Ceylon’s first...
There he left the Navy and ended up in Tsingtao (now Qingdao), China, where he ran a shipyard and established a machine factory, employing some 300 Chinese workers.
In 1909, after selling the factory and shipyard to the German government, which at the time maintained a colonial presence in Tsingtao, he returned to Germany. Learning to fly in his homeland, he bought the Etrich-Rumpler Taube monoplane. In 1911, taking his new ‘toy’ with him, he boarded the Tsingtaobound Silesia, stopping in Colombo on the way.
After recovering from injuries sustained in his January 1912 crash in Ceylon, Oster resumed his voyage to China. When World War I broke out in August 1914, the German Governor of Tsingtao asked Oster to carry out reconnaissance flights in his repaired Etrich Taube to keep a lookout for approaching Japanese troops. But despite three attempts to get airborne, the aircraft failed to take wing and fell to the ground.
When the Japanese finally overran Tsingtao, Franz Oster was captured and taken to Japan as a prisoner-ofwar. Even though the Great War ended in 1918, he remained in Japan until 1920, when he returned to Tsingtao and rejoined his wife and son. Franz Oster died in Tsingtao on July 19, 1933.
Marc Pourpe and Georges Verminck held pilot licence nos. 560 and 1084, respectively, issued by the AeroClub de France. Typical of European aeronautical adventurers of the day, they travelled to distant corners of the world and flew their aeroplanes for reward, giving people in those countries their first exposure to the new and exciting invention that was the flying machine. After their ‘aviation exhibition’ in Colombo, the French flyers and their Blériot monoplanes arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, on December 21, 1912. As they had done in Ceylon, Pourpe and Verminck gave demonstration flights at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, their displays running until January 8, 1913.
From India they continued on their way, doing the same thing in other Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore. But on April 8, 1913, Georges Verminck was killed in an air crash at Saigon, Vietnam. Soon afterward, his aeronautical partner announced plans to fly to Hanoi. But not much is known of Marc Pourpe’s subsequent life story.
Although Ceylon lacked a dedicated airfield at the time, in the two decades after Pourpe and Verminck left the island there was significant aeronautical activity in the skies above the Resplendent Isle. Good harbours at Colombo, Galle, and Trincomalee were ideal ‘landing grounds’ for seaplanes operating off numerous visiting British naval ships during the 1920s. In 1928, a Fairey Flycatcher float-equipped biplane from HMS Enterprise, anchored in Colombo Harbour, very nearly caused Sri Lanka’s first fatal aviation accident. On June 8, after flying over Kandy, Lt. Edwin B. Cairnduff headed off toward the Norton Bridge area. But encountering low cloud, dense mist, and heavy rain, he crashed into a ravine while attempting to alight on a fast-flowing stream. Although the Flycatcher was destroyed, Cairnduff incurred only cuts and bruises, and walked away – literally – to a planter’s bungalow, from where he later left by car for Colombo.
One of the more noteworthy visits to Ceylon by British military seaplanes occurred on December 31, 1927 when four Supermarine Southampton twin-engine biplanes of the Royal Air Force (RAF) alighted at Colombo Harbour. They were on a record-breaking longdistance flight, for flying boats, from England to Australia, stopping at numerous ports along the way; after circumnavigating Australia the ‘flying flotilla’ reached its ultimate destination, Singapore, 14 months since leaving England.
One of the Southamptons’ commanders, Sqdn. Ldr. G.E. Livock, writing in the April 1968 issue of Air Pictorial magazine, described an incident from their sojourn in Ceylon: “Before leaving England we had not thought of one hazard – barnacles and weed on the hulls. After a few days moored in Colombo harbour we had great diffi- culty in getting off the water at all, owing to the drag, so we spent many hours at Trincomali (sic) taxiing each aircraft into shallow water and scrubbing the bottoms clean. On the way round from Colombo I was flying low over the shore and on rounding a headland found myself over a herd of elephants who were even more astonished than I was. One huge animal stayed on the beach thrashing his trunk at us as if swatting at a fly while his companions scattered in panic to the jungle.”
The Royal Navy and RAF aside, in the early 1930s Ceylon was a stop-over point for German civilian aviators on long-distance adventures of their own. One was Captain Hans Bertram, who touched down in Colombo Harbour in September 1931 and again in April 1932, flying Junkers F13 and W33 floatplanes, respectively, en route from Berlin to China. His first journey ended off the coast of Vishakapatnam (Vizag), India, when the F13 named Freundschaft (‘Friendship’) was destroyed in a storm. In 1932, after leaving Ceylon, Bertram and his mechanic, Adolf Klausmann, got as far as Australia in their Junkers W33 Atlantis. But there too misfortune struck, and their subsequent near-death misadventure in the remote Kimberley desert region of northwestern Western Australia became the subject of at least two books and an Australian ABC-TV series Flight into Hell.
On April 22, 1931, Lankan aviation reached an important milestone when an aeroplane flying in from another country landed on Ceylon soil for the first time. Arriving from Mandapam in South India, the de Havilland D.H.80 Puss Moth single-engine, high-wing monoplane was piloted by Nevill Vintcent. Of South African origin and an enthusiastic promoter of Indian civil aviation, Vintcent was a close friend and business associate of the legendary J.R.D. Tata, who founded the Tata Sons airline which later became Air India. Accompanying Vintcent in the Puss Moth, which landed on the Colombo Racecourse, was Zubair Caffoor, who had earlier laid claim to being the first Ceylonese to obtain a pilot’s licence.
That flight was the catalyst for many more from across Palk Strait over the next few years. On April 8, 1932 Vintcent flew India’s Director of Civil Aviation, F.W. Tymms, to Colombo, again in a Puss Moth, for talks with the government about a proposed air service between India and Ceylon.
Ceylon’s first airfield was opened at Ratmalana on November 27, 1935, when a de Havilland Puss Moth arrived from India flown by the Madras Flying Club’s chief instructor Harold Tyndale-Biscoe, accompanied by passengers W.B. Schleiter and C.B. Darius, a Ceylonese. Then on February 28, 1938, a WACO YQC-6 biplane of Tata Sons launched the first Air Mail service from Ceylon to Britain, via India. That flight also marked the start of scheduled passenger services to and from Ceylon, although by a foreign airline.
Since then, Sri Lankan aviation has progressed immeasurably if not always smoothly. Although Sri Lanka is a tiny island, its aeronautical history is rich with stories of men, women, and their flying machines. Many of those stories, recounted by this author, have been featured in the Sunday Times over the past 17 years or so, and can still be read online. Maybe some day, when the ‘centenary dust’ has settled from the sky, one or more dedicated historians with a genuine and abiding interest in the minutiae of the subject will write a comprehensive and accurate – in all respects – account of Sri Lankan aviation history.
Author’s footnote: Much of the material on which this article is based was gathered during an ongoing research project in partnership with Capt. Gihan A. Fernando, an authoritative and knowledgeable figure on the nation’s aeronautical history and lore.