by Jim Eames
While Archbold’s cockpit was apparently open to all on board, most cockpits were workplaces where rank was acknowledged when it came to the serious business of flying, although some crew members didn’t hesitate to prick the status balloon. Flight engineer Jeff Donaldson remembers one captain who had a habit of half-turning after he’d finished his tea break and placing his cup on the navigator’s table immediately behind him.
Tired of his captain’s habit, the navigator decided to teach him a lesson while at cruise over the Pacific. First requesting they alter course about 10 degrees to the right, he then called for another course 10 degrees to the left, then a third request back to the original course.
‘What the hell is this all about?’ asked the confused captain.
‘I’m navigating around your bloody cup and saucer on my nav chart,’ was the reply.
‘The skipper never did that again,’ confirms Donaldson.
Another navigator Howard ‘Joe’ Bartsch, ever the perfectionist, would recount his frustration that pilots could never be bothered to alter a heading by one degree at his request—a situation Bartsch would overcome by saying: ‘Request alteration of heading of five degrees left’; to be followed shortly afterwards by a further request saying ‘Change of heading four degrees right’. Problem solved.
It goes without saying that pilots were not alone in the ‘character’ stakes, some cabin crew adding a rich vein of experience, and numerous examples of humour, to the Qantas story.
GETTING THE AVRO 504K IN YOUR LOGBOOK
There’s hardly a pilot anywhere who can resist the opportunity to add a new aircraft type to his or her logbook. For most airline pilots, it could be a Boeing or an Airbus version; for general aviation pilots, a new Cessna or Piper.
Imagine the dilemma faced by Qantas 747 captain Bill Taylor when in 1982 he was assigned to taxi a replica of the first aircraft that went into service with Qantas back in 1920 for a film commercial.
The Avro 504K was a two-seater biplane from World War I, similar to the original Avro 504K flown by Qantas founder Sir Hudson Fysh in the airline’s earliest day and which had long been on display as the pride of the airline at Mascot. But, unlike the original, the aeroplane Bill Taylor would taxi along the ground had never been intended to fly, having been built as a ‘spare’ and as a labour of love by a handful of veteran Qantas engineers who were the last at the Qantas jet base who had any knowledge of the art of wood, wire and fabric aircraft construction.
While the team had worked from the original aircraft’s specifications, some ‘compromises’ had to be made with the materials and although it was never intended to fly, it would provide the airline with a second aircraft for publicity and photography purposes.
When Qantas’s advertising people came up with the idea of a series of commercials revisiting the airline’s past and chose the Avro as the centrepiece, Taylor found himself as part of the film team on a grazing property just outside Coonamble, in central western New South Wales.
Taylor’s assignment was to taxi the aircraft around the property while the cameras rolled, re-enacting those early days of the airline’s birth at Longreach in outback Queensland.
But by late afternoon, as the breeze dropped to dead calm and as the repeated film ‘takes’ required Taylor to taxi even faster and faster along the ground, Taylor obviously couldn’t resist the temptation.
In front of the assembled trio of engineers, whose structural efforts had never been designed for flight, Taylor suddenly opened the throttle and roared across the paddock and into the air. It might have been only a few metres above the ground for 75 metres or so but advertising manager Bruce Tregenza vividly remembers the reaction of those watching: ‘The three engineers nearly died when the wheels left the ground. None of us had any idea what he had in mind.’
Taylor himself later confirmed it was something of a risk, telling one of his pilot colleagues he could understand why the engineers weren’t all that impressed: ‘The Avro was a cosmetic job only—the spars were made out of floorboard trimmed to size and I made sure I flew low and slow in case it fell apart.’
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Many of the cabin crew antics are well documented by former flight service director Colin Burgess. Burgess’s accounts bring to life a Qantas of a different age and one before the advent of mass transportation by 400-seat Boeing 747s saw the influence of characters as individuals fade into history.
Burgess’s account of chief steward Max Collins’s method of serving breakfast to first-class 707 passengers in the early morning over the South Pacific has pride of place in Burgess’s memoirs.
