by Gavin Young
In the calm tones of a surgeon consulting his anaesthetist at the start of a routine operation, Mike McCook Weir confers with China. At first ground control’s voice babbles something very like, ‘Kee bas how wa-a-a-….’ Let’s see how McCook Weir copes with that, I think with mildly malicious interest. But evidently the remark was not addressed to us because the same voice follows impeccably with ‘Cathay 250, 12,000 metres.’
‘Cathay 250, 12,000 metres,’ McCook Weir quietly acknowledges, and then to me, ‘The Chinese and Russians use metres. We use feet like everyone else. Makes it slightly complicated.’ He reads off a handy printed card that converts metres to feet at a glance: ‘12,000 metres, that’s 39,400 feet. Now we go down.’
We sink heavily and evenly like a submarine beginning a dive. Below us a familiar landscape is taking shape. Over Steve’s head, I can just see the Pearl River surging down muddily from Canton, slowly broadening as it gathers in the even browner water of its eel-like tributaries. On my left, a darker mainland; red mud roads writhing like frantic serpents between terraced hills. Ahead, broken glimpses of open sea between shifting clouds.
A clear Hong Kong Chinese voice now, friendlier. ‘Cathay 250, heading of 220 degrees and descend to 6,000 feet. Over.’ Steve reads back the instruction, the aircraft dips once more, and McCook Weir calls for the approach checklist.
‘Cabin signs.’
‘On.’
‘Inboard landing lights.’
‘On.’
‘Altimeters.’
‘Set for landing….’
And so on, until –
‘Checklist complete.’
The Flight Engineer has made his final fuel check. We shall still have 4,070 gallons in our wing-tanks when we land at Hong Kong. Cheerful news, because that quantity would be enough for us to make one quick circuit in case of a missed approach, or to divert to Canton and if necessary to circle there in a holding pattern for half an hour. An unlikely thing to happen, it’s true: despite the tricky monsoon season, Kai Tak is only closed by bad weather for an average of three days a year. And Cathay’s pilots are coming into their home port, a place they know in all its moods.
The glossy pages of Discovery confirm the outlines of the history I am setting out to write.
It all began on 24th September 1946, when Roy Farrell, an American entrepreneur and enthusiastic amateur pilot, and Sydney de Kantzow, an Australian wartime pilot who has been flying C-47s over the Hump – from Calcutta over Burma to Chungking – registered Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong. Flying a single DC-3, they carried 3,000 passengers and 15,000 kilos of cargo between Australia and Asia….
Two engines, propellers, bone-shaking vibrations, ear-shattering noise – there must have been pros as well as cons in flying in those distant days. Not all that distant, of course, although certainly closer to the era of Biggles and biplanes held together by wire and safety-pins than they are to our own. In their slow C-47s (and later their twenty-passenger civilian versions, the Dakota DC-3s), pioneers like Farrell and de Kantzow would have had plenty of time to enjoy the dawn over Kanchenjunga. Would they think of us with envy or contempt, cruising seven miles up with hundreds of passengers, air conditioning, in-flight concerts, movies, hot four-course meals with an elaborate wine list and all mod cons? Alice Yip could bring you a ‘baby bassinet’ (whatever that is) and a nappy-changing table. All this in forty years! Could the world really have changed so much and so fast?
A thought: Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow would have had another surprise. This aircraft, exhausted in every rivet, one might think, by the long, non-stop flight from London, would have precisely one hour on the ground at Hong Kong before another long flight – ten and a half hours across the Pacific to Vancouver. That hour would not be one of peace and quiet. A small army of cleaners waited even now at Kai Tak to storm on board like crack troops. What would they do? Vacuum the carpets, wipe meal trays, empty ashtrays, brush seats, chuck out used pillows, blankets, magazines and bulging plastic bags of left-over food from the galleys – then leap nimbly Out of the way of another army, this time one of caterers bearing food and liquor, fresh pillows and blankets – and possibly a few spare baby bassinets as well. There would be lavatories to be emptied, fresh water and 44,000 gallons of fuel to be loaded. Within any given period of twenty-four hours, the aircraft I am sitting in is often airborne for all of that time except for a mere ninety minutes.
