England to Australia Flight
Part I: The Vimy Flies Again
by Peter McMillan
All of Sumatra appeared to be on fire. From one end of
the Indonesian island to the other, farmers were burning
the jungle and rice fields for planting.
So much smoke filled the air we could hardly see the
ground 2,000 feet below as we desperately searched for
a place to land. Our twin-engine biplane, a replica of
the open cockpit, World War I era Vickers Vimy bomber,
was going down.
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Vimy 1, Vimy 1, Vimy 1.
We've had an engine failure," Lang Kidby, my Australian
co-pilot, called into the radio. "We're making an
emergency landing."
The 11-foot propeller on our starboard engine windmilled
to a stop. Without power from both engines, there wasn't
much I could do to slow the descent of the big, awkward
aircraft, which was coming down like a huge kite without
a string.
"See any place to land?" I yelled.
"There's a small airfield 25 miles away," Lang
said, scanning a map.
"We'll never make it."
"What about that road on the left?" he said,
pointing to a dirt lane cutting through a paddy. As I
fought to bring the Vimy's nose around for our one and
only chance to land, I noticed ten-foot-deep ditches on
either side of the road, which looked dangerously narrow.
Worse, a blue dump truck filled with dirt was blocking
our path — too close to land in front of, too far away
to glide over. Directly ahead on the road, four boys on
bicycles looked up in horror as we bore down on them.
They dived headlong into the ditches.
Jim Stanfield, the National Geographic photographer,
popped up with a camera from his seat in the plane's nose,
blocking my view. "Jim, not now!" I yelled.
"We're about to crash!" He disappeared.
"We can't use the road," I shouted seconds
before touching down. With less than 50 feet to go, I
revved the port engine, spun the aircraft to the right,
barely clearing a grass hut, and pancaked us down into
the recently burned rice field. Our landing gear slammed
hard onto the dirt, our big tires bashing into a two-foot-high
earthen wall. We vaulted into the air, and I yanked back
on the control wheel to keep us from flipping over onto
our back.
"Hit the brakes, hit the brakes, we've got to stop
this thing!" Lang shouted.
We bounced more than a hundred yards through the paddy,
shearing the tops off three more walls, wings sweeping
through a swathe of waist-high grass, before rolling to
a stop within spitting distance of a field full of tree
stumps and a smoldering fire.
"You OK?" hollered Dan Nelson, our engineer,
scrambling out of the Vimy's rear cockpit. "What
happened?"
"The engine just quit," I said, dazed. As I
pulled off my helmet and goggles, I was astonished to
see a crowd gathered around us. "Where did all these
people come from?" I asked. Hundreds of men, women,
and children were pressed up against the Vimy. Many were
rice workers, wearing conical hats and carrying sharp
scythes.
"Why have you come here?" one man called out,
a cigarette dangling from his lips.
I looked at him for a long moment, at a loss for words.
How could I explain the outlandish idea that had driven
Lang, a level-headed former Australian Army pilot and
me, a San Francisco investment broker, to quit our jobs,
invest every penny we owned, and even risk our lives to
celebrate a historic but largely forgotten aviation achievement?
"We had a problem, had to land." I said. But
there was so much more I could have told him.
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