WWI: Kiwis keen to reach for sky during the war

Those magnificent men ... an Australian pilot lands at a Victorian airfield during World War I. Photo / Australian War Memorial

Would-be-pilots went to UK and Australia so they could take to the air to fight the Germans.

Twenty years before our air force split from the Defence Force in 1937, air fever swept the country. The Western world was becoming obsessed with achieving artificial flight. New Zealand realised coastal air defences would be far more effective, adept and cheaper than warships.

On October 13, 1909, Parliament first began discussing a prize for Kiwis contributing to aircraft invention. Designers of airships and planes popped up from Oamaru to Auckland. Wellington's Beach Aeroplane company made advances until 1911. The Juriss monoplane, which looked like four triangles, didn't go far, but we trained pilots at fledgling flight schools in Auckland and Christchurch regardless.

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Waihi man James Galbraith proposed in 1910 to build an aluminium "Flying Machine" which, with its own positive charge, would resist the magnetic pull Galbraith believed was hindering flight. It would "just float in the air", he claimed; its pilots would wear "longevity jackets" which could cure illness.

New Zealand was well behind in realising how fighting aloft could advantage an army, so Kiwis worked their way to the UK or Australia to join their air forces. It was 1918 before the RAF was formed. Fifty New Zealanders served with the Australian Flying Corps.

In 1916, balloons trailing telephone wire were still in use, while biplanes reported on the enemy via morse code and handwritten notes.

George Foden Rooking Hall couldn't keep away.

A civil engineer from Putorino, Hawkes Bay, Hall was one more Kiwi so convinced by his flying machine blueprints that he travelled to Sydney in 1914 to promote his invention to Australia's Minister of Defence.

Australia raised technical questions about his design and offered guidance. Australia's Defence Department regretted it couldn't carry out construction of the machine, but Hall carried on undaunted.

His mechanical mind saw him placed with the Royal Engineers during the war, where he earned the Star British War Medal and Victory Medal. Hall was killed while serving in Belgium on June 28, 1917. He is buried at Ypres and memorialised at Wellington's National War Memorial Carillon.

The Herald's 100 Kiwi Stories from the Great War continues every Monday and Thursday.