The MacRobertson Air Race, the de Havilland Eighty-Eight Comet Built in Ten Months, and the Day a KLM Airliner Nearly Beat Every Racing Plane to Melbourne

On October 20, 1934, twenty aircraft lifted from Mildenhall aerodrome in Suffolk, England, and pointed southeast toward Melbourne, Australia - 11,300 miles away. The race produced a wooden aircraft built in under a year that averaged over 200 mph across deserts, jungles, and open ocean, and revealed that the gap between racing machines and modern commercial transports had nearly closed.

Who Was MacPherson Robertson and Why Did He Fund the Race?

Sir MacPherson Robertson was a Scottish-born Australian confectioner who built one of the southern hemisphere’s largest candy empires - the company behind Mac’s Chocolates and Fantales. When Australia prepared to celebrate the centenary of the colony of Victoria in 1934, Robertson wanted to mark the occasion permanently.

He offered £10,000 in prize money - equivalent to well over a million dollars today - for an air race from England to Australia. The announcement went out in February 1934, giving aircraft manufacturers roughly eight months to design, build, and qualify anything new.

Most of the aviation world assumed the race would be decided by modified surplus military hardware or a well-funded amateur in a converted transport. Geoffrey de Havilland had other ideas.

How de Havilland Built the Comet in Under a Year

By 1934, de Havilland was one of the founders of British aviation, with decades of clean, efficient designs behind him. When the MacRobertson announcement appeared, he and chief designer Arthur Hagg began sketching an entirely new aircraft from blank paper.

They called it the de Havilland 88 Comet.

The first Comet flew approximately nine months after design work began. Three were completed in time for the race - a compressed development timeline that would be extraordinary by any era’s standards.

What Made the de Havilland 88 Comet Revolutionary

The Comet was a slender wooden aircraft with a 44-foot wingspan, powered by twin de Havilland Gipsy Six engines producing approximately 230 horsepower each. Its spruce-and-plywood fuselage was faired to near-perfect smoothness. Two crew sat in tandem under a greenhouse canopy that blended cleanly into the fuselage spine.

Every design choice targeted drag reduction. No bracing wires. No external struts. And - critically - no fixed undercarriage hanging in the airstream.

The Comet featured a fully retractable undercarriage: the main wheels folded flush into the engine nacelles after takeoff. In 1934, most racing aircraft still flew with their wheels permanently exposed, paying a substantial drag penalty for the entire duration of the flight. De Havilland eliminated it with a mechanical retraction system that, despite being largely new technology, worked reliably throughout the race.

The Comet also carried variable-pitch propellers, allowing the pilot to select fine pitch for takeoff power and coarse pitch for cruise efficiency. This is standard equipment today. In 1934 it was at the outer edge of what aviation technology could offer.

The result was an aircraft that could cruise at around 220 mph and push toward 240 mph in a sprint - serious numbers for a piston aircraft of that era.

Twenty Aircraft at Mildenhall: What the Starting Line Looked Like

The starter’s flag dropped at 6:30 in the morning, with aircraft going off at thirty-second intervals and lifting from the Mildenhall grass into the early October light. The field of twenty represented almost everything aviation had produced by mid-decade: a Boeing 247 airliner, British sport aircraft, converted touring planes, a de Havilland Dragon twin, and the three scarlet Comets.

The route ran through Rome, Baghdad, Allahabad, Singapore, and Darwin, before finishing at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne. Eight legs. Eight fuel stops. No GPS. No reliable weather radar. Navigation by paper charts and dead reckoning across Europe, the Arabian desert, the Indian subcontinent, monsoon country, and the Timor Sea.

Scott and Campbell Black: The Crew of the Grosvenor House

The first Comet, Grosvenor House, was sponsored by the London hotel of the same name and painted in scarlet and gold. Her crew was C.W.A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black.

Scott had flown solo from England to Australia in 1931 and held multiple long-distance records to South Africa. Campbell Black had spent years flying East Africa mail routes, where navigation precision meant everything and engine hours were the only real margin of safety. These were professional long-distance pilots, not sporting amateurs.

