The MacRobertson Air Race, the De Havilland Comet Built in Eighty-Eight Days, and the Eleven-Thousand-Mile Dash from England to Melbourne That Showed the World What Aviation Was Becoming

On October 20, 1934, twenty aircraft departed RAF Station Mildenhall, Suffolk in pre-dawn darkness for the most ambitious air race ever attempted: 11,300 miles from England to Melbourne, Australia. The MacRobertson Air Race didn’t just crown a winner - it demonstrated, in real time, that the world had become small enough to cross in days.

What Was the MacRobertson Air Race?

The race grew out of an unlikely combination of colonial commemoration and confectionery money. The state of Victoria, Australia was marking its centenary in 1934 - 100 years since the first European settlement of the region - and a candy manufacturer named Sir Macpherson Robertson decided to mark the occasion spectacularly. He offered £10,000 sterling in prize money for an international air race from England to Australia, and the aviation world responded.

The Aeroplane Club of Victoria organized the competition. The route ran from Mildenhall south and east through five mandatory checkpoints: Baghdad, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin, and Charleville in Queensland, then south to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne.

Two categories were contested: speed, for purpose-built racing aircraft, and transport, for aircraft operating in something resembling commercial service.

57 aircraft were originally entered from over 20 nations. 20 were cleared to start.

The De Havilland Comet: Built in 88 Days

Among the 20 starters, three aircraft stood apart. They had been designed, engineered, and built specifically for this race - and they hadn’t existed three months earlier.

In August 1934, with the race set for October, Arthur Hagg at the De Havilland Aircraft Company received the commission to design a purpose-built racing aircraft. Three separate teams wanted entries with a genuine chance of winning.

Eighty-eight days later, De Havilland delivered three flying airplanes.

The DH.88 Comet was not a modification or a kit assembly. It was a new design - new engineering drawings, new stress calculations, prototype fittings, engine runs, and complete systems integration. The company ran day and night shifts, seven days a week, with workers picking up exactly where the previous shift had stopped. The workshop floors were lit all night, every night, for the duration.

The result was a genuine thoroughbred. Two supercharged Gipsy Six engines. A swept, graceful wing. Retractable undercarriage - still far from universal on fast aircraft in 1934. An enclosed cockpit for two crew with a fuel system designed around the longest legs between checkpoints. At cruise, she made over 200 miles per hour.

The three factory Comets were finished in three color schemes: scarlet, black with gold trim, and green and gold.

A fourth Comet was built to the same specification: Black Magic, entered by Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison. Johnson was among the most accomplished long-distance pilots alive. She had flown solo from England to Australia in 1930 - the first woman ever to do it - and had completed solo flights to Japan and Cape Town. She and Mollison were legitimate favorites.

Mechanical trouble ended their race early. A healthy Amy Johnson in Black Magic, with her intimate knowledge of that route, is one of the genuine what-ifs of aviation’s golden age.

The Race: Scott and Campbell Black Fly the Scarlet Comet

The scarlet Comet, race number 34, was crewed by Arthur Orlando Scott and Tom Campbell Black - two of the most experienced long-distance pilots in Britain. Scott had flown the England-to-Australia route before, multiple times. He knew the mountain passes in Burma. He knew the heat off the Indian plains in late October.

At 6:30 Greenwich Mean Time, aircraft began departing Mildenhall at 30-second intervals to prevent a mass-start collision on the grass. They rolled out one by one into the dark and headed east.

Scott and Campbell Black led from the front. First to Baghdad. First to Allahabad. First into Singapore.

The Comet’s cockpit offered no comfort. Two pilots, their charts, their instruments, and the constant roar of the Gipsy Sixes through the glass. Navigation was dead reckoning and visual landmarks. Radio when the range cooperated. Checkpoints were grass strips with pre-positioned ground crews - land fast, take on fuel, eat what was available, back in the cockpit.

The clock never stopped.

