Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  There were already discernible differences of opinion on the expansion issue, in both Swires and Cathay. Roughly, the pro-expansion lobby consisted of Bill Knowles and Duncan Bluck, and the anti-expansionists were Jock and John Browne. John Bremridge, Cathay’s Managing Director, held a position somewhere in the middle, though tending towards Jock-like caution. Browne, Bremridge and Bluck – the three Bs – are key figures in this story; they dominated Cathay’s management through the sixties, seventies and into the eighties, taking over direction of the Company one after the other like runners in a relay race.

  As a purely regional line Cathay had on the whole done well. The Company’s (and Jock Swire’s) attitude to the big airlines had been placatory – ‘We’re not competing with you. We’ll feed you passengers from Singapore, Bangkok and elsewhere, and take over and look after the passengers you deliver to Hong Kong. We’ll help each other.’ Admittedly, there were political problems in this sensitive post-colonial time: the Cultural Revolution shut down China; when General Ne Win came to power in Burma, traffic more or less ceased and Cathay had to close down there; the Vietnam War closed down Hanoi and Haiphong. On the other hand, Duncan Bluck was proved right over Japan and Taiwan; he had predicted their ‘miraculous’ economic recovery, and the advent of tourism there. It was easy to play for safety and ‘think regional’ – but only as long as Bluck was not around. He had exciting ambitions, for himself and for the Company. He was a gadfly; the sting under the Company’s tail.

  ‘An aviation genius,’ Jock had said of him when Bluck was still a young and rising star in the early sixties. A wise man, Jock. Bluck knew Japan well, having served three years there in CNCo’s shipping offices in Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama. He had seen the hopelessness of Japan under the post-war American occupation: Japanese businessmen could only travel abroad at the stern whim of General MacArthur; thousands of American servicemen who came for occupation duty and went home on leave only travelled in American aircraft. There was no profit for Cathay in that. But Duncan Bluck, perhaps before anyone at Cathay Pacific, foresaw the Japanese recovery – the ‘economic miracle’. When the signs were right he helped to launch Cathay’s one DC-6B and two Electras at Japan, and the Company saw its trade there blossom spectacularly. This success, its parallel in Taiwan, and the influx of American and other tourists into the East made up in the sixties for a good deal of frustration earlier on. And besides, there was always the good, dependable Manila route.

  But Duncan Bluck was thinking bigger than that. He gave Jock a sturdy nudge towards global expansionism in a report he wrote after a five-week tour of the United States and Canada in February and March 1961. It made very good reading, according to Jock’s old buddy John Scott, and it certainly made important recommendations. Bluck pointed out the vast amount of business immediately available in the United States, leave alone the potential business. (He got to specifics: while he was actually in the Los Angeles office of Ed Sullivan, Cathay’s American sales agent, a mere four phone calls had netted HK$140,000-worth of business right there and then.) Bluck said that Cathay’s services just had not been brought to the attention of American tour operators; if Cathay would flaunt itself a little on the West Coast, who knew? The sky could be the limit. Get a good full-time salesman, Bluck said, to work with Ed Sullivan, who was himself exceptionally well known and liked in the American travel business. Apart from anything else, San Francisco and Los Angeles (and Vancouver up the coast in Canada) harboured the largest Chinese populations outside Asia.

  Bluck was not saying that Cathay should start flying to America’s West Coast – at least, not yet. He was merely drawing Jock’s attention to the gold mine that all those potential passengers – Chinese or non-Chinese – could represent once someone told them that Cathay Pacific Airways not only existed, but was hopefully looking their way.

  *

  It was a razor-edge time of ‘Shall-we-shan’t-we?’ Jock was right to urge his managers to hurry up and decide on the best way ahead. But it turned out that any such decision had to be postponed. For, when Cathay Pacific seemed about to soar at last, in America two Lockheed Electras lost their wings in flight.

  * Bob Smith was Flight Engineer. He claims his exact words were: ‘If we’d gone through the fence at least we’d have been in the bloody hospital.’ This was RAF Kai Tak’s infirmary.

