The racing 247 at rest in the Smithsonian museum. The racing badge, with the England-Australia map, can still be seen on the fuselage.
After the race the Boeing went to United Airlines and flew commercially. This restored 247 has been decked out in the colour scheme it would have worn.
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Pilot Roscoe Turner
Turner's co-pilot
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Boeing's new 247 twin-engined airliner was a natural entry for a race that promised worldwide publicity and sales opportunities. Though it didn't win, like the DC2 the Boeing showed what it could do in a marathon contest such as this, and pointed the way ahead for civil passenger air transport. The technology employed in the winning Comet - wood and fabric build and the first UK use of such things as retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propellors - was already commonplace in the American aircraft represented by the Boeing and the DC2.
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Roscoe Turner - speed merchant
Mrs Aquilla Derryberry Turner of Corinth, Mississippi. did not raise her boy Roscoe to be a flyer. At business college he showed promise of making an excellent clerk.
Then in 1917 he enlisted as a private in the US ambulance service, rose to sergeant, transferred to the air service as a balloon observer, and came out a first lieutenant.
After the 1914-18 War Roscoe Turner became a lion-tamer in a circus, later a barnstorming stunt pilot, wing-walker and parachute-jumper. He toured the country advertising Curlee Clothing Co. of St.Louis and, in 1924, married a dark-haired, pretty Corinth girl named Carline Stovall.
In Hollywood Turner flew an aeroplane of his own in Hell's Angels and became an aviation technical adviser for the cinema.
In 1929 he set up Nevada Airlines and operated it successfully for eight months, but the obscurities of ordinary business held no attraction for Turner. While working for Gilmore Oil Co as an aerial advertiser, he acquired a 450 lb lion cub which flew everywhere with him and helped to get his picture in the papers.
Better known than this pet is the Turner uniform -- robin's-egg blue tunic, faun-colored whipcord breeches, Sam Browne belt, black riding boots and a gold-and-crimson flying helmet.
When Turner began to appear in this gaudy get-up before he had made any real name for himself as a speed flyer, Cy Caldwell wrote prophetically in Aero Digest: "A pilot with nerve enough to wear that uniform and kick a half-grown lion in the pants is bound to come in first eventually."
And last year Roscoe Turner began "coming in first" until today he is the outstanding speed pilot of the US. His rivals sneer at his clothes, at his brash statements that he is "a bit of a hero to the boys of the country," at his public swagger, but there could be no sneering at the flying records that he has won in the stiffest competition.
His speed racing began in ernest in 1930 when he first broke the East-West transcontinental record in 18 hr. 43 min. Last year he won the Bendix Trophy - New York to Los Angeles - in 11 hr 30 min, topped that transcontinental record with another in the opposite direction, in 10 hr 4 min.
Last month he beat that record by two minues, flew back to Cleveland to win the Thompson Trophy, the world's number one closed-course race (100 miles at 248 mph).
A temperamental prima donna on the ground, Turner is a cold, nerveless machine in the air. "I am a speed merchant," he likes to say.
His showing last week in the race to Australia did his reputation and that of his merchandise more good than all the tricky publicity with which his name today is encumbered.
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An early picture
Roscoe Turner the
He also turned
And his equally
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During his career, Roscoe Turner took along many flight covers for stamp collectors on his record-setting flights. This one was stamped in both London and Melbourne at the start and end of the race. | |
| Excerpt from:
LOST!
Colonel Roscoe Turner's Story of the London-to-Melbourne Air Race
as written by Franklin M. Reck
"Hello, Folks, (says Turner) meet my ship!" [Col. Roscoe Turner in his lionskin coat with one arm up waving to crowds and illustration of Boeing plane above him.]
Flying from Los Angeles to New York in 10 hours 2 minutes is one thing. You have a familiar terrain, beacons, and a chain of well-lighted, hard-surfaced fields to give you aid. Flying from London to Melbourne over a strange course, with landing fields few and far between, is quite another.
It's on such a trip that you're likely to encounter the package of grief peculiar to flying - the dismay of sitting in a cabin somewhere between earth and sky, your gas running out, pitch-black night outside, and no place to land.
If you have to get lost, get lost on the ground. Not over a jungle populated by tigers and a river inhabited by playful crocodiles. That, however, is the climax to this yarn, so I'll save it for later.
I had to get into the London-Melbourne race. The Fate that runs my life, bless her heart, wears hobnail shoes and spends most of her time kicking me into trouble. Anyhow, the idea grew upon me that America ought to be represented in what promised to be one of the greatest air races of all time.
The occasion was Melbourne's hundredth anniversary. First prize, 10,000 pounds. The course, from London via Bagdad, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin, and Charleville, to Melbourne. Something over eleven thousand miles of mountain, desert, jungle and ocean. You could make as many stops as you wished, but you had to hit those five control points.
The competition was something to think about. There was the team of Scott and Black. There were the Mollisons, and O. Cathcart Jones and K.F.H.Waller- the cream of British flyers, all flying the specially-built DeHavilland Comet Racers.