Just over 70 hours after leaving Mildenhall, the scarlet Comet rolled to a stop at Flemington Racecourse. 11,300 miles. Under three days. The crowd numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Scott and Campbell Black had done something the world had never seen done before.

The Uiver and the Headlamps of Albury

The speed category result was decisive. The transport category produced a story of a different kind.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines had entered a Douglas DC-2, registration PH-AJU, crewed by Captain Koene Parmentier, First Officer Johannes Moll, and radio operator B.G.U. Geysendorfer. The aircraft was named Uiver - Dutch for “stork.”

It was carrying three fare-paying passengers. The entire way.

While the purpose-built racers flew with nothing aboard but two pilots and fuel, an airliner in commercial configuration was making the same 11,300-mile run on the same course.

Over Australia, the Uiver ran into severe weather crossing New South Wales. Heavy overcast, rain, darkness. The crew was looking for Albury, a refueling stop, and losing the navigation battle. They were circling overhead, somewhere in the murk, with no way down.

The people of Albury heard the struggle on their radio.

They drove their motorcars to the horse racing track at the edge of town. Hundreds of them. They lined their vehicles around the track and turned on their headlamps - creating a ring of automobile lights in the Australian dark, aimed at the sky.

Captain Parmentier found it.

He brought the DC-2 down between those headlamps and landed on the grass. Passengers climbed out in the rain. The crew refueled and was airborne again.

The Uiver won the transport category in approximately 90 hours.

Why the Uiver’s Finish Mattered More Than the Comet’s

The speed result confirmed what De Havilland’s engineers already knew: a purpose-built aircraft with exceptional power and range could cover enormous distances very quickly. That was a significant engineering demonstration.

The transport result was a business argument.

A production airliner, flying in commercial configuration, carrying passengers and mail, had covered 11,300 miles in roughly 90 hours. Yes, slower than the Comet - but not slower by much, when you account for the fact that the Comet carried nothing except two pilots and fuel. The Uiver had done it while carrying the thing airliners exist to carry.

Every airline executive watching the race did the arithmetic. Douglas Aircraft was already selling the DC-2 to carriers worldwide. The Uiver’s race demolished any remaining doubt that long-range commercial air transport was a distant possibility. It had arrived.

Within two years, Douglas had the DC-3 in commercial service - the aircraft that would define passenger aviation for the next fifteen years. The line runs directly from the DC-2 at Flemington back to the drawing board in Santa Monica.

What Happened to the Crews and Aircraft

Of the 20 aircraft that started, 9 finished. The attrition was not all mechanical. Navigation demands across thousands of miles of mountains, ocean, and desert, combined with the weather variability and the limits of 1934 equipment, took a genuine toll. Every crew that crossed the finish line had accomplished something that, a decade earlier, would have sounded implausible.

Arthur Scott and Tom Campbell Black both died in accidents before the decade ended. They flew in aviation’s most unforgiving years, with a clarity of purpose and a level of skill that the outcomes of their careers can’t fully represent.

One of the three original MacRobertson Comets survives today at the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden, Bedfordshire, England. She has been restored to airworthy condition - one of the purest shapes the golden age produced, still flying.

Key Takeaways

• The 1934 MacRobertson Air Race covered 11,300 miles from RAF Mildenhall, England to Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne, with 20 starters and 9 finishers
• De Havilland built the DH.88 Comet from scratch in 88 days, producing three aircraft for the race - a production achievement as remarkable as the design itself
• Scott and Campbell Black won the speed category in the scarlet Comet in just over 70 hours, averaging better than 200 mph across the entire route
• KLM’s DC-2 Uiver won the transport category in approximately 90 hours while carrying fare-paying passengers - proving long-range commercial aviation was operationally viable, not theoretical
• The citizens of Albury, New South Wales improvised a landing strip with automobile headlamps to guide the lost Uiver down through weather - one of the most human moments in the history of flight
• The race’s transport result accelerated the case for the Douglas DC-3, which entered commercial service within two years and defined passenger aviation through the 1940s