When the Royal Air Force (RAF) courier interrupted young Harry’s crap game in London’s Savoy Hotel, the Canadian fl ier had little reason to believe he would be alive in a week’s time, let alone fi nish his game. Still, Flight Lieut. Harry Yates loved a challenge. Besides, the secret mission offered an opportunity to settle a personal score and, since he had only been given six months to live, Harry felt he had little to lose. THE MISSION On June 20, 1919, Harry Yates was in London celebrating his recent London-Paris multiengine fl ight record when the courier knocked at his door. Three hours later, he was fl ying his Handley Page (HP) bomber to Lympne near the coast. At dawn the next day, he met a British Foreign Offi ce agent and was airborne minutes later on a fi ve thousand kilometre fl ight to Cairo. The Foreign Offi ce offi cial was Harry St. John Philby, father of the infamous Cold War era British/Soviet double agent, Kim Philby. Philby was being dispatched to Cairo to quell Arab unrest caused by British betrayal of promises of self-determination made by Lawrence of Arabia in exchange for their resistance against the Ottoman Turks.1 Harry was to leapfrog his way across Europe and the Mediterranean, arriving in Cairo in the shortest possible time. The previous London-Cairo record was 15 1/2days held by an Englishman, RAF Maj. A.S.C. MacLaren. Air Ministry ground support was promised along the way. Harry had very personal reasons to attempt the record. Yates had been ordered to train MacLaren to fl y Hps but had never been told the nature of the mission which, doubtless, he would have felt perfectly qualifi ed to do himself. Second, he began to suffer chronic stomach pain while training in France. Eventually it became so severe that half his stomach was removed, and the surgeon gave him just six months to live. Harry was effectively operating under a death sentence. GOING FOR THE RECORD Guy Simser, a Kanata, Ontario, aviation writer, used Harry’s journal entries to reconstruct events along each of the 10 stages of the fl ight plan. Promised Air Ministry ground support consistently failed to show, leaving Harry and crew to fuel and maintain theGiant bomber themselves and costing them valuable time. His obstacles illustrate the rudimentary nature of fl ight in those days. The landing fi eld in Marseilles was strewn with boulders which blew out two tires. During a quick lunch break, their map was stolen. Writes Simser, gWith no direction beams, radar or radio in 1919, maps were essential. Improvising, they borrowed a local encyclopaedia and traced maps of southern Europe and the north coast of Africa.h2 On descending through cloud cover over Pisa later that day, they couldnft fi nd the airport and so, they used the Leaning Tower as a landmark. Particularly hazardous was the fl ight taking them over the mountains across Italyfs boot. For Canadians used to fl ying over the relatively sedate landscape of England and northern Europe, the sudden appearance of mountain peaks and cliff walls was alarming. Harry called it, gthe roughest trip I have had yet,h but would have to revise his statement the next day. The Greek leg of the route offered no possible landing sites so when a fuel pump quit with only 15 minutes of fuel, the only potential landing spot was a partially dry, rocky river bed. The landing was so dangerous that Harry and his co-pilot shook hands before making the attempt. Philby, cloistered in the rear cockpit, could only pray. Harry successfully landed the giant bomber in the narrow fi ssure suffering only a broken tail skid and a punctured tire. Excited locals cleared a pathway of boulders for take off and helped lift the rear of the six-ton plane on their shoulders to make repairs. The most eventful portion of the journey, however, turned out to be on arrival in Suda Bay, Crete. Nearing Crete, Harry suspected a cracked propeller when the bomber began to shimmy alarmingly. The landing strip was located in an extinct volcano and, when the exhausted pilot came in too low, Yates very nearly tore a wing off the plane. Examination confi rmed the propeller was unusable, and a new one essential, or the record attempt was doomed. Serendipity intervened when Harry was able to cannibalize another stranded RAF bomber of its serviceable propeller. In the meantime, Philby came across Col. T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who had also become stranded in the extinct volcano en route to Cairo. Lawrence had slipped away from the Paris Peace Conference, ostensibly making his way to Cairo to retrieve his notebooks, which he would later use to write Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an account of his First World War exploits. With the Foreign Offi ce secret agent, and now the iconic Lawrence of Arabia, in tow, Harry had more incentive than ever to deliver his passengers safely and in record time. Flying to to Lybia the next day, the crippled HPfs fuel pump failed. With no life jackets or lifeboats on board, ditching in the Mediterranean meant certain death but by noon they were over the vast desert of North Africa. After refuelling, with both crew and aircraft at breaking point, they pushed on to Cairo. On arrival, they couldnft fi nd the airport. The airport was fi nally spotted by Lawrence who had bellied out onto the wing to get a better view. When the tattered HPfs wheels touched down in Cairo on the night of June 26, Harry had broken the 15 1.2-day London- Cairo fl ying record by 10 1.2 days. His new record was fi ve thousand kilometres in 36 hours fl ying time, over fi ve days, and would have been better if promised ground support had materialized. HARRY YATES, DC gIn the ensuing yearsh, writes Simser, gYatesfs stomach responded poorly to medical treatment. Although he outlived, by far, his military doctorfs prognosis of six months, he found no remedy until he turned to chiropractic. Indebted, he became a chiropractor.h3 Yates became a major fi gure in the chiropractic community, serving in various capacities, including Canadian Chiropractic Association president and parliamentary representative, president of the Ontario Chiropractic Association, and member of the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College board of governors.4,5 He maintained a lifelong interest in fl ying, however, and died en route to the Warbirdsf 50th anniversary reunion in 1968.