There were Parmentier and Moll, pilots of the Royal Dutch Airlines, in an American-built Douglas. There was the team of G.J. Geysendorfer and D.L.Asjes, Dutch aces, flying a Pander S.4.
Many of them had made the trip before. Scott had broken the record from London to Melbourne with monotonous regularity. Parmentier and Moll had flown over most of the course on their regular run from Amsterdam to Batavia. All in all, it promised to be a stiff test.
A book could be devoted to the cost of preparing for the race, so we'd better omit finance in this story. I borrowed a new Boeing 247-D from United Air Lines - a commercial cabin plane exactly like those flown on the airlines of this country. According to the rules of the race we were supposed to use standard A.T.C. commercial planes.
My ship had two 550-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engines. It was built to carry 1125 gallons of gas. The cruising speed of the Boeing was around 185 miles per hour.
I could have picked a non-salaried crew from the scores of voluntary offers that came in, but I decided to pay my crew and pick the best. For co-pilot I selected Clyde Pangborn, the man who hopped the Pacific from Tokyo to Washington state. I consider him just about the best long-distance flyer in the business.
My radio operator was Reeder Nichols, who built and installed the radio we carried.
Getting the big plane to England was a task in itself. I finally found a liner with enough deck space to hold the plane, but when we went to hoist it aboard we discovered that the hoisting machinery lacked six feet of being large enough. At an expense of $500 the gear was remodeled to accommodate the plane.
The captain of the liner said that he would land me at Southampton. Instead, due to a change in sailing ordrs, he dropped me, my crew and my Boeing at Le Havre in France. Then followed a battle with governmental red tape that makes me see red to this day. Let's not go into it.
I finally got France's permission to take the plane out of the country and found an American ship captain who would get me across the Channel. The question was, could we get the plane on his ship?
We paced off his deck and found that with the nose hanging over one rail and the tail over the other, the Boeing would fit nicely, except for various obstructions that cluttered the deck. The captain accomodatingly took a blow torch and cut off the obstructions flush with the deck. And that's how we got to England.
We thought our troubles were behind us when we finally arrived at the Mildenhall Aerodrome, but our biggest shock was yet to come. The officials put our ship on the scales and found that it weighed exactly right - without the crew.
"Sorry," they said regretfully. "I guess there's nothing to do but seal up some of your gasoline tanks."
They cut our gas supply to 850 gallons and our cruising range went down accordingly. This meant that instead of cutting a straight course to Australia via the five control points we had to go zigzagging down to the other side of the world in thousand to fifteen hundred mile hops.
Our maps were useless. We had to arrange stops at additional points along the course.
Sixty-four ships were entered in the contest but when the morning of October 20, 1934, rolled around only twenty were ready to start. And of those, only nine were to finish.
The first plane took off in the chill haze at 6:30 a.m. The rest followed at 45-second intervals, and inside of 16 minutes every competitor was in the air, headed southeast for a destination half a world away. We were the second ship to take off.
Clouds shrouded Europe from our gaze, and we had to fly by instrument, without checkpoints. We knew, however, that the snow-mantled peaks of the Alps were on our course, and we waited eagerly for our first sight of them. When we finally glimpsed the Matterhorn thrusting its head up above the clouds we felt a comforting sense of relief.
Our instruments, then, were accurate and our calculations correct. We sat down at Athens, the only hard-surfaced two-way airport on the course. Leaving Athens was like kissing goodbye to civilization. The fabled city of Bagdad was next to feel our wheels, then the town of Karachi on the western shore of India.
Meanwhile we took catnaps on the floor of the plane with our rolled-up coats for pillows. We had less baggage than you would take on an overnight trip to the Joneses'.
We had a week's supply of canned goods and water in thermos bottles in case we came down in desert or jungle and had to hike our way back to civilization.
From Bagdad to Karachi, a country of rocky desolation, we saw not a single living animal or man. And now, gird your loins and steel your nerves for the pleasant mental torture of our next hop - the thousand-mile leap over the interior of India to Allahabad. I still sweat when I think of it.
We left Karachi in the afternoon, still up in the race, and with a good chance of finishing first. Scott and Black, Parmentier and Moll, were somewhere ahead.
We had plenty of gas to reach Allahabad but not much extra for detours. The route was totally strange to us. Visibility was poor. We knew it would be night before we landed. In other words we had to fly by dead reckoning.
We had to set a compass course, allow for drift, figure our speed, and from these calculations deduce when we would arrive at our destination. When the hour arrived we would gaze below and there would be Allahabad, pretty as you please. At least, that's what we hoped!
So we sailed eastward over India, remembering that it was the search for a westward route to this country of fabled wealth that led to the discovery of America. Wishing, too, that we could stop long enough to go through some maharajah's palace and maybe take a ride on his pet elephant. Dusk fell and deepened to night. The hour arrived when Allahabad should be directly below us, but there was no beacon, no field light, no dark outlines of a city.
We didn't assume instantly that we were lost. Very probably we hadn't covered as much ground as we had supposed. We had complete confidence in our instruments and our alertness in staying on the course. Somewhere just ahead the beacon would soon pierce the black curtain of night. The thing to do was to stay on our course and barge straight ahead. This we did until a flash illuminated the horizon.
