Grahamstown Gazette: conquest of the air

What if, instead of planes, airships had soared over New Zealand’s skies? ‘Linking up the Empire— joining up New Zealand and Australia for example—by means of air-lines, is bound to come,’ declared Wing Commander S. Grant-Dalton in the pages of the Thames Star in 1930. ‘But that is a job for the airships, not for aeroplanes or seaplanes. If you want to fly to Australia, you had better do it by airship if you can. Or go in a flying-boat if you cannot get an airship. But go in an ordinary boat if you cannot get either an airship or a flying-boat. An ordinary aeroplane is not built for such a trip.’ The Wing-Commander would know; he was head of New Zealand’s fledgling air force.

Thames was of course no stranger to the possibilities of Count Zeppelin’s famous invention. In 1909 Mr. Norgrove, of Shortland, was designing an airship of his own, and proudly showed off a scale model of his design to the Thames Star. ‘When built the airship itself will be 160ft in length... and capable of carrying over one hundred passengers.’ The Star was highly impressed; ‘it is hoped that Mr. Norgrove will get the right persons interested, as his invention is well worthy of consideration.’

While the ‘conquest of the air’ was a new and exciting prospect for New Zealanders, it didn’t come without a touch of hysteria. Thames escaped unscathed from the menace of the Phantom Airship Scares of 1909, but the rest of New Zealand and even Europe and New England were not so lucky. For just over a month, hundreds of New Zealanders reported seeing airships of different shapes and sizes moving about in the sky. Mysterious bright lights and flying objects were seen across the country, causing concern that some malevolent foreign invader (or perhaps even an alien invader using advanced airship technology) was planning an attack.

One such phantom airship was spotted over Tauranga Road near Waihi, but later turned out to be part of a small kite. Another, seen drifting over Puriri, was later thought more likely to be some sort of flare light. The Thames Star claimed that sky-watchers across the country were suffering from ‘aerialitis... a kind of affection of the eyes accompanied by a phenomenal imagination’

‘Though we don’t expect that a fleet of airships will ever dart across the Hauraki Gulf and levy toll on the bullion producers of the goldfields, the conquest of the air for which many nations are now competing cannot fail to arouse interest,’ noted the Thames Star in its ‘Things in General’ column.