Jack Rowan's Flight Logs

My sweetheart Nancy when she was 18

Flight Check

G'day, I'm Jack Rowan, and this is my girl, Nancy.  Together we'll be flying this box of wood and metal around the world, around Australia, and around inside your head.  I'll be your chief pilot on this flight, though my sweetheart will be taking over the controls when I need a break, and when she has something to say, like "Bail out!".  Only ribbin' ya!

But she does love talking nineteen to the dozen when you let her, so don't you worry about that.  Actually, Nancy's writing a script for a play about the Great Air Race, which is going to be performed on the radio in the very near future, so you'll be reading snippets from that.  It's all her ideas although I have been having a little bit of input just to clarify what actually happened at particular times, and what the many people I've encountered were really like.  I felt like she made things a little too black and white, too much of a, a caricature, I think they call it.  So what you will be reading will be the truth just as I've seen it.  I mean, well, being an aviator isn't how it's depicted in the moving pictures, and I didn't want you blokes and sheilas to think that it was all about me, you know.

So, that's how the story goes, at the moment.  Oh, and here's a picture of my second-best girl, my airplane.  Isn't she a beauty??!!  I'll just leave you to look at her for a while, as I think dinner's ready and I'm famished!

Jack with his mum when he was 12 years old

Old Stories, Old Pictures

Nance said it would be nice if you got to know a bit about my past. So I'll tell you a few things before we get back to some current barnstorming!  

I grew up on a farm west of Lithgow, in a little town at the top of a big valley called Capertee.  I didn't do too much as a littl'un, just wrestled with mates, went hunting every now and then with my old man, and went to the local school like all the other kids in the area. My mum took me to Sunday school every week but it didn't do too much for me.  I was always looking out the windows at the bright blue sky and watching the clouds, and thinking about what it would be like to be up there with them.  I'd seen illustrations in one of our school's library books of men going up in big balloons over in France and other places.  I would stare so hard at the pictures that I'd almost think I was riding along side the men in the little baskets that hung underneath.  Then the teacher would come up behind me and grab me by the ear and drag me back to my desk saying that "I'd be better off looking at working on my times tables than dreaming silly daydreams".  What a wrong'un she turned out to be!

When I turned 15 my old man wanted me to leave school to help him on the farm, so I didn't get much chance for daydreaming after that. But two years later the war began, and I saw my chance to get a new life.  I volunteered for the Royal Air Force, and got a 'free' passage to Old Blighty, where I was put through rudimentary military training (with a fair emphasis on the rude) and finally transferred to the Royal Flying School to undertake training for the latest Avro biplane.

In the early days of the war, the airplanes didn't have any armaments as we were only meant to be doing observing.  All we had to protect ourselves were small .45 service pistols and our wits if there was any trouble, or if we had to do a forced landing behind enemy lines.  The Avros were sturdy old two-seaters, having a pilot and a navigator/observer in the rear.  From the start we were opted into pairings, with each of us hoping that we would end up with a partner we could get along with.  I was pretty lucky, I ended up with Flight-Sergeant Jim 'Lucky' Lucas who'd gotten the nickname from his exploits both on the card table, and in the pilot's seat.  But it had been one flight that had ended up in a tail-up crash landing that had changed his status.  It had shaken him up so badly that he couldn't face flying looking forward anymore as a pilot.  He still loved the thrill of being up in the air, but he chose to be the observer at the back, facing the tail.

Jack with his Italian interpreter sailing off the Baltic coast, June 1918

Lost Last Days

Toward the end of June in 1918, it seemed as if the 'war to end all wars' was finally coming to an end.  I was sent on a special mission to the Baltic region to learn if the secret plans for a new seaplane the Austro-Hungarians had been planning to build could be filched from under their noses.  I was sent in disguise as an unaligned expatriate Australian businessman coming from Italy, and looking to merge production costs on a new seaplane that the Italian company I worked for were looking to build.  I went with an Italian interpreter and a pretty young secretary, with excellent credentials and the desire to be all-convincing.

We arrived on a steamship which had a small boat on board for shore trips when not docking in harbours.  Once on land, we passed the local port checkpoints with flying colours and sought out some overnight accommodation.