by Jim Eames
Taking off from one of the stopping places there was just enough wind to lift the windsock from its pole. A machine belonging to another company left the ground first and the pilot, glancing at the lifeless indicator, took off across wind. Perhaps he did it in perfect safety but when the Qantas plane followed, the pilot religiously taxied across the full length of the aerodrome and, in strict accordance with the company’s principle of safety first before all things, rose dead into the faint breeze.
In 1938, just a year later, the airline moved its head office from Brisbane to Sydney. It was a momentous move for an airline less than twenty years from its birth in Western Queensland and which had only just launched its flying boat service to Singapore to link with Imperial Airways. Although he led an airline with less than 300 staff, General Manager Fysh used the occasion to pen a note to ‘the Executive and Seniors of Qantas Empire Airways’.
The shift to Sydney implies a great deal, and where a new environment will be encountered, demanding a much spruced up organisation, and where each one will be judged on his merits anew.
Till the organisation shakes down we must concentrate on essentials, but from the start if a watchword of ‘nothing but the best’ is taken and followed through in every function, however small, we will have nothing to fear; at the same time unwarranted expenditure must be strenuously avoided. If we fail in this then criticism and censorship must result.
It is our duty to carry on the old standards which have been so successful in the past. The history of Qantas shows that integrity has been one of the dominant factors in the success which has been enjoyed. That, and taking things seriously, and never being satisfied with second best.
Twice in subsequent years, Fysh distributed that note again, first in 1948, though now as merely a foreword to a booklet entitled Ethics and Other Things—A Souvenir of Qantas Service, to be issued to every Qantas employee after the airline had come through the war and was establishing its peacetime role as an entirely Australian-owned company ‘operating east and west from Sydney to London and north and south from Sydney to Japan’. Jack Dawson, who joined in 1949, can still point to his personal copy with the comment, ‘In those days you knew just about everyone else in the airline.’
By the time the booklet was reissued for the third time, in 1955, Qantas had more than 5000 staff, owned a fleet of aircraft valued at over £8 million and had made an unbroken annual profit on operations for 32 years. Fysh now used the occasion to express how proud he was of Qantas’s good name and its efficiency with ‘our clients and public opinion and the authorities with whom we deal,’ but added a warning: ‘This is excellent but we must realise that the further we go and the bigger we get the more difficult it becomes to keep up the old standards.’
The booklet itself is a remarkable document for its time and says much about how Fysh saw the key to the airline’s future. Heavy on ethics and integrity, it covers more than twenty headings, from grade of service: (‘Good and faithful’), advertising: (‘Must be Honest’), staff relations: (‘Duty towards the company and Duty towards the employee’), loyalty: (‘must be deserved’) and so on, through Diplomacy, Character, Vision, Initiative and Enterprise, and even a section headed ‘Bribery’, which he notes ‘is not British and not Australian, and is despicable’.
In true Fysh fashion, ‘Expenses’ also feature, with the challenge to reconcile ‘moderate expenses’ with the principle of ‘nothing but the best’.
Fysh was fortunate in being surrounded by people who would take all such issues seriously, while applying their own high standards in their respective fields. Arthur Baird, who set the criteria for Qantas engineering in the 1920s, was still renowned, years later, for greeting young apprentices with the question: ‘Do you know what you’re doing, son?’ His oft-repeated query would become a catchphrase among those who worked at Qantas’s Sydney Jet Base in Mascot, now named in his honour. To Baird, who had experienced those early days of aviation when things went wrong regularly, near enough was never good enough, and generations of Qantas engineers would embrace his philosophy.
David Forsyth, who would eventually occupy senior executive positions in Qantas, was quick to recognise Baird’s legacy immediately he joined the company as an engineering cadet in 1970. ‘There were these larger-than-life tradesmen who had been with the company for such a long time,’ Forsyth recalls. ‘They would give you a go and never think of telling you to go sit in the corner.
‘They had come from an era where they had to build their own aeroplanes and develop an attitude of self-sufficiency because they were so far away from the people who made the aeroplanes and built the engines. It was a requirement then not only to fix something but to think things through, because in those days things went wrong.’
Forsyth says this requirement to ‘fix it ourselves’ remained long after the wood, wire and fabric era of aeroplanes. Even in the early Boeing 747 days of the 1970s, the airline was experiencing engine problems because of the effects of altitude on fuel on its extremely long-range flights. ‘We had to remedy much of it ourselves with special wiring, special sensors, even special instruments in the cockpit to record the data so that we could see what was happening.’
Forsyth, now retired after 40 years in the industry, admits things don’t go wrong as much today. ‘In those days if one of our engines lasted on the wing for eight or nine months without having to be taken off, you had a party. These days it’s seven or eight years. In fact I think they have one engine on a Boeing 737 that’s been there since new—ten years.’
Alan Terrell and his crew were having breakfast at the start of a rest day in Bermuda while flying Prime Minister Gough Whitlam around the world in a Qantas Boeing 707 in the 1970s when his flight engineer Bruce Lawrence and ground engineer Henry Knight came into the dining room carrying a can of Brasso and some rags.