  CHAPTER 16

  The first man in at the death of Braniff International Airways Flight 542 was a farmer, Mr Richard White. The wreckage fell on his land, not far from Buffalo, Texas, in the middle of the night. He told Federal investigators it seemed as if suddenly the entire sky was on fire, and then that unearthly light faded ‘as if a monstrous Roman candle had spent itself’. There was a noise like thunder and strange sounds came out of the sky – shrill whistles in different keys. White and his wife stood on their porch hugging each other in terror as heavy metal objects crashed about them. Next there was a fearful silence. A wetness fell from the air that was like rain but was not rain because it smelled like kerosene: jet-engine fuel. White ran barefoot to his vegetable patch. It was littered with pieces of what looked like aluminium. The rudder of an aircraft hung in a tree near the pigpen. On it red lettering said: ‘Fly Braniff’. White didn’t recognize it, but he was looking at the remains of a Lockheed L-188: an Electra. And two Electras were the pride and spearhead of Cathay Pacific’s little fleet.

  So on 29 September 1959 began one of the most tragic yet inspiring stories in modern aviation history. It has been grippingly told in its complex entirety by Robert J. Serling in his book The Electra Story, published in 1963. Here it is only possible to give an outline of the disasters, of their investigation, of Lockheed’s brilliant recovery and of the impact of the tragedy on the upward progress of Cathay Pacific Airways. At once an army of investigators from the Federal Government’s Civil Aviation Board descended on the White farm, and certain things were soon established. Flight 542 had been carrying a crew of six and twenty-eight passengers. Captain Wilson Stone, the pilot, was highly experienced, with 28,135 flying hours behind him. Admittedly only forty-nine of them had been in Electras, but as Cathay’s Laurie King said later, the Electra was ‘really easy flying; really easy. That is, provided you listened to the Lockheed pilots and didn’t fly it as if you were flying a DC-3 or a DC-4.’ Captain Stone would not have flown 542 anything but correctly.

  From two huge barrels full of small pieces of metal the experts tried to find out what had happened. There had been – all witnesses agreed – a quick, vivid flash and then a reddish fireball. A meticulous search over a very wide area revealed sections of the left wing and bits of Nos 1 and 2 engines far from the nose crater. From this it was deduced that the left wing had snapped off. Had the explosion destroyed the wing – or had there been a wing rupture and then fire resulting from the igniting of spilled fuel? Sabotage was ruled out: there had been no emergency messages from the crew. Might the captain have put the plane into a violent manoeuvre to avoid a collision with another aircraft? The Federal Aviation Agency could trace no aircraft anywhere near. It was baffling.

  Yet the investigators uncovered two interesting facts. First, marks showed that the No. 1 engine propeller had been wobbling as much as 35 degrees out of the norm; it was a key clue, but no one thought much of it at the time.

  The second fact had a Sherlock Holmesian property about it. Many of the farmers in the area of the crash remarked that ‘Every coon dog for miles started howling’ at about the time of the explosion or just before it. That seemed to mean that something was causing a shriek or whine on an unusual sound frequency. What kind of sound? What could be the cause? There was no answer. After a great deal of brain-racking and meticulous investigation of the site and the remains, the accident looked like joining the list of unsolved crashes.

  Then, on 17 March 1960, approaching Tell City, Indiana, in clear weather at 18,000 feet and at 400mph, an Electra of Northwest Airlines suddenly burst into a black cloud of smoke. It emerged from the cloud minus it
s right and most of its left wing: the fuselage dived almost vertically to earth, where it dug itself a smoking crater forty-foot wide. Northwest Airlines Flight 710 had on board thirty-three men, twenty-one women, eight children and one infant, all bound for Miami. The aircraft’s pilot, Captain Edgar E. LaParle, had been with NWA since 1937 and had flown 27,523 hours with them. The Electra in which he died had flown less than 1,800 hours and only the week before had undergone a major inspection.

