by Jim Eames
‘If I can get you a beer, how are you going to drink it?’ was Spiteri’s surprised reaction.
‘Don’t you worry about that, mate. You get me the beer and I’ll do the rest.’
Those were the days of 26-ounce (740 ml) bottles and when Spiteri passed it over he watched as the soldier removed the plastic tube from his drip, placed it in the bottle, thanked Spiteri and asked him for his address.
‘Unfortunately when we got to Sydney the nurse on board smelled the beer on his breath and asked him where he got it. He wouldn’t tell them who gave it to him but I admitted it was me,’ Spiteri recalls. When the report of the incident reached Qantas management Spiteri was disciplined and told if it happened again he would lose his job.
Two months later a new fishing rod was delivered to Spiteri’s home with a note of thanks from the soldier, later to become a bank manager in Victoria. He and Spiteri remained in contact for some years after the war.
Qantas DC-4s would also airlift RAAF and army personnel to Penang during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s when Commonwealth forces were engaged in guerrilla warfare with the Malayan Communist Party. Then came Konfrontasi, the undeclared war that broke out in Borneo in 1963 as a result of Indonesia’s objection to the creation of the Federation of Malaysian States.
One of Qantas’s most lucrative engineering contracts at that time was for the overhaul of the engines used on Indonesian airline Garuda’s Lockheed Electra aircraft, a contract that included delivering the engines back to Jakarta on completion of the work. Before the conflict, Qantas DC-3s were used to return the engines via a traditional route from Darwin, through Timor and Bali to Jakarta and returning the same way. Qantas off-duty pilots with DC-3 endorsements could volunteer for the flights, although former captain John Fulton describes accommodation at places like Bali in those days as ‘hardly exotic’.
‘The hotel in Bali was pretty well just bricks and mortar so we would take our own soap, toilet paper and bread and take a boiler off the aircraft to fire up some chicken,’ says Fulton.
Later engine delivery flights were made with DC-4s but by now Konfrontasi had broken out, leading to an anomaly where while the Australian government-owned Qantas was delivering engines to Indonesia, soldiers from its Special Air Service (SAS) regiment were engaged in guerrilla warfare against Indonesian soldiers in the jungles of Borneo. Indonesia meanwhile had closed much of its airspace to other traffic, with a direct route through Timor and Bali no longer available.
Norm Field explains: ‘That meant we had to fly due north from Darwin around Timor, then left-hand down north of Java almost into Borneo then back into Jakarta. You had to closely watch where you were in the airspace because their navigation aids were primitive and the extra distance meant you had to keep an eye on the fuel usage.’
Konfrontasi also had its moments even for the mainline Qantas 707 services operating on the Kangaroo Route between Australia and the UK. Restrictions on airspace meant that, on the climb out of Singapore, aircraft had to avoid flying over Indonesian territory by using a so-called ‘safe zone’ to the south-east that took them well clear of the Indonesian flight information region. Alan Terrell recalled a night departure out of Singapore: ‘We had flight planned to pass about twenty miles [32 km] clear of the boundary and had just reached 6000 feet when we suddenly saw tracer coming up off to one side. My first reaction was—“Shit, we haven’t made a mistake have we?” and did a quick check to make sure we were where we were supposed to be.’ To Terrell’s relief a quick check of his charts revealed that his Boeing 707 was in fact in airspace that was ‘safe’.
Unsettling though the experience may have been it would be Vietnam that would mark Qantas’s re-entry into another genuine, and far more dangerous, war.
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Within weeks of Prime Minister Menzies’ April 1965 announcement of Australia’s commitment of a battalion of troops to Vietnam, it was obvious the scale of the uplift of troops and equipment would be beyond the ability of Australia’s armed forces themselves. Not that it came as a surprise that Qantas would be called on, as the airline’s uplift capacity was a nationally accepted strategic element in such situations. But the Vietnam involvement would be on a much grander scale than anything preceding it, would need significant pre-planning and a heavy commitment of the airline’s fleet of Boeing 707s, and, as it turned out, would last for seven years.
