Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  Of the 116 passengers and eleven crew aboard, eighty-two of the passengers and all the crew escaped unhurt, although thirty-three passengers were treated in hospital. Tragically one passenger, a Vietnamese woman, died at the moment of impact from a fractured skull.

  How did this experience affect the crew? According to Ian Steven: ‘I hadn’t smoked for some time, but I must have had five or six cigarettes on the ferry taking us ashore. Going over the sea wall I had thought I was dead.’ He didn’t stay dead long. He was flying again almost at once, and as I write is still flying for Cathay as a Senior Captain on Boeing 747s, although talking of his retirement in Australia or New Zealand.

  Still dripping from the wreck, Bob Howell telephoned his wife as soon as he got ashore. ‘Good heavens, Bob,’ she said, expecting him to be well on his way to Saigon. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Oh, just having a swim.’ But despite his light tone, he was as shocked as Ian Steven. As the plane swerved off onto the runway’s grass verge and headed towards the harbour, he had heard himself silently screaming, ‘This can’t be me!’ For both men the great uncontrollable rush towards the Bay had seemed to go on for ever. Witnesses in the Kai Tak Control Tower could tell them that actually, from Steven’s shout of ‘Aborting!’ to the sickening plunge into the harbour, a mere twenty-one seconds had elapsed.

  The Convair had been seriously damaged. Crane barges had difficulty towing the wreck to the RAF slipway, and once there, in order to lift it ashore, a cable was slung around the fuselage. When winching began, it was found too late that part of the tail was embedded in the harbour mud and the cable cut through the fuselage like a wire through cheese. The aircraft was finally brought ashore in pieces while all four engines stayed on the bottom of the Bay. They too were recovered, badly damaged. But Convair 880 VR-HFX was a total wreck.

  Over the signatures of John Bremridge, Managing Director; Dave Smith, Alec Wales, Don Delaney and R. J. Smith, Cathay’s Training Manager, the Company’s report blamed the accident mainly on the sudden shredding of the right-hand nose wheel tyre. Retreaded more than once, as was customary, the tyre had disintegrated causing the terrible shaking. With the nose wheel to all intents and purposes gone, Ian Steven lost his ability to steer with it, hence the uncontrollable swerve to the right. The Goodyear Company, the manufacturers of the tyre, stated in its report that it believed foreign objects on the runway – markers, lights and so on – might have torn the retread. The Cathay report recommended that retreading of nose wheel tyres should be more carefully monitored. Both reports completely exonerated the flying crew and congratulated the cabin staff for preventing panic and an even worse disaster.

  Even so, it was a bad day for Cathay. For a time ‘See the Bay with CPA’ became a local joke. Worse, the Company had lost an aircraft when its fleet was already at full stretch, though it was some consolation that Don Delaney was able to salvage something financially from the wreck. ‘We had a fantastic amount of spare parts from it,’ he said, ‘and the hull we sold quite well for scrap.’

  The accident had come just as John Browne was preparing to announce the Company’s acquisition of a HK$7.5 million (about £500,000) Convair simulator from Japan. This would reduce the need to use real and expensive aircraft for crew training and, of course, the risk of losing them. Now, thanks to Don Delaney’s brilliant gift for improvisation, a number of bits and pieces from the carcase of poor Convair VR-HFX went into this new Japanese electronic wonder.

  Delaney also had the presence of mind to rescue the Convair’s registration plate. When Howell retired, Delaney presented it to him as a souvenir. Bob had it mounted on wood above the legend: ‘The One He Swam Away From – VR-HFX 5.11.67’, and it hangs on Bob’s living room wall.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Kai Tak mishap had been caused by a few feet of worn rubber. It could have happened to anyone. Five years later a second Cathay Convair became the centre of a horror story embracing multiple death, mystery and the pursuit of an alleged mass murderer.

  On 15 June 1972 a ‘Top Urgent’ message to Swires in London brought news of the airline’s worst tragedy:

  MUCH REGRET ADVISE CV880 REGISTRATION VR-HFZ INVOLVED MIDAIR COLLISION ABOUT 0600 RPT 0600 WEST OF QUINON SOUTH VIETNAM WHILE ENROUTE FROM BANGKOK TODAY UNDER COMMAND CAPTAIN NEIL MORISON. TOTAL 81 PASSENGERS CREW ON BOARD. BLUCK WILL PHONE.

