It is not only what you have done,” said Sir Philip Sassoon, to him, “but the way in which you have done it that has earned our admiration. This has crowned all your achievements.” WHAT HE DID. And what Hinkler had done was something magnificent, brave, and original. By flying from Natal m j South America to Bathurst, in Gam-1 bia, he made the first west-east flight. of the South Atlantic; he made the first light aeroplane flight of either of the Atlantics; he made the first so'o flight over the South Atlantic; _ and made the second solo flight of either of the Atlantics. In his do Havilland Puss Moth he set off from New York in October, and made a non-stop flight of some 1800 miles from New York to Jamaica. From there he flew , to Maracaibo in Venezuela, and thence ■ to Trinidad in the British West Indies. The ocean passage of the flight I was a lonely and terrifying “hop 1 of approximately 1900 miles, which is longer than the shortest ocean route across the. North Atlantic. Characteristically, the small notice taken of this tremendous achievement —described as the most notable since Lindbergh’s famous exploit—has been attributed to the fact that Hinkler is British and Lindbergh was an American! But Hinkler did more for aviation than Lindbergh. He marked the culminating triumph of the British light aeroplane, the possibilities of which it has always been his object to demonstrate. Did he not fly non-stop from London to Turin in a British Avro “Baby” in 1920? did he not hop over the 1200 miles which separate London and Riga, in 1927, in a light machine P Best of all, did he not make his record-breaking flight from England to Australia in an Avro Avian machine? Always his_ machine has been British; always his machine has been a small one. » . As The Times generously pointed out to its readers, Hinkler is “clearly not an ordinary mortal.” He appears, as this paper so truly made clear, to have a genius,, amounting almost to a sixth sense, for discovering navigational facts about which the average pilot would bo able to satisfy himself only by the most elaborate tests, » Not the excellence of his Puss Moth, not the most careful preparation, not even the element of 6uprpmb good luck could have brought him safely through his last perilous enterprise if he had not had the uncanny gift of correcting drift by estimating the strength and direction of the wind, chiefly by means of various signs which he detected in the shapes and. movements of the clouds. Thanks to this faculty he held to his direct course so skilfully that he actually made the coast of Africa only 10 miles south of the point which had been his objective when he left South; America. To have made this -flight across the turbulent wastes of the At-1 lantic, through storms and chain | lightning, by day and by night, some- ] times five feet from the water and sometimes above and in the midst of ; clouds, was a feat nothing short of marvellous. He had no special instruments in his riiachine. Indeed, afterJ leaving New York, he did not trouble even to swing his two compasses afresh. He had no means of measuring drift except by his own senses, but at every available opportunity he checked his compass error by means of the sun and allowed for the changing error as the flight progressed. When, during an awful night, he went into the clouds for safety, he found himself in the very centre of electrical turmoil and crashing thunder. “I have never seen so much lightning,” he said, “It was chain lightning and the flashes seemed as thick as telegraph poles. They were so close that 1 feared they would go through the ’plane.” Justly can Australians, proud of their compatriot, share in his triumph ■ over bad weather and a .thousand dangers, and congratulate him on being the first pilot in the world to fly the Atlantic in a machine of only 120 horse-power. They will honour him the more because he added this page to the history of aviation without any preliminary flourishing of a goldnibbed pen. He set out with so little' publicity and with so complete an I absence of self-advertisement, that the journey was practically over before the world had realised th*t it had | begun. ,