The first Qantas advance guard to leave Sydney for Saigon in 1965 was small. Sydney traffic training instructor Frank Corcoran, aircraft engineer Brian Chadwick and security officer John Healy would work with American forces at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport on the coordination of aircraft parking, unloading, refuelling, security and anything else needed to guarantee a quick turnaround. The aim was to have the Boeings spend as little time as possible on the ground.
Chadwick was chosen as an engineer who had all the necessary technical qualifications to sign out a 707. Corcoran says his ‘recruitment’ for the task was a fairly arbitrary one. His boss, traffic manager Jim Ledger, at first asked him how ‘fast’ he could turn a 707 around at an airport. ‘Obviously satisfied with the answer he then told me the airport was at Saigon.’
Corcoran, Chadwick and Healy made their first flight in with two of Qantas’s most experienced captains, World War II veteran Captain ‘Torchy’ Uren and Alan Morris, aboard a Pan American 707. Frank Corcoran commented:
Apparently there had been a mortar attack the previous day and the skipper announced, because of that, the normally steep approach profile would be increased and not to be too worried. At that stage we must have been at about 20,000 feet. Morris was up the front on the flight deck and Torchy was in the seat across the aisle from me in first class.
As we started down I got the feeling this was all too steep and too fast as the ground was coming up very quickly.
I looked across and noticed Torchy was gripping the arm of his seat really tightly and was as white as a ghost.
After we landed Morris told us the first officer was calling out the wrong rate-of-descent figures to the captain. I’m certainly glad we didn’t know about that at the time.
While Uren and Morris left after a few days, Corcoran, Chadwick and Healy spent more than three weeks in Saigon establishing ground arrangements for the Qantas charters. They were given a Land Rover and a driver for travel to the airport each day to wait for the Qantas arrival.
To avoid the danger of hand grenades being thrown into the Land Rover, the trio sat inside a cage built on the back of the vehicle. While they appreciated the extra security the cage offered they would soon learn that it wasn’t foolproof. Apparently the Viet Cong had devised a method of throwing grenades with hooks attached so they anchored themselves to the sides of cages.
The war itself was never far away, with the rumbling of artillery constantly in the background and mortar attacks on the airport itself not uncommon. Billeted three to a room on the first floor of a hotel in the city, and with the frequent explosions in mind, Chadwick took the precaution of taping up the windows at the front of their room. It was as well he did.
‘Several days later, at about 5.30 in the morning there was an enormous explosion and a gun battle broke out outside the hotel which was situated opposite a bus station where hundreds gathered each morning,’ says Corcoran.
‘The bus station had the misfortune of being midway between an American officers’ mess and a sergeants’ mess and we learned later that a motorcyclist had detonated explosives in his bike’s saddlebags.
‘The guards at each mess opened fire believing the VC would be on the buses and their bullets literally perforated the heavy metal bus shelters.’
The only injury in the hotel was to an RAAF officer who received a cut from glass fragments; the taped-up windows saved the Qantas trio from serious injury.
All those who had anything to do with Tan Son Nhut in the following years would describe it as ‘organised chaos’. Most remember just about every military aircraft they had ever hear
d of either parked, taxiing for take-off or landing, from the smallest single-engine spotter planes to Hercules transports, an assortment of helicopters and every type of fighter or ground-attack aeroplane in the US military inventory.
By mid-1966 the charter flights were weekly as troop units were rotated to and from the war.
Early flight crews were briefed by Torchy Uren before the charters started, but even then they might have been excused for not totally realising the job in front of them until they approached Tan Son Nhut. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it exciting,’ Uren had said as he ended his briefings.
Many of the military aircraft approached the airport in a narrow, descending spiral, then pulled out sharply and landed, a procedure designed to limit their exposure to small arms fire from Saigon and its airport surrounds. But the Qantas 707s were required to follow a glide slope on the airport’s instrument landing approach that started 16 kilometres out at 2500 feet, a trajectory bringing them well within the range of small arms fire.