When Terrell asked Lawrence what they were up to, the flight engineer replied: ‘We’re off out to polish the engine cowlings up a bit.’
Former captain Roger Carmichael is another who can cite the Qantas standards of times gone by, offering one example during a transit of his 747 at Bangkok.
Walking across the tarmac to pre-flight his aircraft, Carmichael was approached by a Boeing representative accompanied by two Thai Airways management people. The Boeing man asked if he could go aboard and show them the flight deck maintenance logbook that records, among other items, the permissible defects the aircraft is carrying that are yet to be fixed. The Boeing man ‘wanted to show them how an aircraft should be maintained.’
‘Since I hadn’t been aboard the aircraft myself to look at what had been entered in the book, we were all going in cold,’ recalls Carmichael. ‘In the event the logbook was completely clean with no defects listed and the Boeing rep was very happy, the Qantas engineering reputation remained intact and the Thais were very impressed.’
Such circumstances, of course, meant no expense was spared when it came to safety, and from a maintenance and flight operations viewpoint, neither were there any arguments about it. While at various times up into the 1970s and 1980s there might be considerable financial or marketing influence on the direction of the airline, safety was non-negotiable and money for flight operations or engineering was never a problem when justified by safety.
No one, not even the airline’s owner—which by then was the Australian government—or, for that matter, the justice system was prepared to stand up against the flight operations division when it suggested something was unsafe. After all, says Carmichael, the only way to prove otherwise was to run the risk of a serious accident and not even a financial supremo was willing to take a razor to the operations budget under such a threat.
For many years, even within its own crewing administrative responsibilities, such a situation provided flight operations management with absolute authority. For instance, if management decided a second or first officer lacked the ability to attain a higher level and would remain at that level for the rest of his career, the edict was final and not
even a court would question the right of a training captain or flight operations management to make that decision.
This flight operations culture had been the beneficiary of a massive amount of experience with the pilots who came out of the war, not only through their impact on its training regime, but in general line flying on Qantas routes as well. They were men who had known what it was to fly by the seat of their pants, learnt lessons and had their share of ‘frights’ along the way as they acquired the highest levels of airmanship. Some applied their skills as training captains; others passed their experience on to first and second officers as they flew the line.
Some pilots were highly decorated individuals. Merv Shipard, Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, scored an incredible thirteen confirmed ‘kills’ as a night fighter pilot on Beaufighters in the UK, the Middle East and Malta, joined Qantas in 1957 and flew Constellations, Electras and 707s before being appointed flight simulator instructor in the late 1970s. Shipard was tutoring another pilot on a 707 out of Tullamarine one night when a boost activator broke from its mounting on the wing and the aircraft rolled through 140 degrees. Despite a pitch-black night, at a dangerously low altitude with no visual references and doubtless using his extensive night-flying experience, Shipard took control and recovered the aircraft.
Keith Thistle won a DFC and a DSO serving in RAF Bomber Command and, because he wanted to transfer to fighters, had the rare distinction of declining an offer from Guy Gibson VC to join his famous 617 Lancaster Squadron for the Dam Buster raids. It was as well he did; his replacement for the Dams raid was killed.
Promoted to squadron leader, Thistle was shot down over Holland, became a prisoner of war but escaped on a bicycle and made his way to Allied troops advancing across Europe. After joining Qantas he flew the inaugural 707 flight from Brisbane to Singapore before retiring in the 1960s.
R.F. ‘Torchy’ Uren DFC was a flight commander with No. 30 Beaufighter Squadron in New Guinea, famed for its key role in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, when Australian and US aircraft turned back a large convoy carrying thousands of Japanese planning an assault on Lae. Uren received wide exposure in news footage of the battle, shot by Australian cameraman Damien Parer, who crouched behind him in the cockpit. Short of stature and something of a prickly character, Uren would later fly Qantas Catalinas on the secret Double Sunrise route through Japanese territory between Perth and Colombo in 1944. This effort allowed Australia to maintain an air link with the UK. Uren would eventually rise to senior pilot management positions in the company.
‘Bunny’ Lee, who would eventually be renowned for telling a small cartel of training captains at Avalon what he thought of them, had the rare distinction of having his rear gunner shoot down a night fighter which attacked them as they bombed Berlin with 106 Squadron RAF in early 1944, only to then have his Lancaster ‘coned’ by a score of searchlights as German anti-aircraft fire smashed into his aircraft. He managed to break free by violently corkscrewing the aircraft back into the darkness, went on to bomb Berlin and arrived back at base in England with dozens of holes through the Lancaster.
Such men were the tip of the post-war iceberg as far as Qantas was concerned and one of their most decorated, former Wing Commander Alan Wharton, would go on to head the airline’s operations division as Director of Flight Operations. Wharton won his DSO, DFC and Bar and was Mentioned in Despatches while serving with Bomber Command in Europe and the Middle East.
With those responsible for training reporting to him, Wharton led the airline through the various recruiting changes necessary as the airline entered the jet age, first with the 707 and eventually the 747, taking it through the peaks and troughs of the notoriously cyclical airline industry. In between the ups and downs, Qantas established its own cadet pilot scheme in the mid-1960s where young pilots were trained on single- and twin-engine aircraft, then moved on to command experience in general aviation for two years before joining the airline.