They flew in shifts - one at the controls while the other navigated, monitored the instruments, and tried to rest in the cramped rear seat. At each fuel stop, they were on the ground only as long as it took to pump fuel and inspect the engines. The Comet’s range was adequate for the planned legs, but there was no margin to spare. A stronger headwind, a fuel leak, an engine running slightly rough, and the arithmetic changed badly.

Baghdad in just over twelve hours. Allahabad ahead of schedule. Singapore with both engines running clean.

The KLM Uiver: A Commercial Airliner That Entered a Race

While Scott and Campbell Black pressed toward Melbourne, another aircraft in the field was drawing less attention than it deserved.

KLM - Royal Dutch Airlines - entered a Douglas DC-2 named Uiver (Dutch for “stork”). Captain K.D. Parmentier and First Officer J.J. Moll flew it to Mildenhall, loaded actual fare-paying passengers and a consignment of airmail, and entered the race as a commercial transport entry competing on handicap rather than raw elapsed time.

The DC-2 cruised at around 180 mph on two Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, with seats for up to fourteen passengers, and was built with the durability that Douglas considered a baseline requirement. It was the aircraft that would evolve within two years into the DC-3. It was flying against purpose-built racing machines on an 11,300-mile course - carrying passengers while it did it.

How the Town of Albury Saved the Uiver

On the final leg across Australia, the weather deteriorated. The Uiver approached Albury in New South Wales at night, in low cloud and poor visibility, behind on fuel consumption and disoriented above the dark countryside below.

Word spread through Albury that the aircraft was in difficulty somewhere overhead. The town responded.

Drivers took their cars to the local racecourse, parked in a circle around the infield, and pointed their headlights toward the center of the oval. They sat there with engines running and lit up the night. In the dark sky above, Parmentier and Moll saw the ring of light below them.

They put the Uiver down inside that circle without bending a thing - on a country racecourse in rural New South Wales, guided to the ground by car headlights in the rain. They refueled, rested briefly, and flew on to Melbourne.

The Final Results and What They Meant for Aviation

Grosvenor House landed at Flemington Racecourse on the afternoon of October 23 in a time of 70 hours and 54 minutes. The second Comet, flown by Owen Cathcart-Jones and Ken Waller, placed second overall.

The Uiver finished in 90 hours and 13 minutes - third overall, but second on handicap under the commercial transport classification.

The aviation world understood the implication immediately. A scheduled commercial airliner, carrying passengers and airmail, had run within striking distance of purpose-built racing machines over 11,300 miles. The gap between specialized racing hardware and modern transport aircraft had closed to a degree that drew serious attention at Boeing, Fokker, and Junkers. The DC-2 would become the DC-3, which would transform commercial aviation within the decade. The MacRobertson race was the moment when that future first became legible.

What Survives from the MacRobertson Race

Only five de Havilland 88 Comets were ever built. The aircraft were expensive to produce and had no practical application beyond racing. After 1934, several set additional long-distance records; one was adapted for photographic reconnaissance work in the early years of the Second World War; two were lost in accidents.

One survives. The Grosvenor House, in her original scarlet and gold livery, is preserved at the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden Aerodrome in Bedfordshire, England. The aircraft is smaller than most visitors expect - a narrow cockpit opening, a slender fuselage, and the physical reality of what two men flew across 11,300 miles of the earth in under three days.

Key Takeaways

The MacRobertson Air Race began on October 20, 1934, covering 11,300 miles from Mildenhall, England to Melbourne, Australia across eight legs with no GPS or reliable weather forecasting
The de Havilland 88 Comet was designed and built in approximately nine months, incorporating a fully retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propellers that represented the leading edge of 1934 aviation technology
Scott and Campbell Black won in Grosvenor House in 70 hours and 54 minutes; they were professional long-distance pilots, not racing sportsmen
The KLM DC-2 Uiver, carrying fare-paying passengers and airmail, finished in 90 hours and 13 minutes and placed second on handicap - close enough to purpose-built racers to send an unmistakable message to every aircraft manufacturer watching
The Uiver’s performance directly foreshadowed the DC-3 era; the MacRobertson race is widely regarded as the moment the commercial aviation revolution became visible
The surviving Grosvenor House is on permanent display at the Shuttleworth Collection, Old Warden Aerodrome, Bedfordshire, England