As the flights increased there were numerous ‘surprises’ for Qantas crews.
Ken Lewis, then a flight steward and later to become the airline’s safety officer, was sitting behind Captain Bunny Lee as they approached Tan Son Nhut. Lee was just about to prepare for touchdown when a US air force Hercules suddenly appeared directly in front of them.
‘I’m talking around 100 metres away. Bunny took the 707 around again. It turned out the C-130 had something wrong and had to get down quickly.’
The level of aircraft movements around the airport meant the air traffic controllers’ instructions were ‘like continuous bursts of machine-gun fire’. Crews needed to listen carefully as there was no break in the nonstop transmissions to allow anyone to ask for a repeat. And any doubts one may have had about the precarious nature on the ground at Saigon were graphically evident by the number of burnt-out, roofless buildings near where they were told to park the 707s.
‘We were held up once on approach because the strip was being mortared at the time and it seemed to me more dangerous on the ground with all that was going on … choppers whizzing around, holding while taxiing while a bunch of Phantoms went past and trucks seemingly roaring all over with no regard for how bloody dangerous the ass-end of a 707 actually was,’ says crew member Alan Ross.
Michael Collins’s 707 was at 3000 feet with its undercarriage down on final approach to Tan Son Nhut when the American air traffic controller began shouting into their earphones. ‘The rest of the crew were having trouble understanding him but I had been there before and I could tell he was telling us not to deviate as there was an air strike going on somewhere. So we kept on course and the next minute a couple of ground-attack Skyraider aircraft appeared diving almost vertically alongside us firing rockets into the ground.
Despite a natural tendency to get as far away from the Skyraiders as possible, the crew held firm on their landing approach but, as they reached 500 feet the air traffic controller began shouting again: ‘Qantas. Qantas. There’s an F-4 coming in underneath to land in front of you. Continue your approach. Don’t go around. Land behind him.’
‘With that the Phantom fighter bomber comes in from the right, slides underneath, lands right in front of us, then halfway down the runway deploys his braking chute and drops it onto the runway just as we’re about to use reverse thrust. I have no idea what happened to the parachute.’
Les Hayward, who also flew into Saigon as a second officer, remembers tracer bullets appearing off to the left of the 707 as they approached.
‘We were only at about a hundred feet and the captain, Dick Otway, who had been a bomber pilot in World War II, immediately took evasive action. For a moment or two I wasn’t quite sure whether he’d had a heart attack!’
All pilots and cabin crew operating the flight were volunteers, but Hayward, like others, soon became concerned when the pilots’ union discovered that their superannuation scheme didn’t cover war risk as part of their insurance.
‘At the same time the government was telling us as we were civilians they weren’t covering us either.’
The issue was quickly referred to the Arbitration Commission at which the government produced a major from army intelligence as a witness who described Saigon as the ‘Paris of the east’, painting an image of mothers and their children strolling down tree-lined boulevards. When pilots’ union representative Don Gray queried why, if that was the case, the crews were required to adopt such unusual take-off and landing procedures, the major admitted that was so the approaches to the airport could be kept free of mortar and machine-gun fire!
‘That fixed that,’ says Hayward. Qantas was required to and did provide insurance cover.
The issue of small arms fire during approach to landing was raised on several occasions, with one captain suggesting that if the authorities were worried about fire coming from one particular area then why didn’t they just seek out the Viet Cong shooter and put an end to the problem. The answer that came back suggested that he had proved such a lousy shot they had decided to leave him there in case the Viet Cong replaced him with someone more accurate!
Not that crew tensions were allowed to ease once they were on the ground. Unlike any normal airport, Tan Son Nhut appeared to be devoid of any ground control, with vehicles of all descriptions crossing the runway from all directions in front of the 707s as they taxied to their parking position. ‘No one seemed to be in charge of anything on the ground,’ says Ray Heiniger, later to become a senior management pilot. ‘You just had to avoid them.’