"That's it!" we decided and headed toward the flash. But it didn't reappear and we began to have that gone feeling in the pit of our stomachs. The flash was not a beacon after all - it was lightning.
Reeder Nichols, sitting in his chrome-nickel chair with green leather upholstery (it had been presented to him by a London automobile dealer), was sending messages to the operator at Allahabad. "Give us a radio bearing," he requested. "Give us a radio bearing." But for some reason we couldn't establish two-way communication.
All the time we were requesting help, the operator at Allahabad was blithely announcing to the world, "Colonel Turner is lost. The Americans are overdue." We could hear him announcing it, but we couldn't get him to answer us.
In the meantime the needles on our gas guages swung closer and closer to empty. Vainly we searched the ground for some check point, but there was nothing in the blackness below to give us an accurate indication of where we might be. Very soon the motors would sputter and die. Before that should happen, however, it was important to have some plan in mind. We wanted to land at an airport. If that was impossible, we wanted to save the ship.
Barring that, we hoped to save our lives.
"We can always bail out," was one pleasant suggestion. "Yes," I replied. "Bail out at night into a jungle full of tigers. They tell me the tigers always go looking for fresh meat at night. Besides, if we bail out we'll lose our ship. The thing to do is to try to land on a river."
"Didn't they tell us at Karachi there were crocodiles in the rivers?"
I had forgotten the crocodiles and for the moment I actually visualized myself standing on the wing trying to unfasten a propeller to use as a weapon against the crocs. A sort of modern Saint George battling the dragons with a sword of purest alloy steel. Tigers, crocodiles, and no airport. Bail out and play tag with tigers. Land in the river and annoy the crocs. Do neither and die. One of the three fates seemed imminently to be ours. At that very moment, I think, all of us must have known intimately the state of mind of all the fliers who have gone to their dooms in ocean and wilderness, blazing new trails for mankind to follow.
I looked at the guages and saw with shock that they read empty. We were a couple of hours overdue. Why didn't we get a reply from Allahabad?
"Send out an SOS," I told Nichols. An SOS would silence all other stations on the air - even the Sparks at Allahabad who seemed to feel special delight in telling the world we were lost.
Nichols was aghast. "That's serious business. You only do that when you're on the spot."
"If we're not on the spot now we never will be," I replied grimly.
So Nichols sent out the three famous letters. Then things began to break all at once. They had to, if we weren't to be just another air casualty.
The Allahabad operator heeded our request and sent us the bearing we wanted. At the same moment we saw beneath us the Soune River. Feverishly we searched our maps. Yes! We had located our position by the Soune - we were cruising over the only part of the river that took a due east-west course for approximately 50 miles. We knew where we were then! A hundred miles beyond Allahabad and fifty miles south.
The tail wind must have been stronger than we thought, the southward drift greater than we had figured. We turned back, praying that our gasoline would last. As far as our guages showed we were already riding on borrowed time. We caught a flash of light and hoped that it wasn't lightning.
"Flash your beacon on and off," Nichols radioed to the ground. Allahabad obliged and when we saw the intermittent flashing we knew that our troubles were over. We coasted down to a landing and taxied up to the gas tanks in front of the hangar. As we slowed to a stop our two motors gave their last gasps. But we didn't care - we were safely down, ship and all!
We had other thrills on that race. I shall never forget the monsoons - those topical rains so thick with water that it's imposible to fly through them. You must go above or around . . .
The dust storms, whipping up like gigantic clouds until all the world is an impenetrable gray . . . That stretch of tiger-infested marsh along the Bay of Bengal, so thick with reeds that once your ship lands you cannot take it off, so deep and slimy that you cannot wade to safety . . .
The typhoon off the Malay Peninsula that made us change our landing place from Rangoon to a spot called Alor Star . . . The night landing at Singapore, where the field was marked by a single row of lights and we didn't know which side to take. If we picked the wrong side we might strike plowed fields and hedges that would end our trip. We found when we landed that the lights were down the center of the field . . .
The forced stop at Bourke, Australia, to take the cowling off the motors in order to let the wind cool them. That stop, incidentally, let Parmentier and Moll into Melbourne two hours and 45 minutes ahead of us . . .
The thrill of Melbourne's wholehearted reception, and of taking second place to Scott and Black when Parmentier and Moll decided to take first place in the Handicap Division rather than second in the Speed Division. The thrill of knowing that two of the first three ships were standard American-built craft.
Thrills all along the 11,323 miles. Thrills coming at unexpected moments during the 3 days, 21 hours, 5 minutes and 2 seconds of the voyage.
But nowhere did the tension draw quite as tightly as when we cruised over the Indian jungle southeast of Allahabad with our futures hanging by the slender thread of a few dwindling gallons of gas.
Source: Colonel Roscoe Turner as told to Franklin M. Reck. The American Boy Magazine, 7430 Second Blvd, Detroit, Michigan.
For more about Rosecoe Turner see www.tsixroads.com/Corinth_MLSANDY/rt153.html
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