metre emergency waterproof set capable of operating eight hours submerged. Receivers, sharing a common audio amplifier, included a short-wave, long-wave and beacon. The first paid commercial messages were sent and received during the flight and a new world record distance for radio was set with a short-wave reception at Bloemfontein, South Africa, the long way around the world at . Direct short-wave aircraft-to-shore communications were maintained with the Pacific Coast until the flight was four hours out of Honolulu which had been monitoring the flight from two hours after departure with a similar reception overlap on the Honolulu to Suva leg. Success on this flight influenced Admiral Byrd to equip his three Antarctic Expedition aircraft with similar equipment. Trans-Tasman flights Kingsford Smith, Ulm, and Gordon Taylor also made the first nonstop Trans-Tasman flight in the Southern Cross – over the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand – beginning with the first crossing on 10–11 September 1928, a distance of . They then flew back to Australia. Guy Menzies completed the first solo trans-Tasman flight in the Southern Cross Junior in 1931. 1929 crash In 1929, Kingsford Smith and Ulm set out on the Southern Cross from Sydney for England. When radio contact was lost, a search was organised. In April 1929, Australian National Airways or the Sydney Citizens' Relief Committee engaged Les Holden to join the search. According to one newspaper article, Holden flew a total of 9000 miles (14,500 km) and was in the air for 100 hours, before spotting the missing aircraft on a mud flat near the Gleneig River. The crew of Southern Cross were rescued, though two other searchers lost their lives due to dehydration, when they were forced to land their aircraft known as the ‘Kookaburra’ in the Tanami Desert, due to an engine problem with the aircraft and a faulty compass. Preservation Shortly before Kingsford Smith's death in 1935, he sold the Southern Cross to the Commonwealth of Australia, for display in a museum. The aircraft was brought out of retirement briefly in 1945 for the filming of the movie Smithy. The machine was refurbished in 1985 under the supervision of Jim Schofield, a senior aviation civil servant and air crash investigator. The Southern Cross is now preserved in a special glass hangar memorial on Airport Drive, near the international terminal at Brisbane Airport. Australian aviation enthusiast Austin Byrne was part of the