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Flight to Fame

Victory in the 1919 Great Air Race, England to Australia

Ross Smith, Peter Monteath

Flight to Fame, a classic adventure story, tells the hair-raising tale of the world-first flight from England to Australia, in the words of the pilot, (Sir) Ross Smith.

In March 1919, Australia's prime minister announced a prize of £10,000 for the first successful flight from Great Britain to Australia in under 30 days. Late that same year, the victorious pilots, Ross and Keith Smith, landed in Darwin to international acclaim. The New York Times gushed: 'Captain Ross Smith has done a wonderful thing for the prestige of the British Empire. He must be hailed as the foremost living aviator.' Their achievement was the forerunner to the age of international air travel.

During the race, Ross and his brother Keith (his co-pilot and navigator) wrote in their diaries daily, recording the journey of their four-man crew in their Vickers Vimy G-EAOU twin-engine plane, its open cockpit exposing them to snow, sleet, hail and unbearable heat. Originally published as 14,000 Miles Through the Air (1922), Ross Smith's book recounts their danger-ridden, record-breaking journey - a mere 16 years after the Wright brothers first defied gravity for just a few seconds.

This richly illustrated edition, published to coincide with the flight's centenary, is introduced and edited by historian Peter Monteath.

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Born in Semaphore in 1892, Ross Smith was educated at Queen's School in North Adelaide, and for a couple of years at Warriston School in his parents' native Scotland. He spent a good part of his early life on a massive property in South Australia's north-east, near the rail line connecting Port Pirie with Broken Hill.

When war broke out, Ross abandoned his storemans job at Harris Scarfe to enlist with the Light Horse and sailed for Egypt on the first of the convoys to leave South Australia in October 1914. He was not among those sent to Gallipoli for the landing on 25 April the following year, but from Egypt he followed the course of the battle and could barely wait to join it.

In October 1916 Ross Smith took the life-changing step of joining the Australian Flying Corps. Trained and deployed for six months as an observer, Smith then made the transition to the role of pilot. By the end of the war Smith was one of the most respected and experienced of airmen, having clocked up some 600 hours as a pilot.

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Peter Monteath, a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, teaches History in the School of International Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. His recent books include POW: Australian prisoners of war in Hitler's Reich, Red Professor: The Cold War life of Fred Rose (with Valerie Munt), Interned: Torrens Island 1914-1915 (with Mandy Paul and Rebecca Martin), and the edited collection Germans: Travellers, settlers and their descendants in South Australia.

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ISBN   
CATEGORIES: ,
IMAGES   44 greyscale images
PAGE COUNT   180
DIMENSIONS   234 x 156 mm