After the failure of Australian National Airways, Ulm bought one of the airline's Avro X aircraft for himself, and named it Faith in Australia.

In this aircraft in 1933, Ulm set the speed record from England to Australia at 6 days, 17 hours and 56 minutes, and made several trans-Tasman flights.

[6] Ulm established a new company in September 1934, Great Pacific Airways Ltd, intending to operate a San Francisco-Sydney air service.

Ulm disappeared in December 1934, together with copilot George Littlejohn and navigator Leon Skilling, on a test flight from Oakland, California to Hawaii in VH-UXY Stella Australis, an Airspeed Envoy.

[8] At about 10 am local time on 3 December, after sending a series of Morse coded radio messages to Hawaii over five hours advising that they were lost and running out of fuel, the Envoy ditched into the sea.

Ulm had chosen not to carry a life raft on board, preferring to save weight and predicting that the aircraft would float for two days if it were forced to land on the water.

[7] The plane had been customized by Airspeed to meet Ulm's own specifications; Airspeed's manager, Nevil Shute Norway, suggested in his autobiography that the internal cabin design may have contributed to the navigational problems, because the inexperienced navigator/wireless operator (who had been a ship's officer) had to sit in the rear compartment behind the large petrol tank and some distance from the pilot.