HISTORIC “PROP”

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 89, 9 January 1935, Page 11

HISTORIC “PROP”

Memento of Late Mr. Ulm in Wellington CAUSE OF ONE DEATH Exciting, and, in one respect, grim, are the associations of an aeroplane propeller which stands in the Civil. Servico Club, Wellington, as a souvenir of a great airman, now dead. It is the propeller of the Faith in Australia, the machine used by the late Mr. C. T. P. Ulm since 1932, and it had taken the plane through many flights outstanding in the history of aviation.

The president of the Civil Service Club, Mr. H. W. C. Mackintosh, who was responsible for the propeller being sent from Auckland to stand in one of the club room,?, had a placard designed for it recording the principal flights of the plane at the time the propeller was used, intending to be added the signature of Ulm, his co-pilot and the passengers on his flight to New Zealand in 1933. With that object he sent the placard to Mr. Ulm’s Sydney address. It was only a few weeks later that Mr. Ulm left for the United States, and then made his fatal attempt to fly to Honolulu.

Mr. Mackintosh’s surprise was great, therefore, when very recently he received by post, the placard he had sent, bearing the signatures he had wantedincluding that of. the airman who was dead. The placard apparently had been found among the late Mr. Ulm’s effects in Sydney. The other signatures are those of Mr. G. U. Allen, co-pilot, Mrs. M. J. Ulm, the late Mr. Ulm’s wife, and Miss W. Rogers, his secretary, all of whom were .on the Australia-New Zealand flight in 1933 when the first two women passengers were carried across-' the Tasman,

Together with that flight, almost the last of importance as far as the propeller was concerned, it was used in the Sydney-to-London flight in 1933, in the record flight from England to Australia in 1933 and, with the arrival of the Faith in Australia in New Zealand, in the first non-stop airmail flight fioni Auckland to Invercargill at Christmas, 1933. In January, 1934, the propeller, which contains cracks in the blades, ended its career at Wanganui, when it was the cause of the death of an Australian ground engineer, Ronald Smith, who was struck by the revolving blades.