Pre-war Services for Civil Aviation (continued)

There were many Australian contenders wishing to be involved in such an air service including Kingsford Smith and Ulm, and Brearley. Late in 1931 Smithy's Southern Sun, with Brinsmead, Australian Controller of Civil Aviation aboard, crashed on take-off in Malaysia while attempting to make a demonstration flight carrying airmail from Australia to England. Smithy eventually reached London in the Southern Star carrying the mail but Brinsmead, anxious to get to London, took a KLM aircraft which also crashed on take-off, injuring Brinsmead so severely that he was unable to continue as Controller, his place being taken by Johnston, his deputy.

By 1934 Qantas and Imperial Airways had won approval to begin a regular air service with Qantas responsible for the Brisbane-Singapore sector. Loss of some of their DH86 four-engined biplanes, which carried only 10 passengers, caused great difficulty, but the service continued. The radio-equipped DH86 took three to four days to fly from Brisbane to Singapore. The Sydney to London service took between 12 and 14 days.

Meteorological services for these flights were extremely primitive, as were the other aerodrome and in-flight facilities. The first specialised meteorological service for aviation in Australia was provided by W. A. (Walter) Dwyer in 1934 from the primitive aeradio shack on the Darwin aerodrome, shared with the radio staff. He provided forecasts using a sparse network of meteorological observations from Australia and the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). One of the advantages of having Walter based at the aerodrome was that he could provide observations of the local weather, and make pilot balloon observations to determine the upper winds so important for flights across the Timor sea in an aircraft with a cruising airspeed of only 125 knots, and a range of only about 650 nautical miles in still air.

Bureau of Meteorology