| Hannibal by Rail
It is well accepted that the HP42s were built along the lines of a railway
carriage in layout and furnishing. Here was a brief moment when Hannibal
took to the rails!
17 November 1932 Hannibal was
caught by strong winds at the old RAF auxiliary airfield south of Semakh at
the southern end of Lake Tiberias, (on the Sea of Galilee).
Imperial Airways had adopted this airfield in late 1931 as a means of
speeding their Europe to India service. Conveniently located next to the
Lake, passengers could be transferred from the Short Kent flying boats
arriving from Greece.
The airliners would be secured
to concrete blocks to prevent them being moved by the occasional wind gusts
known to occur at this location.
The event that threatened to ruin Imperial Airways greatest
achievement, delivered only the year before, for service to Karachi or Cape
Town from Cairo seems to have been suppressed in the press. Very few direct
mentions of the event are to be found. However, one lost sentence in a book
suggested more. It relates how the airliner was dismantled and shipped to
Cairo to be rebuilt. Newspapers are
vaguer.
“The experimental service between Ramleh (Cairo) and Baghdad and
between Baghdad and Galilee
was discontinued in November, 1932.” (1)
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The air route from England to India has been changed. No longer will
the airplanes alight near the Sea of
Galilee. The
air port of the
Imperial Airways has been removed to Ramleh since the
Galilee
territory is visited by squalls so frequent and violent that even
the pegging of the airplanes has proved futile. (5)
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“Galilee
still has a reputation for sudden tempests during the night and
early-morning, when strong winds will rise suddenly from one quarter
and within a few minutes be blowing from the opposite direction.
These gusts have driven the big liners of Imperial Airways from the
Galilee district, which was a night stopping place on the
London-India air route.
The practice has been to peg down the liners in the open, but the
sudden violent gusts have proved too much for the 'planes on the
ground. If the winds could be expected from one quarter only the
machines could be left in safety, but they could not be tethered
afresh to meet each change of direction of the wind. Flying-boats
which alight on the sea can ride out the storms, for they swing at
their moorings head-on to the wind. Owing to the risk of the big
land 'planes being torn from their moorings and damaged in Galilee
it has been decided to make Ramleh the port of call for travellers”
(8)
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“ Imperial Airways used to have a night stopping-place In the
Galilee district for their liners to India. The liners
were pegged down on the landing ground, but it was found that the
sudden storms would tear them from even the strongest moorings. “
(4)
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A 1949 review of the HP42’s service records, - “One
was blown upside down in Galilee”. (2)(3)
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In Grants ‘Syrian Desert ‘(7)
They had not reckoned on atmospheric conditions peculiar to the
Jordan Valley.
Suddenly
variable winds, of astonishing velocity,
made the place exceedingly unpopular with pilots.
Finally, one
night one of the “Hannibals” was literally blown to bits at its
moorings—all except the fuselage. The huge air-liner was moored
so firmly to concrete ground blocks that when there was a sudden
change in the direction of the wind, succeeded by an eighty-mile-an-hour gale, something had to give: the wings broke into countless pieces, and the fabric blew into ribbons. |
In the “Log of the Astrea” published in 1933, Hudson Fysh the Managing
Director of Q.A.N.T.A.S. describes flying in the “Hannibal’ in July 1933. The
earliest (9) mention of the airframe in service after November 1932 appears
in journals in late January, early February 1933.
Whether this was a mention of the ‘Hannibal’ or the HP42 class name for
promotional reasons remains unclear.
How badly damaged was Hannibal in this incident?
What does it take to retrieve an airliner from remote Palestine in
secret and rebuild it to service condition?
In 2018 correspondence it is revealed.
Researchers (10)
have uncovered photographs of the hull of an HP42 aboard Palestine Railways
flat cars and the interchange from the Hedjaz Railway 1.05m gauge to
standard gauge at Haifa. Why these images were taken, as an enthusiast’s
record, or for the airline is not apparent but they were kept private until
presented to the Israel State Archives where they are recorded as from
‘1933-1943’ (6) (This may cause some alarm as it might be taken that the
images are from after 1940, and 1000 miles away!).
Knowledge of the damage
suffered at Semakh explains the images more sensibly.
Semakh Railway station, (site of a short but severe Great War battle)
is only a very short distance from the landing ground.
With the fuselage built to reasonable size it and the damaged wings
packed in crates with the great tyres as padding could be loaded for
shipment. The images also show
another aircraft (fig.5 Presuming the DH50 was also damaged at Semakh in
November 1932) in transit. That aircraft is recorded as being scrapped in
1933. (13)
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