Sir Charles Edward Kingsford Smith (9 February 1897 – 8 November 1935), nicknamed Smithy, was an Australian aviation pioneer. He piloted the first transpacific flight and the first flight between Australia and New Zealand.
Kingsford Smith was born in Brisbane. He grew up in Sydney, leaving school at the age of 16 and becoming an engineering apprentice. He joined the Australian Army in 1915 and was a motorcycle despatch rider on the Gallipoli campaign. He later transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was awarded the Military Cross in 1917 after being shot down. After the war's end, Kingsford Smith worked as a barnstormer in England and the United States before returning to Australia in 1921. He subsequently joined West Australian Airways as one of the country's first commercial pilots.
In 1928, Kingsford Smith completed the first transpacific flight, a three-leg journey from California to Brisbane via Hawaii and Fiji. He and his co-pilot Charles Ulm became celebrities, together with crew members James Warner and Harry Lyon. In the same year he and Ulm completed the first non-stop flight across Australia from Melbourne to Perth and the first non-stop flight from Australia to New Zealand. They subsequently established Australian National Airways, but the airline and Kingsford Smith's other business ventures failed to achieve commercial success. He continued to participate in air races and to attempt other aviation feats.
In 1935, Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge disappeared over the Andaman Sea while attempting to break the Australia–England speed record. He was fêted as a national hero during the Great Depression and received numerous honours during his lifetime. After his death Sydney's primary airport was named in his memory and he was featured on the Australian twenty-dollar note for several decades.
Charles Edward Kingsford Smith was born on 9 February 1897 at Riverview Terrace, Hamilton in Brisbane, Colony of Queensland, the son of William Charles Smith and his wife Catherine Mary (née Kingsford, daughter of Richard Ash Kingsford, a Member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly and mayor in both Brisbane and Cairns municipal councils). His birth was officially registered and announced in the newspapers under the surname Smith, which his family used at that time. The earliest use of the surname Kingsford Smith appears to be by his older brother Richard Harold Kingsford Smith, who used the name at least informally from 1901, although he married in New South Wales under the surname Smith in 1903.
In 1903, his parents moved to Canada where they adopted the surname Kingsford Smith. They returned to Sydney in 1907.
Kingsford Smith first attended school in Vancouver, Canada. From 1909 to 1911, he was enrolled at St Andrew's Cathedral School, Sydney, where he was a chorister in the school's cathedral choir, and then at Sydney Technical High School, before becoming an engineering apprentice with the Colonial Sugar Refining Company at 16.
On 2 January 1907, Smith was swept out to sea by a strong undertow at Bondi Beach and nearly drowned. He was pulled ashore by lifeguards and revived by a nurse who happened to be around.
Kingsford Smith married Thelma Eileen Hope Corboy in 1923. They divorced in 1929. He married Mary Powell in December 1930.
Shortly after his second marriage he joined the New Guard, a radical monarchist, anti-communist, and fascist-inspired organisation.
World War I and early flying experience
In 1915, he enlisted for duty in the 1st AIF (Australian Army) and served at Gallipoli. Initially, he performed duty as a motorcycle dispatch rider, before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, earning his pilot's wings in 1917.
In August 1917, while serving with No. 23 Squadron, Kingsford Smith was shot down and received injuries which required amputation of two toes. He was awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry in battle. As his recovery was predicted to be lengthy, Kingsford Smith was permitted to take leave in Australia where he visited his parents. Returning to England, Kingsford Smith was assigned to instructor duties and promoted to Captain.
On 1 April 1918, along with other members of the Royal Flying Corps, Kingsford Smith was transferred to the newly established Royal Air Force. On being demobilised in England, in early 1919, he joined Tasmanian Cyril Maddocks, to form Kingsford Smith, Maddocks Aeros Ltd, flying a joy-riding service mainly in the North of England, during the summer of 1919, initially using surplus DH.6 trainers, then surplus B.E.2s. Later Kingsford Smith worked as a barnstormer in the United States before returning to Australia in 1921.
Applying for a commercial pilot's licence on 2 June 1921, he gave his name as "Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith".
The Cowra Free Press told how Kingsford Smith flew under the Lachlan road bridge at Cowra, New South Wales, with local "crack motorist" Ken Richards. It went on to recount how Kingsford Smith was preparing to also fly under the nearby railway bridge, but was warned by Richards of telegraph wires just in time to prevent a catastrophe. Richards, they added, was a mate of Kingsford Smith, and had flown with him several times in France. In this version of events, the feat was accomplished "just after the Armistice" (11 November 1918), but may have been in July 1921, when Kingsford Smith was hosting "joy flights" there, in an aircraft owned by the Diggers' Cooperative Aviation Company. Later accounts have embellished the story.
He became one of Australia's first airline pilots when he was chosen by Norman Brearley to fly for the newly formed West Australian Airways, and piloted their Bristol Type 28 Coupe Tourers plane (G-AUDF) that made bi-weekly mail drops to the astronomers during the 1922 Solar Eclipse expedition at Wallal, Western Australia.
Around this time he began to plan his record-breaking flight across the Pacific.