Lost Australian

"He disappeared in the darkness like a comet with a trail of brilliant flame from the engine exhaust," said Pilot C. J. Melrose to a group of worried Singapore airport officials one night last week. Just in after a bad battle with a monsoon over the Bay of Bengal between Allahabad and Singapore, Pilot Melrose in his slow plane had seen the sleek Lockheed-Altair Ladv Southern Cross of Air Commodore Sir Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith rocket past at 200 m.p.h., only 200 ft. above the waves. At that rate he should have reached Singapore long before Pilot Melrose. But when Melrose finally slid in for a landing, Sir Charles was two hours overdue. On what he asserted was to be his last long flight, the great Australian aviator and Co-Pilot Pethybridge had left London on Wednesday for a "leisurely" trip home. When the single-motored monoplane reached Allahabad on Thursday, the flyers were scarcely three hours behind the record. Eagerly they headed on, past Akyab, out over the Bay of Bengal. . . . When, as the hours ticked by, there came no sign of the plane, no message from its radio, the Royal Air Force started one of the greatest searches in aviation history. Up from Penang roared 37 planes to scour Sir Charles's route. Through the steaming jungle all along the Malay coast natives ran forth with flares flickering in the dark. But as the days passed it became more & more likely that Sir Charles, who had safely pioneered almost every dangerous airway in the world, had finally tempted fate too far. Hope persisted that he might have landed on some tiny, uninhabited island, some lonely Burma beach. In California, Brother Richard Harold Kingsford Smith recalled that in 1929 Sir Charles was given up for dead when lost for twelve days in the Australian bush. Said he: "I'm not worried. He'll show up."

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