Threatening clouds, looking deep and solid, rush at us – but they part and melt at a touch like the brick ‘walls’ in a funfair’s ghost train, spattering a burst of rain which streams away upwards in the airflow and is gone. We burst into clear air again.
We are at the ultimate edge of Asia. Old Cathay ends here where the mouth of the Pearl River yawns at the South China Sea. Macao is a pimple half-lost in haze. Immediately below, across Deep Bay, the wakes of a couple of motorized junks and a hydrofoil unfurl like stretched lengths of silver thread. We pass the point of Castle Peak – in Hong Kong territory now – above green islands encircled by sandy beaches and three cargo vessels lying in a bay as if abandoned.
Six thousand feet. ‘On top of Lantau now’ – McCook Weir jabs a finger downwards at the long, high dragon’s back of Hong Kong’s largest island. Again the plane dips. The window next to me is hot to the touch. The whole flight deck is overheated. I am sweating on my face and feel a certain embarrassment. The cockpit is such a small space that body odours – even a sweat-soaked shirt – matter. I can understand why flight crews are urged not to eat garlic less than twelve hours before a flight – halitosis or flatulence! Baked beans are totally banned.
A message from the Kai Tak controllers.
‘Cathay 250, turn right onto 360 degrees and reduce to 200 knots,’ 230 miles an hour.
‘Flap one.’
‘… further right onto 030 degrees cleared for the approach … last aircraft reported moderate turbulence and sinking wind shear.’
Mike McCook Weir eases back the four thrust levers beside his right knee and the aircraft settles down once more, gently, like a fat man gingerly sinking into a low armchair.
‘Better put on the “No Smoking” sign now.’
Our speed is falling back: 190mph now.
‘Gear down.’
Open Sesame. Lights flash, warning us that the undercarriage doors are unlocked and opening beneath us. With a noise like a medium-sized boat running aground on shale, the 747 is giving birth to eighteen monstrous wheels. The nose wheel directly below the cockpit follows them with a rumble and a hiss.
Not far now. Here are visual signs of Hong Kong: the Caltex storage tanks; the boulders of Stonecutters Island nearby to the right; the gaunt chimney of the Lai Chai Kok incinerator; motor boats and police launches lassoing ships in the Western Anchorage with their wakes. To the left, the steep skyscrapers of financial Hong Kong rise from the waterfront and march grandly up to the Peak. And then – dead ahead – at last, the famous Chequerboard, a Kowloon landmark, red and white squares painted on a sheer hillside, a challenge and a warning for approaching aircraft that says: ‘Turn away now – now! Or else….’ It’s a tricky spot: so tricky in fact that you can’t even trust to electronics. No electronic approach aid is allowed – is even possible. The final turn to the runway must be visual. You can see why. Big white strobe lights, visible even by day, signal the steep 47-degree swing to starboard that brings the aircraft in line with Runway 13, stretched out straight and dark and very narrow in the waters of Kowloon Bay.
Four hundred feet. Our starboard wing tilts down into the turn – reaching daringly towards the leprous rooftops of rotting tenement housing sprouting TV aerials and strung with lines of washing. I have stood on those slum roofs and watched the planes coming in one after the other, unbelievably close above me, just like the man I see now, holding a homing pigeon in his arms and gazing up quite undisturbed by the familiar sight of a green and white leviathan plunging down over his head. A group of boys playing football in a side s
treet must hear the change in engine-note, but they too ignore us. A double-decker bus overtakes a lorry on the road bordering the airport’s boundary fence.
McCook Weir says, ‘150 knots,’ as if to himself, meaning 165 miles an hour. And to Steve, ‘Good. I’ve got the aircraft.’
‘One hundred feet’ – from the Flight Engineer.
Our speed is falling with the descent and McCook Weir nudges the thrust levers forward. The aircraft’s nose now points directly at the control tower – that is to counteract drift to starboard. It must be interesting for the controllers to watch us heading briskly their way.
