HISTORIC AEROPLANE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 December 1938, Page 7

HISTORIC AEROPLANE

AVRO 504 K MACHINE. FLOWN BY NOTED PILOTS. Many prominent airmen, some of world fame, have flown an aeroplane of Great War vintage, which will end its career at New Plymouth lis material for making model aeroplanes. It is an Avro 504 K biplane that once belonged to the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and in which Mr F. C. Chichester learned to fly. - A two-seater machine fitted with a rotary engine and bomb racks, Avro 504 K was used by the crew of the Southern Cross, including Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, after they first flew the Tasman, and in her Mr C. T. P. Ulm learned to fly that type of machine. Captain P. G. Taylor, who was Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s co-pilot on his second Pacific flight, also piloted the machine.

Among other noted, pilots wlib flew the Avro were Captain G. Hood and Lieutenant J. R. Moncrieff, the first New Zealand pilots to attempt, the Tasman crossing, Flying-Officer H. L. Piper, test pilot on the first flights of the Mayo composite aircraft, Squad-ron-Leader J. D. Hewitt, who flew in the Melbourne centenary air race, and later crossed the Tasman, and the late Squadron-Leader M. C. McGregor. The Director of Civil Aviation, Group Captain T. M. Wilkes, once made a forced landing in the machine. The Avro experienced many mishaps in her long history, i She was forced down and damaged at least a dozen times after being delivered to the Royal New Zealand Air Force at Lyttelton in 1925 as a reconnaissance machine. In 1935 the machine was lifted by a gale and cast upside down on the roof of a hangar at the New Plymouth aerodrome. The only fatality cohnected with the machine was when her part owner, Mr F. C. Norton, of Wanganui, was killed by an explosion of petrol in the last stages of the machine’s active life.