Flight and Radio: The Fusion of Two Fledgling Technologies
Victorian Lieutenant Clifford Peel, had heard Flynn's public speeches, and on being shipped out to France for World War I in 1917, sent Flynn a letter explaining how he had seen a missionary doctor visiting isolated patients utilising a plane. Assisted by costing estimates by Peel, Flynn immediately took the idea of using aircraft to incept his idea, and published Peel's idea in the church's newsletter. Peel died in combat in 1918, probably not even knowing the impact he had in the creation of an Australian icon.
Along with motorised flight, another new technology was being developed that could replace the complicated means of communication by telegraph. Together with Alfred Traeger, Flynn began experiments with radio in the mid 1920s to enable remote outposts to contact a centralised medical base. The pedal radio was the first result of this collaboration. These were distributed gradually to stations, missions and other human residences around Cloncurry, the base site for a 50-watt transmitter.
By 1928, Flynn had gathered sufficient funds through fundraising activities to launch the experiment of the AMS on 15 May. Its supporters included industrialist HV McKay, medical doctor George Simpson, and Hudson Fysh, one of the founders of Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service, the company which would go on to become Qantas. Qantas supplied the first aircraft to the fledgling organisation, a De Havilland DH.50, dubbed "Victory". On 17 May, two days after inception, the service's first official flight departed from Cloncurry, 85 miles to Julia Creek in Central Queensland, where the plane was met by over 100 people at the airstrip. Qantas charged two shillings per mile for use of the Victory during the first year of the project.
Read more about this topic: Royal Flying Doctor Service Of Australia
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“If in a shimmering room the babies came,
Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,
It was because night nursed them in its fold.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)