The MacRobertson Air Race, the De Havilland Comet, and the Eleven Thousand Miles from Mildenhall to Melbourne

The MacRobertson Air Race of October 1934 sent 20 aircraft on an 11,300-mile course from Mildenhall, England, to Melbourne, Australia - and the winner completed the journey in under three days. The race didn’t just crown a champion; it proved that the vast distances of the British Empire could be operated as commercial air corridors, laying the foundation for the intercontinental routes still flown today.

What Was the MacRobertson Air Race?

The race emerged from a centenary celebration. When the government of Victoria began planning the 100th anniversary of the colony’s founding, Sir Macpherson Robertson - a Melbourne confectionery magnate who had built one of Australia’s largest commercial empires over five decades - donated £75,000 to the festivities. Someone on the planning committee matched the moment: a long-distance air race from England to Australia, open to all comers, to demonstrate that Australia was a connected, modern nation.

The prize was £10,000 for the first aircraft across the finish line, with an additional £1,500 for the handicap category winner. The route ran south and east from Mildenhall through Rome, Baghdad, Karachi, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin, and down to Melbourne - eleven compulsory stops and roughly 11,300 miles in total. The date was set for October 20, 1934, less than a year after the announcement.

Twenty aircraft lined up at RAF Mildenhall before dawn on race day, representing everything from purpose-built racing machines to current transport aircraft.

The De Havilland DH.88 Comet: Built in Nine Months to Win

When de Havilland heard about the race, they didn’t enter an existing aircraft. They designed a new one from scratch, with the race as the sole specification.

Chief designer Arthur Hagg led a team working under an extraordinary deadline. The brief: build an aircraft fast enough to win across 11,000 miles, reliable enough to finish, and light enough to carry two pilots and the fuel loads each leg demanded. What emerged from the Hatfield factory was the de Havilland DH.88 Comet.

Low-wing monoplane configuration. Twin Gipsy Six engines fitted with variable-pitch propellers - still genuinely new technology in 1934. Retractable undercarriage. A smooth, hand-rubbed wooden skin finished like lacquer. Top speed of approximately 237 mph, with a cruise around 200 mph. For 1934, that was fighter territory.

The cockpit was famously tight. Two pilots sat side by side with elbows nearly touching, the instrument panel inches from their faces, every cubic inch allocated. Fuel tanks filled the wings and the space behind the cockpit; range on each leg was calculated to the last gallon. There was no margin for drifting off course.

De Havilland built three Comets for the race, all spoken for before the paint dried. The one to watch was registered as the Grosvenor House - named for the London hotel whose managing director, Arthur Ormond Edwards, sponsored the entry and put the hotel’s distinctive red livery on the fuselage.

C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black: The Crew That Won

The Grosvenor House was flown by C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black.

Charles William Anderson Scott was a former Royal Air Force pilot who had flown the England-Australia route before, held records on it, and knew every leg intimately - where the weather turned, where the headwinds built, where the terrain forced you low in the dark. He was competitive in the focused, unhurried way of pilots who’ve spent years racing the clock.

Tom Campbell Black was a Kenya-based bush pilot and former RAF man, steady and experienced. Between them, their knowledge of the route came not from studying charts but from being there.

They took off with the rest of the field at 6:30 a.m. on October 20, aircraft departing at 30-second intervals. The strategy was simple and relentless: minimize time on the ground at every stop. Fuel, check, go. Scott would climb down, speak briefly with the ground crew, and climb back in. Campbell Black navigated and shared the controls on the long legs. They slept in brief shifts in the cramped cockpit as desert and ocean passed below.

The Grosvenor House landed at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne on October 23, met by a crowd estimated at 70,000 people. Their official time: 2 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes, and 21 seconds. Under three days from England to Australia, in 1934.

Scott and Campbell Black collected their £10,000 prize. By most accounts, they appeared more relieved than elated. They’d done the job. That was the point.