  Duncan Bluck had been out on his sailing boat that morning; it was lucky that a Cathay captain had seen him setting off and was able to find him and bring him back. Neither Bluck nor anyone else connected with Cathay Pacific would get much sleep for several days. A midair collision? Over Vietnam, too. That complicated things for the American war with North Vietnam was then at its height.

  Next day came a follow-up message. Jock, John and Adrian Swire and Michael Fiennes, suffering mental agonies in London, learned that a Cathay investigation team flown from Hong Kong to South Vietnam the night before had already been lifted by American Army helicopters to the scene of the crash, far up in a remote, forested region of the Central Highlands near the town of Pleiku. The team was led by Captain Bernie Smith, Cathay’s Operations Manager, and included Brian Thompson, the Chief Engineer, representatives of HAECO and of Hong Kong’s Department of Civil Aviation, notably Cyril Wray, the Colony’s Accident Inspector.

  Peter Sharrock, Reuters’ bureau chief in Saigon, was quickly onto the story and his first urgent dispatch quoted an American military spokesman as saying that the Convair had collided in midair with some unidentified aircraft, and that one of the two planes had fallen midway between Pleiku city and the port of Qui Nhon on a mountain range about 250 miles north-east of Saigon. The collision was merely presumed, although the spokesman added that no locally based military aircraft was listed as missing, and yet the theory did seem plausible since commercial airliners like Cathay’s regularly flew across Vietnam at about 30,000 feet, an altitude sometimes favoured by the high-flying American B-52 bombers based on Guam. Nevertheless, nothing in the wreckage spotted so far bore the green and black colours of a B-52; the tail plane in the jungle was silver.

  A dispatch from Agence France Presse added to the speculation, quoting a Vietnamese Government spokesman who said that the second plane had been a Nationalist Chinese C-46 military transport from Taiwan, not a B-52. The report added that uniformed Montagnard tribesmen (the friendly hill-people of central Vietnam) were poking about the wreckage in gas masks in appalling heat, while aviation experts tried to read some sort of message in the widely scattered bits and pieces. It even hinted that there might be some survivors.

  Into this tortured uncertainty the Hong Kong Standard decided to jump with both feet. On 16 June a front page banner headline proclaimed ‘CPA Ignored Air Warning’, and in fine thumping vein went on: ‘Cathay Pacific ignored three warnings – one by the Hong Kong Government – to stay out of the Vietnam air “corridor” that claimed the lives of eighty-one people yesterday.’ It would be hard to imagine a more damaging allegation the day after such an accident, and it struck everyone at Cathay a second blow almost as devastating as the first. It came before any reliable facts were available, and it was wholly false. Duncan Bluck, after alerting Cathay’s legal advisers, put out an emphatic rebuttal which in the circumstances he managed to keep remarkably calm.

  Cathay Pacific have announced that there is no truth whatever in the report printed in the Hong Kong Standard to the effect that the airline had ignored warnings regarding designated airways.

  Cathay Pacific have made it clear that the routing of their Convair 880 VR-HFZ on Thursday 15th June was through the international airway between Bangkok and Hong Kong used by the majority of carriers on that routing. Furthermore, a position report was received at the designated reporting point which was approximately four minutes prior to the accident and it is therefore known that the aircraft was on track and in communication with Saigon control.

  The following day the Standard did an about-face. In a headline display on its front page, as eye-catching as the original ca
lumny had been, the words ‘Apology To Cathay Pacific Airways’ were followed by ‘The Hong Kong Standard acknowledges that our report was wholly inaccurate and regrets the false impression created by [it]. The Standard wishes to make it clear to its readers that Cathay Pacific Airways have at no time ignored any warnings or failed to accept any recommendations which are made in the interests of the safety and comfort of its passengers.’

  The paper unreservedly acknowledged the untruth of its own reported slice of fiction and apologized to Cathay for permitting it to be published. It was a rapid and handsome apology and the Standard ran it for two days.

  With that distressing distraction out of the way, all thoughts could turn to the search for survivors and to discovering the cause of the disaster. This was not easy. One of the first two Vietnamese helicopters to have found the wreckage was shot down next day by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army units infesting the region, but despite the dangers and difficulties of the war zone Cyril Wray, Bernie Smith and their colleagues poked about the crash site in almost unbearable heat and humidity, charting and identifying the various bits and pieces. They soon reported that major parts of the wreckage could be removed to Saigon for closer examination by Vietnamese, American and Hong Kong experts, with accident investigators expected to arrive at any moment from Britain.

