How the Southern Cross replica flew again after two decades

The famous Southern Cross replica has returned to the air after being lovingly restored by HARS two decades after its crash at Parafield Airport. Jake Nelson was there to see its first public flight

After more than 20 years since a crash took it out of the skies, the replica of Charles Kingsford Smith’s famous Fokker FVIIB, Southern Cross, is airborne again thanks to a decade of painstaking restoration work by HARS. The plane, which bears the original registration of VH-USU, took off on its first public demonstration flight from Shellharbour Airport on 8 December last year, piloted by Bruce Simpson and Mark Thurstan. It was the culmination of a long and difficult road for the three-engine plane, from its construction in the 1980s to its crash at Parafield in 2002 – to, at long last, its resurrection.

The first Southern Cross and its famous flight

The Southern Cross at HARS is not the one Charles Kingsford Smith famously flew on the first trans-Pacific flight from California to Brisbane in 1928. The original plane is on display at the Kingsford Smith Memorial at Brisbane Airport, where visitors can boggle at what it must have been like for “Smithy” and his crew – Charles Ulm, Harry Lyon and James Warner – to make that journey more than 80 years ago.