After National Service and a short career at the Bar, Michael Cobham followed him into the Flight Refuelling business, and for many years was in charge of it.

He enjoyed the outdoors, and after completing his apprenticeship spent a year working on his uncle's farm, hoping to make a career in estate management.

Between 16 November 1925 and 13 March 1926, he made a trip from London to Cape Town and return in his de Havilland DH.50, in which he had replaced the original Siddeley Puma engine with a more powerful, air-cooled Jaguar.

[4] On 30 June 1926, he set off on a flight from Britain (from the River Medway) to Australia, where 60,000 people swarmed across the grassy fields of Essendon Airport, Melbourne, when he landed his de Havilland DH.50 floatplane (it had been converted to a wheeled undercarriage earlier, at Darwin[5]).

During the flight to Australia, Cobham's engineer of the D.H.50 aircraft, Arthur B. Elliot, was shot and killed after they left Baghdad on 5 July 1926.

On 25 November 1926, Cobham attempted but failed to be the first person to deliver mail to New York City by air from the east, planning to fly mail from the White Star ocean liner RMS Homeric in a de Havilland DH.60 Moth floatplane when the ship was about 12 hours from New York harbour on a westbound crossing from Southampton.

This was an ambitious plan to encourage town councils to build local airports in the hope of drumming up business for his activities as an aviation consultant.

The tour visited 110 venues between May and October 1929 using a ten-passenger de Havilland DH.61 Giant Moth G-AAEV named Youth of Britain.

[14][15][page needed] In the British winter of 1932–33, Cobham took his aerial circus to South Africa (with the mistaken view that it would be the first of its kind there).

The pilot of an Avro biplane, South African war veteran, Captain Hugh P Stewart and Blackpool sisters, Lilian and Doris Barnes were killed.

[17] Cobham was also one of the founding directors of Airspeed Limited, the aircraft manufacturing company started by Nevil Shute Norway (perhaps better known as the famous novelist, Nevil Shute), together with the designer Hessell Tiltman; who, having been discharged by the Airship Guarantee Company (a subsidiary of Vickers) after the R101 disaster also caused the grounding of the more successful R100, decided to found their own small aircraft business.