  The first Cathay announcement of the disaster had spoken of eighty-one passengers and crew. There had actually been seventy-one passengers of a variety of nationalities, mostly Japanese, Thai and American. Two complete families had been on the Convair: at Bangkok seven members of an American family called Kenny had boarded together; and a Filipino civil servant, Norberto Fernandez, his wife, his niece and his five children were on their way home to Manila. ‘There’s a possibility of survivors,’ the Saigon spokesman had said, but a telegram from Bernie Smith put paid to that hope: ‘Returned from crash site definitely nil repeat nil survivors.’ That dreadful message, according to Adrian Swire, left everyone in Swires’ London office feeling almost intolerably remote and miserable; Joan Esnouf recalls seeing old Jock in tears. The Convair’s Captain had been an Australian, Neil Μorison, Fleet Captain of the 880s fleet and a friend of Adrian Swire from his Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force days. First Officer Lachlan Mackenzie had flown 2,687 hours in Convairs and had been flying the aircraft under routine instruction from Morison. The right-hand seat had been occupied by First Officer Leslie Boyer and the Flight Engineer was Ken Hickey, one of the Cathay crew who had swum to safety from Convair VR-HFX after her plunge into Kowloon Bay. The Hong Kong Chinese cabin crew consisted of two pursers, Dicky Kong and William Yuen, and four hostesses – Winnie Chan, Ellen Cheng, Tammy Li and Florence Ng.

  To the Vietnamese helicopter pilots who first spotted it, all that was left of the Convair, strewn across an area of wooded hillsides, must have looked like the debris of a monstrous paper-chase, but even so an initial close-up inspection of the crash site told the investigators a good deal. Before hitting the ground the aircraft had broken into three main parts: the nose (all that part ahead of the wing), the central fuselage (where the wings join it and the landing gear joins the wings), and the aft fuselage behind the wings. This last part had fallen vertically and been impaled on a tree. The force of the fall from the plane’s normal flying altitude of 29,000 feet had compressed it into a mere six feet, crushing seats, galleys and overhead racks; on its right side there were distinct signs of scorching. A search round the wreckage showed that many passengers had been thrown out, although some were still strapped in their seats. The cockpit too was hideously crushed and virtually inaccessible. Bernie Smith spoke delicately of the ‘unpleasant proximity of crew remains’.

  Behind a protective cordon of American troops (the Viet Cong were close at hand), the investigating team concentrated on the landing gear beam situated where the wheels and wings join the fuselage, for there they found significant signs of structural failure. It was at this point that the idea of sabotage rather than collision first crept into their minds. It was too early to be sure of anything – structural failure, after all, could mean metal fatigue. However, when the suspect parts had been moved to Saigon and two British Government experts from the Accident Investigation Branch of Whitehall’s Department of Trade and Industry had looked at them more closely, a still more significant discovery was made. A small crater was detected on the inside of the aircraft’s skin where it was attached to the main landing gear beam; a crater, they decided, caused by an explosion of some sort of infernal device in the part of the cabin nearest the right wing. Such a device would certainly have fragmented, and some fragments would equally certainly have embedded themselves in the passengers and in the seats nearest to the explosion. Who had been in those seats? It became a matter of urgency to X-ray the remains of passengers known to have been seated in that area and, sure enough, metallic particles were found embedded in their limbs. Further tests confirmed that these particles were indeed fragments of a bomb.

  Even while the tests were in progress, the joint Vietnamese– American–Hong Kong team ruled out the earliest hypothesis. The collision theory went by the board when it was found that without doubt there had been no movement of military or commercial aircraft in the region at the time of the crash. The other possibility considered, that of a SAM surface-to-air missile attack by the North Vietnamese, was also discounted because all the bomb fragments found on the Convair were of light metal whereas military missile fragments are large, heavy and thick. Furthermore, a missile is designed to shatter an aircraft over its entire length, and this had not happened to the Convair. Apart from that, once the warhead had exploded on contact with its target the body of any missile – a pretty hefty object – would have fallen very near the aircraft wreckage. A careful search revealed no such thing.