Often the diggers on board would be confronted by tractors carrying trolleys of body bags past the aircraft as it came to a stop. ‘Just the insensitivity of it must have been pretty hard on the lads down the back who were just about to step into this war,’ says Michael Collins.
And stepping into the war was just what they were doing. When one cabin crew member asked a welcoming sergeant major whether the disembarking diggers would be treated to a good meal after disembarking, the reply came back: ‘No. Straight into the trucks and into the jungle.’
As the Australian commitment lengthened, the flights changed from the early one-way loads into Vietnam to carrying replacement troops in and rotating troops out back to Australia. By then, most flights operated out of Richmond, Townsville and Darwin via Singapore, where one of the bizarre aspects of the charters occurred. Because of the inter-country politics of the region in relation to the war, the Australian troops were required to land in Singapore dressed in civilian clothes then change back into military uniforms once they reboarded for the short last stage into Saigon.
With the increased frequency of the charters and to minimise disruption to Qantas’s regular worldwide schedules, as well as meeting crew flight-time limitations, the charters operated differing patterns. Some taking troops both to and from Vietnam would fly into Singapore where a new crew would take over for the final delivery of the in-bound troops to Saigon and the uplift of home-bound troops back to Sydney or Darwin.
The nonstop Vietnam-to-Australia routing required an aircraft to take on enough fuel at Singapore to enable a quick turnaround at Saigon and still have sufficient fuel for the long flight back to Australia. But while it might have suited the airline’s scheduling commitments, the pattern often presented crews with considerable difficulties during the Saigon departures.
Despite its iconic reputation as one of history’s great aeroplanes, the Boeing 707 had severe limitations when it came to operating fully loaded out of hot climates, particularly under wartime conditions. Take-offs from Saigon in the middle of the daytime heat could at best be described as ‘character building’ for pilots and other crew members as their Boeings struggled to clear the markers at the end of the runway.
There are numerous tales of heart-in-the-mouth take-offs, along with some inventive initiatives to get the Boeing into the air and homeward bound. Alan Terrell recalled lining up for take-off one midday to have the air traffic control order him to execute a sharp
right turn immediately after take-off. ‘Apparently there was a fire fight in the area and he wanted to get us around it.’
Despite being an experienced captain on 707s, Terrell was acutely aware of his aircraft’s limitations. ‘The 707 was a wonderful aeroplane to fly but its ability to do steep turns fully loaded and at low level after take-off was not something I was happy about.’ But orders were orders. Terrell remembers telling his crew as they began their take-off roll: ‘If you feel this thing starting to shake, then for Christ’s sake tell me about it immediately.’
Terrell though obviously had enough confidence in the aeroplane’s ability to meet the challenge, as another incident remembered by Mike Collins attests. Flying as second officer with Terrell on a direct Saigon–Brisbane flight it was Collins’s job to compute the take-off data, factoring in the aircraft’s passenger and fuel weight, outside temperature and therefore the length of runway they would need.
On this occasion, with the temperature around 40 degrees Celsius and a full load of troops and fuel, Collins’s numbers were telling him they were just too heavy. He passed his card of calculations to Terrell with: ‘Skipper, I can cheat with the best of them but with the best will in the world I just can’t make this work.’
Collins watched as Terrell took the take-off card, did a few scratches here and there, then put the card back in the middle of the cockpit.
‘When I looked at it I saw a load of bollocks, but I wasn’t about to say anything as the alternative was to unload the troops, and that wasn’t going to happen.’
‘So we took off eventually and I think we were still at 3000 feet twenty miles [30 km] from the airport. Any self-respecting Viet Cong could have shot us down,’ Collins laughs.
Demands for tight turns immediately after take-off were common. With his fully loaded Boeing just airborne, Ian Macdonald was ordered to turn left immediately. It was the last thing Macdonald wanted to do at such a critical moment but the sight of a swarm of helicopters blasting away at targets on the ground quickly helped him make the decision.