  This time the scene of the crash was one of almost unimaginable horror. Rescue workers, masked and gloved, delved about in that steaming hole to find the fuselage and its contents crushed into a mass of molten metal; the fuselage itself was no more than a third of its original length. It was something of a miracle that as many as seven of the sixty-three bodies could be identified. An army chaplain from Fort Knox nearby and the Tell City coroner, as well as local health authorities, were so distressed by what they saw from the lip of the cauldron that the order was given for bulldozers to cover up the hole and everything in it without more ado, and for a commemorative stone to be placed over this communal grave. But for the Civil Aviation Board – and Lockheed – it was a duty to do everything possible to unravel the mystery underlying both this crash and the earlier one of Braniff Flight 542, and the CAB was obliged to obtain a restraining order from the Governor of Indiana to prevent the bulldozers getting to work.

  The consequent investigation was astounding in its thoroughness. As before, CAB investigators moved in like ants, collecting, marking, plotting the scattered wreckage as hundreds of soldiers supported by helicopters scoured a twenty-five square-mile area. This time the investigators had some extremely valuable help – two US Air Force jet-bomber pilots had been flying in the vicinity of Flight 710’s path at the same time, and now they reported that without warning they had hit clear-air turbulence so severe that they were bounced out of their seats. So Flight 710 had met a jet stream at 18,000 feet moving at something in excess of 100mph and at 90 degrees to its flight path. It was, as Robert Serling says, as if the Electra, travelling at 400mph, ‘had bounced into an aerial ditch – a jarring collision of metal and wind in which the metal had come off second best’.

  But clear-air turbulence was nothing new. So why had an Electra – a modern aircraft that in terms of structural strength actually exceeded the very high standards set by the Federal Government – been wrecked by it? Whatever the answer was, ninety-seven people had been killed in two aircraft of the same make, and a nationwide furore broke over Lockheed’s bewildered head. Pilots, engineers, CAB investigators and Congressmen felt that Electras should be removed – temporarily at least – from passenger service. And the only government official with the power to take such a step was the head of the Federal Aviation Agency, ex-Air Force General Elwood R. Quesada, commonly known as Pete.

  A former fighter pilot, Quesada was considered by many to be too autocratic: he was stocky, tetchy, and suffered fools not at all. It was a time, however, when most people thought air violations had increased to a point beyond a joke and that civil air regulations needed ‘a tough cop’. In Quesada they got one. With his most senior assistants he visited that terrible crater near Tell City. They had already begun forming theories – considering the ‘severe turbulence’ reports of the Air Force pilots – as to what might have happened. But the dire decision – whether or not to ground every Electra in the world for the foreseeable future – had to be taken.

  One of Quesada’s top colleagues had an idea: instead of grounding them, why not put the Electras under a speed restriction? His reasoning was as follows. The Electra was the fastest prop-driven airliner ever to fly, and as a result it was taking its conventional, straight wings into speeds not far from those of the pure jets, the wings of which were swept back to absorb subsonic turbulence. The Northwest Airlines plane at least had hit turbulence at high speed. Placing speed restrictions on the Electras during intensive investigation would have the effect of adding strength to their wings. Lockheed’s engineers agreed. So did Quesada.

  The FAA first ordered speed restrictions three days after the Tell City crash, but strident calls for total grounding were not diminished by that. It was a brave thing for Pete Quesada to oblige Electra crews to keep their speed down from 373mph to 259mph (roughly the speed of a DC-6 or a Constellation) but to let them keep flying. He was taking a risk – a calculated risk for sure, but a fearful one. ‘If another one goes down,’ said an FAA official quoted by Serling, ‘Pete might as well be on it.’ Quesada himself told Serling later, ‘You’re damn right I was worried. I knew one more crash and I was finished.’

  CAB officials returning to Washington from Tell City refused to travel in Electras; a fact which in itself could have put the kibosh on the Electras if it had leaked to the press. And the proponents of grounding had an impressive point: the first Electra had lost its wings from an unknown structural cause in level flight and in calm weather, with no turbulence in the vicinity. If there was a third and similar crash the Electra would be finished for ever, its reputation smashed beyond what even a grounding order could do – better a wrecked schedule and lost dollars than another crash and more deaths. Sick jokes began to be bandied about: ‘Seen the new aviation play – Mourning Becomes the Electra?’ and ‘Read the new Electra book, Look Ma, No Wings’? Inevitably, the rumour was put around: ‘It’s a fact Lockheed paid Quesada $50,000 not to ground the Electra.’

