Charles Ulm - Later Flights and Disappearance

Later Flights and Disappearance

After the failure of Australian National Airways, Ulm bought one of the airline's Avro X aircraft for himself, and named it Faith in Australia. In this aircraft in 1933, Ulm set the speed record from England to Australia at 6 days, 17 hours and 56 minutes, and made several trans-Tasman flights.

Ulm disappeared in December 1934, together with copilot G.M. Littlejohn and navigator/radio operator J.S. Skilling, while flying from Oakland, California to Hawaii in VH-UXY Stella Australis, an Airspeed Envoy. It is believed an unexpected tailwind and bad weather caused them to fly past the islands in the dark. The wind was about 35 knots from the south-southeast and the aircraft may also have been pushed north of the islands. At approximately 10 am local time on 3 December, after sending a series of Morse coded radio messages to Hawaii advising that they were lost and running out of fuel, the Envoy ditched into the sea. Despite an extensive and immediate search by aircraft and 23 naval ships, no trace of Stella Australis or her crew was ever found. Ulm had chosen not to carry a life raft on board, preferring to save weight and predicting that the aircraft would float for two days if it were forced to land on the water.

The plane had been customized by Airspeed to meet Ulm's own specifications; Airspeed's manager, Nevil Shute Norway, suggested in his autobiography that the internal cabin design may have contributed to the navigational problems, because the inexperienced navigator had to sit some distance from the pilot.