‘Thirty feet …’
The plane’s nose rises slightly, still just left of the runway’s centre line.
‘Twenty feet …’
A shift of the right rudder, and at last our nose is on centre.
‘Ten feet….’
Thrust levers back to idle; control column back. Light as a 220-ton feather we plane gracefully over the threshold. Eighteen massive wheels hit the runway. The brakes bite. Nose-wheel down.
‘Lovely … right-o….’
The flight deck quivers with the sudden braking as Mike reaches forward his right hand for the reverse thrust levers, yanking them sharply back as far as they will go. We slow, and then the brakes relax and the quivering dies. He cancels reverse thrust, pushing the levers forward to normal, and Cathay 250 U-turns smoothly off the runway and down the taxiway towards the house-high neon advertisement near the boundary road and our unloading bay. Dingy white buildings and the hills roll slowly by outside. Bare-chested in baggy shorts, a middle-aged Chinese on a rusty barge moored in the water that laps the runway is washing himself from a bucket, not heeding us at all.
‘Thirteen hours four minutes,’ McCook Weir says. ‘Nice eh?’
We have shrunk a hefty chunk of space into thirteen hours and accepted the miracle as boring routine. Nice? We have won a victory. One victory in a war of a million battles – but still a victory.
I hang up my headset, wondering if Sydney de Kantzow and Roy Farrell ever envisaged anything quite like this. But of course they couldn’t have.
‘Beautiful,’ I reply, and add a saying familiar on airstrips throughout the war in Vietnam: ‘So we walk away from another one.’
Someone on the flight deck laughs. ‘Almost a shame to take the money.’
PART ONE
ROY AND SYD
CHAPTER 1
One could toss a coin to determine Cathay Pacific’s exact place of birth. There are two obvious choices. Shanghai in 1946 is one possibility – that is where Roy Farrell, the godfather of Cathay, began commercial air operations with his DC-3, ‘Betsy’ (‘my baby’ as he calls her), the pigmy ancestor of today’s family of flying Titans. Hong Kong is the other – there Farrell’s first handful of aircraft achieved adulthood as ‘Cathay Pacific Airways’, and there the airline first drew the attention of rich and important suitors. In a dilapidated Hong Kong painfully recuperating from Japanese occupation and the Second World War, Cathay was ‘discovered’ and launched to fame and fortune rather as Lana Turner was ‘spotted’ and shot to stardom from Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood – although in Cathay’s case fortune did not come overnight.
Even so, the airline began as a gleam in Roy Farrell’s eye in a remoter place and at an earlier time. The place was Dinjan in British India; and at the time, 1942, the Second World War had reached a point when circumstances were at their bleakest. Indeed, it might be said that one of the world’s greatest international airlines emerged from the steamy confusion of a makeshift Assamese wartime airstrip rather as Life itself crawled out of the world’s primeval swamps. Dinjan: who has heard of it? Yet for a while, from 1942, it achieved a certain fame.
That year, 1942, was the worst of times. The unstoppable Japanese army had rolled through Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, had pursued the British out of Burma and arrived at a gallop on the eastern borders of India, driving a wedge of mountain and jungle between, on the one hand, the demoralized British and Indian forces in India and, on the other, the Chinese Nationalists and their American allies. Moreover, on their way the Japanese had closed the Burma Road, the most important Allied supply route into China – in fact, the only remaining lifeline. For already Japanese forces, battling since 1937 with the ill-coordinated Nationalist Chinese units of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had occupied China’s coastal cities and in a series of relentless offensives had pushed Chiang back into the remote upland regions of the country’s centre and west. Japan was now poised to knock Nationalist China out of the war.
