I am not sure if I have posted this here before or not. If I have forgive me. The picture came to me from my late uncle effects who was in the R.F.C./R.A.F. in 1918.
K107 was the prototype Vickers Vimy Commercial, making its first flight on 13th. April 1919 at Joyce Green Airport in Kent. Initially it bore the interim civilian registration K 107. It was then allocated the civilian registration G-EAAV.
This aircraft was used on an attempt on the Cairo to Cape Town record with a prize of £10,000 from the Daily Mail. Flown by Vickers pilots S. Cockerell and F.C.G Broome it crashed at Tabora, Tanganyika on 27th. Feb. 1920.
Today I found an article in the "Times" relating to this flight and thought I would share it with you.
Empire air odyssey became a crash course in survival - Times Online
Empire air odyssey became a crash course in survival
Accident-prone airmen courted disaster daily
Marcus Leroux
Times Archive: see how we reported the adventure in 1920
The plan, hatched in the offices of The Times after the end of the Great War, was a simple one: fly an aircraft from London to a far-flung corner of the Empire — Cape Town — and hand a letter from King George V to the Governor of South Africa.
It would mean crossing the war-scarred continent of Europe, flying over the Pyramids, and tracing the path of the Nile into the deepest heart of unmapped Africa,
The flying men, plus a correspondent from The Times, were to traverse desert, swamps and, apparently, cannibal-infested jungles, in a rickety biplane. And why? To see if they could.
It may sound like a tall tale lashed together from Biggles and Around the World in Eighty Days, but the extraordinary story of derring-do has been brought to light by a collection of press cuttings, photographs and a captain’s log to be auctioned this month. The log, bound in a Morocco-bound scrapbook and compiled by one of the two pilots, recalls the gung-ho days when aviation was a rather inexact science.
Dozens of articles in The Times charted the adventurers’ exploits as they discovered volcanoes, encountered lions and found that “all African natives” answer to the name George. But as a test of a new route to link the Empire by air, the voyage was only a partial success, since it involved several crashes and the near-death of its only passenger.
The flight set off from Brooklands Aerodrome in Weybridge, Surrey, on January 24, 1920. The portents were not good, as the twin-engined Vickers Vimy biplane almost failed to make it beyond South London.
Captain Broome’s log, printed in The Times, notes: “Soon ran into mist and clouds near Croydon, and nearly took the towers off Crystal Palace.” Chalmers Mitchell, a biologist and special correspondent for The Times who was to record scientific observations, take photographs and test the viability of taking passengers along the route, would not have been assured by the philosophy of Captain Broome’s co- pilot, Captain Cockerell.
“The art of flying”, he observed, “is in crashing well.”
The Vimy eventually spluttered across the Channel. “Don’t know where the hell we are, but steering 12deg. on compass . . . Saw a large town thro’ clouds”, the log states. “Think it must be Paris.”
By Lyons, the explorers had met their first hostile natives: “Nearly caused strike asking for 600 gallons of juice on a Sunday night . . . French mechanics don’t appreciate our Billingsgate accent.”
Captain Broome and Captain Cockerell, with their two mechanics, somehow made it to Cairo, via Italy and Malta, where they were met by Dr Mitchell. He had been recruited to The Times by Lord Northcliffe, then the proprietor, under whom he had served at the Department of Enemy Propaganda during the First World War. Lord Northcliffe had earlier, as proprietor of the Daily Mail, sponsored the first flight across the Channel, but The Times insisted that the Cape Town flight was neither publicity stunt nor race: it was a scientific endeavour.
This high-mindedness may or may not have been related to a rival South African plane entering the field, hot on the heels of The Times aeroplane. Flown by two First World War aces, Colonel H. A. van Ryneveld and Flight Lieutenant J. Q. Brand, who had “the distinction of ‘clawing down’ a German bombing machine while night flying over London”, the South African Vimy was unencumbered by a passenger and could fly at night because it had no interest in scientific observation. It was odds-on to beat the Times plane to Cape Town.
Undeterred, the British crew ventured on, but suffered their first crash before they had got out of Egypt.
South of Khartoum, the Vimy was forced to land on dangerous ground.
Chalmers wrote: “We were unable to reach water through the bush and swamps, so lunched on sandwiches and tea while obliging natives fetched water from the Nile.”
The “obliging natives” would no doubt have been a relief for the explorers. As they set off, The Times had noted of this treacherous leg of the journey: “It is to be hoped that storms do not drive the machine far to the west of its course, as a forced landing among the Niam Niams is not to be faced with equanimity, as these folk have been known to eat their visitors.”
On another enforced stop, this time in “hostile Dinka territory”, Dr Mitchell recorded how armed natives watched on as the aircraft failed to take off. By now, the aircraft was verging on being clapped out and Captain Cockerell, who joined the Royal Flying Corps on the second day of the war and had a German bullet in his hip, admitted that his “flying nerve” was in peril for the first time in his life.
On March, February 27, in modern-day Tanzania, the aircraft suffered its last crash, losing a wing in the process. Dr Mitchell was in the process of writing a dispatch for the newspaper. He was then struck by malaria, which delayed his return. Perhaps delirious, he had to be talked out of proceeding to Cape Town on a bicycle.
The South Africans were left to claim the glory, though their voyage was no smoother, as they destroyed two aircrafts along the way. The two pilots were awarded knighthoods and a banquet was thrown for them at the Savoy, at which they were praised by Dr Mitchell and the Minister for War, Winston Churchill.
The collection is to go under the hammer on June 25 at Mullock’s in Shropshire.