The Uiver and the Night at Albury

The race was not over when the Grosvenor House landed.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines had entered a Douglas DC-2 named the Uiver - Dutch for “stork” - flown by Captain Koene Dirk Parmentier and co-pilot Johannes Moll. KLM was not simply racing. They had flown from Amsterdam to Mildenhall with paying passengers and mail on board, and they intended to complete the full 11,300-mile course while running a live commercial airline service.

The Uiver flew with quiet professional precision. At Allahabad the crew was third overall; by Singapore they remained in serious contention for the handicap prize. The long leg down through Australia went well until the final approach to Melbourne.

In the darkness of October 23 going into the early hours of October 24, the Australian interior delivered what it delivers to those who underestimate it: violent convective thunderstorms rolling east across the Murray-Darling basin. Parmentier pushed south looking for a way through. Fuel was becoming critical. The sky between them and Melbourne would not cooperate.

No weather radar. No satellite imagery. No datalink. Just a pilot looking through a rain-lashed windscreen at walls of black cloud that swallowed the stars.

The crew picked up a radio signal from Albury, New South Wales. The local station was broadcasting race updates and noted that Albury itself sat directly under the storm line. But Albury had a racecourse. Parmentier homed in on the signal. The radio operator, sensing what the circling aircraft needed, kept transmitting - a lighthouse made of radio waves.

The people of Albury heard the Uiver’s two Wright Cyclone engines in the overcast above them. They could not see the aircraft. They drove to the racecourse anyway. Hundreds of cars formed rings of headlights on the grass inside the track. People stood in the rain holding flashlights pointed upward. An entire town, in the middle of the night, in a downpour, improvising a landing field from automobile headlights.

Parmentier broke through the cloud base and found a circle of light below him. He landed the Uiver on the Albury racecourse shortly after midnight. The crew refueled through the night as the storm cleared.

On the morning of October 24, the Uiver departed Albury, flew to Melbourne, crossed the finish line, and won the handicap category. Parmentier and Moll collected their £1,500 prize.

Australia printed commemorative stamps. A memorial was built in Albury that still stands. Streets were named for the aircraft. The word Uiver entered Australian aviation history permanently - because one country town turned on its headlights in the rain.

Why This Race Still Matters

The MacRobertson Race’s legacy extends well beyond prize money and records.

The route flown by Scott, Campbell Black, Parmentier, and Moll - Rome, Baghdad, Karachi, Singapore, Darwin - became the rough outline of the imperial air routes that followed. Imperial Airways was already pushing toward Australia; the race was a full-scale proof of concept, flown at speed, in public, with the world watching.

The DC-2’s performance sent a specific message to the industry. KLM had carried paying passengers and mail across 11,300 miles, finished second overall, and won the handicap. That was not a racing stunt. That was a commercial airline operation. The aviation world understood immediately what it implied.

The de Havilland DH.88 Comet, built in nine months for one race, went on to further records. Two of the three aircraft survived World War II. The Grosvenor House - the actual aircraft flown by Scott and Campbell Black to Melbourne - is preserved and restored at the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, where it can be seen today.

Key Takeaways

• The MacRobertson Air Race on October 20, 1934 covered 11,300 miles from Mildenhall, England, to Melbourne, Australia, with 20 aircraft competing for a £10,000 outright prize and a £1,500 handicap prize.
• The de Havilland DH.88 Comet was designed and built in nine months specifically for this race, with a top speed of approximately 237 mph - among the fastest aircraft in the world at the time.
• C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black won the outright race in the Grosvenor House in 2 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes, and 21 seconds, arriving in Melbourne on October 23.
• KLM’s DC-2 Uiver, flown by Parmentier and Moll with paying passengers aboard, won the handicap category after the town of Albury, New South Wales, used car headlights to mark an emergency landing strip during a nighttime thunderstorm.
• The race validated the England-Australia air corridor and directly shaped the imperial and commercial air routes that followed in the years afterward - the world those pilots built is the one we fly in today.