DAMIEN LAY : OF AIR AND MEN

This is one of Australia’s  oldest mysteries  and greatest legends. There’s  a war hero, adventurer, the world  record attempt,  the sudden disappearance  and the small clues hinting of their tragic end.

But after almost 75 years of intrigue,  the final resting place of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith  may have been found by a small film crew. He was the first to circumnavigate  the globe by air, the first to fly across the Pacific from the US to Australia– and then the first to fly back again.

On November 8, 1935 “Smithy” and his co-pilot  Tommy Pethybridge vanished on route from England  to Australia  in their Lockheed Altair 80  aircraft, Lady Southern Cross.  They were attempting to break the light speed record between the two countries.  Over Burma, their last contact  was 1.30am. They never arrived in Singapore.  The world was on edge for news, but it never came.

For decades  the disappearance  remained a mystery.  Clues surfaced over the decades,  theories abounded, but no proof surfaced. Until Damien Lay came along. In 2009, he located what he believed to be an aircraft,  about two miles off the Burmese coast, in a hundred feet underwater.  That discovery ignited a 20 year journey  to piece together  what really happened,  stripping away the myth that clouded Charles’s memory and bring closure to the families  who endured in their  absence.

This is a true story,  epically told through  the intimacy of historical fiction. Its also a story of the women  who bore the weight  of that silence and of a son, just shy of his third birthday when his father  crashed and who for 90 years, knew him only through the history books. Set against the turbulence  and glamour  of the 1930s,  this is both a mystery  unravelled and a legacy reclaimed.

Award-winning Australian  writer, filmmaker, and explorer, Damien Lay has released his long-awaited  book “OF AIR AND MEN”, offering the final unwritten chapter  in this amazing story.  The pieces of wreckage  that Lay and his team found  in 2012 included timber and components  such as fuel lines, each piece corresponding  to his sonar imaging.  This follows the extraordinary research of Jack Hodder, an Aussie aviation engineer,  adventurer and explorer who in 1937 conducted multiple expeditions  in search of the wreck  after a wheel surfaced on a beach. His work was followed  by Australia’s  foremost  aviation historian, Ted Wixted who conducted research  for 50 years.

Lay began his research  in 2005 and announced  that he had located the aircraft  in 2009. At that time,  his findings were questioned  and highly controversial.  The author  has spent 20 years  and around $5 million  researching  Kingsford Smith’s arial journey  and believes that he has worked out how the aircraft and its pilots met their fate. He concludes that the plane was damaged by a bat strike while passing over an uncharted  island  and forced to make an emergency landing on a sandbar. Lay suggests, Kingsford Smith and Pethybridge were able to repair the Lady Southern Cross  and take-off again only to hit a headland  and be forced into the sea. His theory  about the location of the plane received  support from Kingsford Smith’s 92-year-old son Charles  Jr.

OF AIR AND MEN  makes for riveting  reading both as a mystery, an adventure and is written in a style that is not easy to put down.  Loved it.