Unlike Bert Hinkler during his flight to Australia, Maitland and Hegenberger could not put down along the way and had no landmarks to guide them along the twenty-four-hundred miles (3,86 1.3km) of featureless ocean. The successful flight was a tribute to the piloting skills of Maitland, the navigating skills of Hegenberger, and the reliability of the Whirlwind engines and the Fokker aircraft. That same year; James P. Dole, president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, issued a challenge offering prizes to the first two fliers to cross the Pacific from California to Hawaii non-stop. He intended to encourage a trans-Pacific flight as a prelude to eventual air transportation between Hawaii and the mainland.

Dole, a member of the National Aeronautic Association, believed that the flight was well within the capabilities of the competitors for the Orteig prize, who had to fly a thirty-six-hundred-mile course. He hoped Lindbergh and Chamberlin would be induced into competing, but neither showed any interest. The authority that certified the race was appointed by the promoters, and therein lay the problem. Entrants with virtually no chance of making the flight were allowed in and, in Dole’s words, the contest. dubbed the Dole Derby, became a free-for-all.

The Dole Derbv was won by stunt pilot Art Goebel, flying a Travel Air called the Woolaroc second place was taken Mart in Jensen, flying a Breese monoplane, the Aloha. But during the  course of the race, four planes were lost and ten people died, including the only woman entrant. Mildred Doran (known as the “Flying Schoolmarm” ), and the flying team of Scott and Frost (flying a prototype of the new Vega, the Golden Eagle). A number of sponsors of other races withdrew their support and the ban on uncertified transoceanic flights that was officially placed on the Atlantic was unofficially extended to the Pacific.

The Fokker Trimotor Bird of Paradise in which Lieutenants Lester Maitland and Albert Hegenberger made the first flight across the Pacific—from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii. The twenty-four hundred miles represented the longest all-water flight made to that time.    

Crew of the Southern Cross's historic 1928 first trans-Pacific flight from San Francisco to Brisbane. From left: radio operator Jim Warner, relief pilot Charles Ulm, Smithy, navigator Harry Lyon.

Into this dour environment stepped Charles Kingsford-Smith. “Smithy,” as he was known, was precisely the wrong man to place in charge of an attempt to cross the Pacific. An average flier during the war, afterward Smithy demonstrated himself to be a reckless, hard-drinking, irresponsible thrill-seeker who had caused many accidents and injuries in the aftermath of his barnstorming stunts.

In connection with the Dole Derby (which he passed up because it seemed foolhardy, even to him), it was unlikely that anyone would sponsor him or certify any aircraft in which he wanted to attempt a Pacific crossing. In spite of all this, as a result of patience, careful planning, and a measure of luck he found himself in 1928 in possession of the Fokker Trimotor, now called the Southern Cross, that Sir Hubert Wilkins had flown in the Arctic. He also had a political sponsor—the Premier of New South Wales, who was coming up for re-election—and a new image—the result of a highly publicised record-setting flight around the perimeter of Australia that gave Kingsford-Smith and his partners, Charles Ulm and Keith Anderson, an air of respectability.

Smithy and the Southern Cross which he used to call 'my old bus.'

The Fokker trimotor Southern Cross flies past Mt Taranaki on arrival in New Zealand in 1933

Smithy and his co-pilot, Tom Pethybridge, beside the Lockheed Altair Lady Southern Cross in which they disappeared off the Burma coast in 1935