On the upper reaches of the Yangtze River at Chungking Chiang made an emergency capital. By now he urgently needed any help he could get from his allies. But with the Burma Road closed and the only other land supply route, from Hanoi to Kunming, sealed off by the surrender in 1941 of French Indo-China, how could help be delivered? Yet to deliver it became a priority for the Allied High Command. The reason for that was not simply altruistic love of Chiang Kai-shek. The fervent hope was that with the active support of China-based United States Air Force bombers and fighters under General Claire Chennault, Chiang’s men would manage to tie down thousands of Japanese troops while the Americans’ knockout effort against the Japanese fatherland got under way in the Pacific. ‘Keep China in the war’ – that was the cry in Washington and London. ‘Keep the Japanese busy’ was what that cry really meant. But to be kept in the war Chiang’s China needed arms, ammunition, and an expensive spectrum of supplies from clothing to paper clips, or resistance to the Japanese might collapse. How on earth were these supplies to be delivered to the mountains of central China?
The Allied commanders saw only one possibility: by air from India – admittedly no ordinary route. This one would have to cross one of the world’s natural wonders – the uncharted barrier of formidable mountains at the eastern end of the Himalayas, a region of soaring walls of dark or snow-covered rock that soon came to be known to the world as ‘the Hump’. But was it feasible? At what times of the year could heavily laden piston-engined transports operate over it? At what height? What were the risks from Japanese fighters based in Burma? Could they operate at night? A swift reconnaissance led to a report, on the basis of which the planners in Washington and Chungking gave the go-ahead and the largest and most successful air transport operation of the war began, under the command of the irascible American commander-in-chief of the China–India–Burma theatre, Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell – ‘Vinegar’ by nickname, pure vinegar by nature.
At the Indian end of the Hump, British and Americans set up their headquarters in Calcutta, the largest port in eastern India, and looked for airfields. The Dinjan field was a mere pinprick on a general’s wall map but it happened to be particularly well situated in Upper Assam for the launching of transports across the Hump. And it was already the operational base for two RAF squadrons. Dinjan it would be, and by the time Roy Farrell was posted there it had become a noisy, overcrowded home-from-home for aircraft and aircrews from both the American Army Air Corps’ Transport Command (ATC) and the hybrid China National Aviation Company (CNAC).
CNAC is important to this story. It had been a Sino-American organization since 1933, when Pan American Airways acquired a 45 per cent share against the Chinese Government’s 55 per cent. Prewar, Pan American had begun to fly passengers across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila via Honolulu; later that route extended as far as Hong Kong, where CNAC’s DC-2s and DC-3s, based in Shanghai, were waiting to shuttle Pan American’s passengers into China. That link-up was a milestone in aviation pioneering, for in effect Pan American had built an air bridge spanning 8,000 miles of Pacific Ocean to join America to Asia.
The Second World War put paid to that. With the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese, CNAC’s headquarters were moved perforce to Hong Kong, and when that fell, to Kunming. By 1942 Japanese soldiers were inside the borders of India, Japanese aircraft controlled the skies of Burma, administrative and organizationa
l muddle and shortages of airstrips, supplies, roads and labour were the order of the day – but the men of CNAC rose to the occasion. Indeed, CNAC’s pilots, engineers and radio operators became the human backbone of the Hump story. Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow, an Australian, were only two of many experienced Pan American fliers to put on air force uniform. Engineers, air controllers and administrators did so too, and their experience made things work.
In the semi-chaos of Dinjan, Roy Farrell began to fly the aircraft that would shape his future. He and other young pilots, flying ten Douglas DC-3s (Dakotas) and three C-47s, the Dakota’s military version, inaugurated the route to Kunming and Chungking – 550 miles to Kunming plus an additional 450 miles to Chungking on the Yangtze River. Another twenty-five aircraft in Calcutta completed the fleet. Dinjan airstrip took its name from a nearby tea plantation in the valley of the holy Brahmaputra River. A long way inland, it stood only 90 feet above sea level. To the north rose the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world, a petrified tidal wave; to the east were the wild, razor-backed Naga Hill tracts where a tribal people, once head-hunters and only quite recently converted to Baptism by British and American missionaries, cultivated rice on precipitous hillsides to which their thatched huts clung like ticks to a dog’s back. Beyond them were Japanese-occupied Burma, more mountains, more ravines, and – China.