  Nevertheless Lockheed did have friends in an unlikely quarter. As the almost superhuman effort to determine the cause of the accidents (code-named Operation LEAP) got under way at Lockheed’s plant at Burbank, California, even the company’s fiercest rivals, Boeing and Douglas, sent aerodynamic specialists to help. Two hundred and fifty of Lockheed’s own engineers went on three shifts a day, seven days a week; some worked an eighty-four-hour week. The California Institute of Technology lent additional computers; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made available the huge wind tunnel at Langley Field, Virginia. In laboratories, in wind tunnels, in hair-raising test flights, Lockheed started driving an Electra wing to destruction: a complete wing with its engines were subjected to the most powerful twists and shakes that America’s best aviation engineers and most courageous and skilful test pilots could contrive. It was an awe-inspiring joint effort by the major airline manufacturers and operators. As the search went on, Electra pilots across the country voted by overwhelming majorities to continue flying the aircraft (under the FAA speed restriction), even while the cause of the crashes remained unknown. Cathay’s Laurie King was flying them on a regular schedule at the time: ‘We had the speed restriction and we were flying only by hand. They suspected the autopilot for a while. I think we knew it had something to do with wing oscillation. We inspected every day for wing fatigue. We were pretty philosophical about it.’

  Wing oscillation – a severe ‘flutter’ on a wing – could destroy a plane, everyone knew that, but the Electra had wings as flutter-proof as any in the world. In tests the wings survived, but attention focused on where and how the engines were mounted on those wings, on the strength of their mounts and struts – that was where, it appeared, something was very seriously wrong. On the Braniff aircraft marks had shown that the No. 1 propeller had wobbled very considerably. It was the sound of this – the shriek of a supersonic propeller gone haywire on a wing that was shaking itself to death – that had set all those Texan ‘coon dogs’ howling. For the Lockheed examiners now realized that not only had propellers wobbled – the entire engine had wobbled on its nacelles or wing fixtures, and these violent oscillations had twisted the wing itself in an unstoppable gyroscopic seizure. Unstoppable because the oscillations, occurring at the same frequency, fed on each other and in less than thirty seconds reached a degree of violence and speed that snapped off the wing. In the case of Braniff, perhaps an earlier ‘hard landing’ had weakened the engine mounting; in the case of the NWA Electra, the impact of turbulence on the weakened engine-mounts simply hastened t
he self-destruction of the wings.

  The enormous effort had paid off; now it was time for major surgery. The stiffness of the nacelles was almost doubled, the rear engine mounts strengthened with heavier metal. Braces were added, and wing-ribs relocated to increase their resistance to twisting stresses. Altogether Lockheed would have to call in the 136 Electras being operated by seven domestic and six foreign airlines, including Cathay. The cost was estimated at about $24 million, which proved to be accurate. Once again, Lockheed’s test pilots took to the air to see how far the newly modified Electras could be pushed in adverse conditions. The tests must have been unbelievably dramatic. Electras were dived at speeds up to 418mph, having been deliberately weakened to simulate structural failure. Unusual flight loads were flown in turbulent weather to record critical strains in the wings and fuselage. Whatever the test pilots did, there was now no sign of oscillation, flutter, whirl or whatever you liked to call it. The modification programme on each aircraft took about twenty-five days and on 5 January 1961, fifteen months after the Braniff disaster, the FAA announced its approval of the programme and removed the speed restriction on any Electra so modified. Pete Quesada could sleep peacefully at last.

  Like the other dozen affected airlines, Cathay had had to grit its teeth and improvise. Jock instructed John Browne to make it his top priority ‘to see what can be done to brace ourselves to meet the critical period while the FAA restrictions are in force, followed by the lay-up time for modification’. December–January 1960 was the time allotted to Cathay by Lockheed – not too long to wait, Cathay’s directors thought, although greater delay would be bad for the crews’ morale. At the same time, to fill the gap while the two Electras were in Burbank – particularly on the then still operating Sydney run – Cathay chartered a Britannia turbo-prop from BOAC for £4,000 a week plus £75 per flying hour.