[quote=""Hermit""]
Roo St. Gallus;675514 wrote:From what I understand, KLM was operating to the Dutch East Indies successfully by the mid-1930s. Australia was within easy reach, as the DC-2 in the MacRobertson showed. It seems that KLM regular service to Australia had to wait until 1952, though, because Australia denied them landing rights, despite their request to open service following the MacRobertson race. If there weren't any services to Australia from Europe, it sounds like the responsibility for that lay with Australia, which seemingly actively impeded such from happening.
You are sort of right. The UK put the kibosh on KLM's proposal with Australia's wholehearted agreement.
While the Australian colonies officially became the Australian nation on the first of January 1901, it very much hung onto the Old Dart's coat tails in practice. Foreign policy was in effect determined in London and we did not mind. There simply was no question about sending Australian troops halfway around the world in 1914 to be slaughtered there. And we were proud of it. The ANZAC legend was born. Nothing had changed when WWII started. On 3 September 1939 at 9:15 pm our Prime Minister announced to the nation via the wireless: "Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war." And off we went again. Our next Prime Minister had great difficulties in getting some Australian divisions back downunder when the Japanese made their way towards us a couple of years later. He got too few back, and too late to prevent the Japanese from landing in New Guinea and their aeroplanes close enough to repeatedly bomb Darwin.
But that was not all. Until 1986 the last court of appeal was not the High Court of Australia, but the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. And even now ties, both emotional and official remain, even if the latter are not much more than symbolic and the former nowhere near as strong as they used to be. The next referendum on the matter will surely turn us into a republic. The previous one was cunningly sabotaged by yet another conservative PM, who was a staunch monarchist. He made sure that the referendum presented the voters with three options. One was to leave things be as they are. The other two proposed two different republican models, effectively splitting the republican vote in two.
So yes, Australia would definitely go along with the UK's view that flight services will be kept "in house" so to speak, but it was the UK which called the tune. Unsurprisingly, the Sydney to Southampton air service was a joint venture between Qantas and Imperial Airways. Australian pilots and crew would take the aeroplanes to and back between Sydney and Singapore, and British would handle the same aeroplanes for the other two thirds or three quarters of the trip. British prestige was at stake. As far as Britain was concerned, and with our own willing collusion, we were still de facto the colonial boys.
TL;DR version: Twas dem wat did it, not us, guvner.[/QUOTE]
Interesting how politics affects everything, innit?
I'm not surprised that some of those early records would be set by what are basically airliners. For those routes, range is much more important than raw speed, and the early airliners, even with their limitations, had much more range than anything else.
Roo, I need to dig through my old pics, but if you're a fan of the DC-3, I have some you'd like. The Hamburg (Germany) airshow in 2003 had no less than 5 C-47/DC-3s present (technically, 4 DC-3s and a DC-2, but most people can't tell them apart). They actually all flew together in formation and did some passes, which was quite spectacular.
I also watched several of the water drop tests that are in the various videos there (the initial testing and flights were done in Marana, Az). 
