Replica monoplane recalls Border’s rich history of flight

The Robbins and Porter monoplane will hang in the Albury Library Museum, about on the spot where the original was built by the two young motor mechanics in their Kiewa Street garage in 1912-13.

This will be a spectacular addition to the city’s aviation memorabilia, most of which relates to the Uiver landing in 1934.

It will remind us that Albury’s aviation story began more than 20 years before citizens freed the Uiver DC2 from the mud of Albury’s racecourse.

And since then, the city has figured in several Australian aviation firsts.

Last month, the RAAF landed a Hawk 127 training jet, but most passenger planes flying in and out today are turbo-prop planes carrying about 70 people.

Azor Robbins and Alex Porter didn’t fly their plane — for insurance reasons — but Porter’s brother Vivien, 18, took the controls — reportedly flying several hundred metres at Bungowannah on July 27, 1913 on the Border’s first flight.

It made news locally, but not nationally because others were doing much the same thing.

Pioneer aviator Harry Hawker flew the first plane over Albury, a frail Sopwith Tabloid bi-plane on March 7, 1914.

Flying from the Albury Racecourse and watched by 5000 people, Hawker set an Australian altitude record of 7800 feet, but his second flight crash-landed. He escaped unhurt.

Only 11 weeks later, Frenchman Maurice Guilleaux reached 9800 feet when he bought his Bleriot XI monoplane to the racecourse for three exhibition flights.

Guilleaux returned on July 16 on the very first Melbourne-Sydney mail flight, landing at the racecourse 40 minutes after leaving Wangaratta, and then hopping on to Wagga.

By Sydney, he had made the world’s longest airmail flight.

On October 30, 1917, an Australian Flying Corps instructor, Raymond Galloway, flew a Bristol Scout biplane from Point Cook to Albury non-stop — the longest Australian flight to date — and did it in 105 minutes.

Galloway crash-landed near Wagga, picked up the pieces and put them on a train for home.

On April 15, 1920, Albury saw an Australian landmark flight when Nigel Love, in a Avro 506K, carried the first paying passenger from Sydney to Melbourne in stages — Fred Blacklock had cans of petrol ready for him.

Love then flew non-stop to Melbourne, returning through Albury on April 2, and, in May, staged joy flights and let a photographer take the first aerial pictures of Albury.

Aviator Sir Ross Smith happened to be in Albury in April speaking about his first England-Darwin flight in 1919.

Later in the ’20s, a Gypsy Moth put on joy flights from Alexandra Park.

In May 1928, Bert Hinkler and his wife landed on the Albury Sportsground in their Avro Avian by arrangement at half-time in a football match. The players placed a white sheet on the grass to mark the spot.

In 1929, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm visited Albury, where Kingsford Smith’s brothers lived.

The pair told the council to forget about Alexandra Park, Ettamogah and South Albury and build an airport where the present one is.

Eight years later, the council resumed the land and had unemployed men build an “aerodrome” with three intersecting gravel runways, but it fell into disuse in World War II.

In 1946, Denys Dalton and Fred Ogden started Albury’s first commercial air services.

A proper licensed airport wasn’t opened until December 15 1963, allowing it to handle DC3 planes and Fokker Friendships F27 planes.

The 50th anniversary comes up this year — surely worth another air pageant.