Qantas files back into the 1970s reveal Wharton discussing a future in which pilots would be trained specifically with airline flying in mind, due to some extent to the fact that the skills learnt while gaining hours flying for others didn’t relate to airline practice. Wharton, known for his dry wit, put it more bluntly: it was so they didn’t pick up any bad habits.
The ideas espoused by Wharton and others in the 1970s would come to fruition with the introduction of multi-crew licences, whereby pilots are specifically trained to fly as part of a crew on regular public transport aircraft, meaning they can only use this licence on multi-crew operations.
At the same time, technological advances such as sophisticated simulators have helped ease the economic pressures of increasing competition in the airline industry by reducing the costly in-aircraft training of years gone by. Such a brave new world, which means pilots get very little solo flight time and no seat-of-the-pants experience, has not always been easy for some in what is traditionally a very conservative industry. Veterans like Roger Carmichael suggest the process may be painful and may add to unpalatable statistics from time to time, but they acknowledge the inevitability of it all both in economic and practical terms.
As for the ‘old’ culture: ‘Whatever is said, either for or against, for the times it speaks for itself—Alan Wharton’s people did it right.’
But, as the early 1990s arrived, some believed that there was another factor influencing cultural change—privatisation.
Its precursors were government decisions first to deregulate the Australian domestic aviation industry, approve the sale of Australian Airlines to Qantas, then the sale of a 25 per cent share in Qantas to British Airways, all destined to be the first steps towards the privatisation of Qantas in 1995. While many in the company who had watched Qantas struggle with limited government financial support in a highly capital intensive industry—where one Boeing 747 came at a cost in excess of $200 million—could see benefits in being cut free of the restrictive government oversight, they were wary of other consequences.
Former engineering executive David Forsyth, for one, marks privatisation as the change point. ‘I considered Qantas to be an ethical company. If things weren’t right and management found out about it they did something about it. That changed in the mid-1990s,’ Forsyth says.
Many attribute the cultural change at Qantas to the switch to an environment where the share price became the priority and management positions began to be filled by newcomers at salary levels unheard of in the pre-privatisation era. For many it was certainly not destined to be a long-term career. One former senior executive delights in telling the story of how, when he questioned his successor as to how he saw his future with the company, he was met with the response: ‘Five years maybe. I’ll make a quid and get out.’
‘Such a comment would have been almost unheard of in the Qantas of earlier years but the world had changed and unfortunately some of the old culture was changing with it,’ the executive says sadly. ‘And as for the name “Arthur Baird” on the entrance to the Mascot Jet Base: I doubt there’d be all that many who’d know who he was.’
Be that as it may, there’s little doubt that many in the company appreciate the operational and engineering cultural building blocks that have created the Qantas they know today.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RIGHT CHOICE
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THE PREGNANT PUP
Airlines run the gauntlet of success or failure on the choice they make in aircraft to fly their flag in a ruthless, competitive environment, where the margins often come down to fuel efficiency and reliability for on-time performance. But while men like Shipard, Thistle, Uren, Lee and Wharton created an unmistakable identity for Qantas, the aeroplane choices themselves, from the early biplanes to the jets, also played a role in creating that identity. The planes as well as the people who maintained and flew them had their own personality traits; some could be cranky and hard to handle, even hard to please, while others would forever win the hearts of those who had anything to do with them.<
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The Qantas we know today has inherited a worldwide reputation, even among other airlines, as an industry leader when it came to aircraft choice. Other international airlines were known to closely follow Qantas’s choices before making their own decision, a situation much to the benefit of companies like Boeing.
But it was not always that way and there are still a few out there who remember times when the right aircraft choice meant a different set of challenges, from putting at risk our ties to the Empire, to terse telegraphic exchanges between prime ministers at opposite ends of the earth. Such things as fuel efficiency and interior decor weren’t even on the radar!
No one could foresee, in 1939, the massive strides in aviation that would be made over the next six years of war.
Prior to the war, developing airlines like Qantas had few choices beyond aircraft that were already available. As Qantas developed its inland services and then took its first steps overseas, expanding its reach as far as Singapore (in conjunction with the UK’s Imperial Airways), the use of aircraft like the de Havilland DH-86 biplane were largely the result of what Fysh and his colleagues considered to be the most suitable for the role, combined with a large degree of influence by its imperial partner. In historical terms, buying British pretty well came with the territory. Again, later in the 1930s when it came time to upgrade in an era where the flying boat reigned supreme, the obvious answer for Qantas, so links with the old country were maintained, had to be the Short Empire flying boat, skipping its way up Australia’s eastern coastline, across to Darwin Harbour, and through the then Dutch East Indies (Indonesian) ports to Singapore.
But by 1945, not only were fighter aircraft on the cusp of entering the jet age but bombers were also carrying loads unheard of in the early days of the war. Some of these engine and airframe advances had spun off into transport aircraft like the Douglas DC-4 and others that would form the basis for the peacetime civil aviation regime that was to follow.
