Australian Dictionary of Biography

Arthur Schutt, 1930s

Graham Schutt

Arthur Henry Schutt (1912–1999), aviator and businessman, was born on 18 June 1912 at Spotswood, Melbourne, youngest of three children of Victorian-born parents John Ralph Schutt, dairy farmer, and his wife Mary Jane, née Stone. Attending state schools in Spotswood and Footscray, Arthur showed little interest in academic achievement but was captain of the cricket and football teams at Footscray. His father enrolled him (1927–28) at Scotch College, Hawthorn, where he was encouraged to become a boxer to overcome his short temper. At Dookie Agricultural College in 1929, he enjoyed the practical teaching but chafed at authority and left after being accused of stealing fruit from the principal’s garden. The next year he joined his father’s chaff-milling business, Schutt and Barrie Pty Ltd, West Footscray, where he enjoyed working with machinery. After the business expanded into flour milling, he travelled throughout Victoria buying wheat. A lover of speed, he competed in grass-track motorcycle racing.

As a child Schutt had cycled with his brother near Coode Island airfield, and they once took a joy flight which had frightened them as the pilot shut off the engine before landing. In 1933 a chance flight from Camperdown to Melbourne in a Cirrus Spartan aircraft inspired him to take flying lessons at Essendon airfield. After qualifying for his private pilots’ licence, he began flying to the country on buying trips, often inspecting wheat crops from the air. On weekends he conducted charter joy flights at regional locations in Victoria.

In 1936 Schutt left the family business and, with a loan from his reluctant father, imported from South Africa a streamlined Miles Falcon monoplane with an enclosed cabin. Naming his plane ‘Rebel,’ he fitted larger fuel tanks to enable longer flights to New South Wales and outback Queensland. For five years ‘Schutty’ was an ‘aerial gypsy’ (Davies 1976, 58), picking up charter work, medical evacuations, and joy flights. He encouraged station owners to build airfields on their properties, and in 1938 extended his operations to the Northern Territory. Brash and self-confident, he only ever held a private pilots’ licence.

On 30 August 1941 Schutt married Dora Agnes (‘Bonny’) Semmens, a secretary, at the Scotch College chapel. He had attempted to join the Royal Australian Air Force in 1939, soon after the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected for flying duties due to mild colour blindness. He eventually enlisted on 23 February 1942 and served as a Link Trainer simulator instructor at RAAF flying schools at Point Cook, Laverton, and East Sale, and in New South Wales at Camden and Parkes. Promoted to the rank of temporary warrant officer in April 1945, he was demobilised in November.

Turning down a job offer from Qantas to become a simulator instructor, Schutt returned to the aviation business. Having saved £1000, and with a similar loan from his father, in 1946 he purchased thirty-five ex-RAAF Tiger Moth aircraft and formed Schutt Aircraft Sales and Service based at Essendon Airport. The business moved to Moorabbin Airport in 1950, and in 1954 it was renamed Schutt Aircraft Pty Ltd after becoming a Cessna aircraft dealer for Rex Aviation, which held the Australian agency. Schutt also serviced and modified aircraft for agricultural use, forming Schutt Air Farmers Pty Ltd in 1956 with a fleet of de Havilland Tiger Moth and Dragon crop-spraying aircraft. In 1960 he opened Schutt Flying Academy, the first private training facility in Australia to offer instrument flying ratings, Link Trainer simulators, and jet aircraft flight training. One of his students, Elva Rush, later recalled that Schutt ‘championed women pilots’ (2000, 1).

Schutt had made his longest flight in 1954, with Tony Vigano, the owner of Mario’s restaurant in Melbourne, flying from London to Melbourne in a Miles Aries twin-engine aircraft purchased by Vigano. Beginning in 1959, he organised and participated in regular ‘air safaris,’ during which private pilots toured remote and regional Australia in their own light aircraft. He also competed in the 1976 Tom McDonald Centenary Air Race in North Queensland.

Appointed MBE in 1970, Schutt was the subject of a biography by Wal Davies published in 1976. The next year he featured on the television program This Is Your Life. In 1978 he sold Schutt Aviation to Brents International, a prestige car dealership, staying on as a consultant. The business then entered a period of instability. In October 1981 it was purchased by Jet Corporation of Australia for $12 million. Along with nineteen other employees, Schutt was retrenched in August 1982, shortly before Jet Corporation was wound up amid fraud allegations and bankruptcy proceedings not linked to him. He retired to the Gold Coast, Queensland, the following year. Survived by his wife, their son Graham, and their daughter Mary, he died on 9 March 1999 at Benowa and was cremated.