  The state and positioning of the bodies, too, told their own story. The aft fuselage section contained fifteen bodies – two cabin attendants, the rest passengers: a purser was dressed in his in-flight meals service jacket; some of the passengers were in the aisle, others in the toilet area. Twenty feet from the wreckage a flight hostess lay in full uniform; she was wearing her serving apron. She was badly injured around the face, but her body had made only a shallow indentation in fairly soft ground, from which it was clear that she had fallen from the aircraft at a relatively low altitude. A little forward of the aircraft’s nose the Second Purser, Dicky Kong, lay spreadeagled on his back, his face swollen but undamaged, the two-bar insignia on his shoulders confirming his identity. The nearby body of a male passenger in the clothes of a priest was easily identified as that of the only Irish passenger, a Father Cunningham. When the mangled cockpit was prised open, the first body to be recovered was that of Captain Morison, identifiable only by his epaulettes and by his build. Later, in the Saigon mortuary, the bodies of Leslie Boyer and Ken Hickey, too, were identified. Lachlan Mackenzie was missing (and was never found).

  Because, when disaster struck, some passengers had had their seat belts fastened and some had not; because some evidently had been standing in the aisle; because all doors were locked and all life jackets stowed normally; because, as far as anyone could tell in the shambles of the cockpit, the crew had not donned their oxygen masks – for all these reasons, coupled with the readings taken from the aircraft’s ‘black box’ flight recorder which was retrieved only slightly damaged, it was established to expert satisfaction that everyone aboard had been taken totally by surprise. Whatever had destroyed Cathay’s Convair VR-HFX sixty-four minutes and two seconds after take-off from Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport, the plane had been flying normally at the time.

  One can assume from their dress that the pursers and hostesses were busy serving lunch when the end came. Without warning something had happened: the stricken aircraft had turned over on its back and broken up into quite large sections during its plunge to earth, shedding bodies as it fell. The best one can say is that certainly everyone – passengers and crew – lost consciousness in the massive decompression
which followed the explosion.

  What exactly had happened, so brutally, so suddenly? It was time for the bomb experts to give their opinion. Vernon Clancy, a distinguished British explosives expert and a veteran of ninety-six bomb investigations, cleared the air a bit more. In his confidential report to the Vietnamese Director of Civil Aviation, Saigon, he stated bluntly, ‘There is firm evidence of an explosion of a substantial quantity of high explosive within the aircraft, probably within the cabin in way of the wing roots.’ This ‘firm evidence’ expanded on the first report of a small crater in the aircraft’s skin. By now a number of such craters, large and minute, had been found on the inner skin and near the No. 3 fuel tank. Within one of them partly fused fibres were visible, suggesting that a fragment had passed through the carpet in the passenger cabin.

  Experiments with a typical high explosive in a thin metal container had produced very similar craters to those found in the Convair’s wing roots and particles very like those recovered from the bodies. Clancy was unable to identify the explosive exactly, but he believed it was one with a high velocity of detonation, a military explosive, perhaps, or one used commercially for blasting. C-3 or C-4 high explosives, packing twenty times the power of TNT, could have done the trick; both looked like chewing gum and could be squeezed into any shape at all.

  Meticulous examination of the wreckage coupled with Clancy’s findings led Eric Newton, the British Civil Aviation Department’s Chief Inspector of Accidents, to the following reconstruction of events. As Cathay’s flight CX700 sped serenely from Thailand into South Vietnam, a bomb had exploded between rows nine and ten on the Convair’s right side, blowing out a largish section of the right cabin wall over the wing, indicating that at least two kilograms had been used. At least one passenger and a seat or two had been sucked out of this big hole and whipped backwards to strike the right-hand stabilizer so violently that it broke off. At the same time escaping fuel from the punctured right-hand tank ignited and flames streamed back along the right-hand side of the fuselage. Without its right-hand stabilizer, the aircraft had pitched suddenly upwards with great force, yawed to the right and turned on its back. The explosion having severed the flying controls beneath the cabin floor, the crew had no hope of controlling these erratic, high-speed manoeuvres. In the sickening vertical plunge tail-first that followed, the aft fuselage began to separate from the wing; the rudder and all four engines separated (only No. 3 engine was recovered); the landing-gear went at about 10,000 feet; and the front section snapped off, too.