Collins would position the meal tray behind the curtain into First Class then, as the in-cabin lights were switched on, would stand on the back of the trolley and push himself forward, plunking out a tune on his ukulele as he rolled into the cabin, singing as he went: ‘How do you wake ’em? You Kellogg’s Corn Flake ’em.’
Collins once talked a small member of the cabin crew into sitting on top of the food trolley while Collins covered him with parsley and garnishes and rolled him into the first-class compartment at meal time. Once there, to the astonishment of the passengers, Collins proceeded to carve the prime rump.
Mind you, there is still the odd echo of such behaviour, as former cabin crew member Peter McLaughlan can attest. On one 747 flight out of Honolulu some years ago a female passenger complained loudly about the fact that the seafood meal on the menu had run out by the time the meal trolley reached her. It so happened one of the cabin crew had purchased a scuba diving kit during his Hawaiian lay-over. After a few minutes had passed a wetsuit-attired cabin crew member, equipped with mask, snorkel and flippers, paraded down the aisle carrying a tray above his head and asking at the top of his voice: ‘Who ordered the fish?’
Such echoes of the past might be more difficult to sustain in the cabin crew world of today where the four hundred plus passengers carried on aircraft like the 747 or A-380 are well beyond the more intimate numbers aboard the Constellations and 707s of the past. As one former flight service director put it: ‘You might try your best but you’re really taking care of what can be the equivalent of a small country town.’
13
POSTINGS … NOT ALL MILK AND HONEY
It can all sound so exotic. You’re working for this great international airline and your boss has just come on the phone and told you you’re in line for a posting. London and Buckingham Palace immediately cross your mind—or perhaps a house with a view overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
While for a few of the Qantas staff of yesteryear, the romance of an overseas posting certainly lived up to expectations, there were many occasions when the freedom of being a long way from head office came with its fair share of primitive living conditions and, at times, all manner of risk. Even if you had second thoughts about a posting close to a war zone or some desolate island in the middle of the Pacific, refusing such an assignment didn’t sit well on your company record as far as future promotion might be concerned and extreme family disruption was often par for the course.
Many of the tales of primitive living conditions come from those posted to the tropics or Pacific islands, which in the 1940s or 1950s didn’t quite match the image portrayed by today’s tourist brochures.
During the UK’s H-bomb tests in the Pacific in the 1950s, Bob Weekes spent months living in a tent on Kiritimati, a raised coral atoll and part of the Line Island group, 300 kilometres south of Hawaii, while chartered Qantas Constellations ran shuttle services between Kiritimati and Honolulu in support of the tests. The tents served as officers’ quarters and while there were only two or three flights a week during the peak times there wasn’t much to do beyond that.
‘It was real pioneering stuff,’ says Weekes, who had to have security clearances from ASIO, MI5 and the FBI before he could board the Royal Air Force freighter to take him there in the first place. For some reason, those at Qantas head office had the idea that if you lived in the tropics
you had no need of hot water or other creature comforts. ‘That was all right for adults who could survive but families with children needed hot water,’ explains Weekes.
One of Weekes’s colleagues of those days, Hartley Shannon, remembered a Qantas engineer in Papua New Guinea who used his initiative to build his own hot water system, only to receive a stern rebuke when head office in Sydney found out about it. Papua New Guinea, according to Weekes and others with him at the time, rated about as unpopular as a posting to Darwin in those days, where the accommodation for staff was less than ideal.
‘We’d taken over Darwin’s former Berrimah hospital for transiting passengers and staff accommodation and I reckon the termites had eaten much of the hospital wood. Fortunately the paint continued to hold the building up.’
Lae in Papua New Guinea was no paradise either when it came to living quarters. ‘We used to wonder whether Qantas designed the buildings for winters in Tasmania,’ says Weekes.
Charles Wade, posted there as a traffic officer for two years in the 1950s, later described the early accommodation in Lae as Quonset huts with tin roofs and sisal craft walls on the edge of the airstrip. ‘In the early morning you had to pull a sheet over your head, otherwise you would be covered in dust and gravel as the aircraft turned around to take off.’
Neither did it take Wade long to realise some of his workmates worked hard and played hard. On his first night, at a party to farewell a captain who was ‘going finish’, the local vernacular for someone returning permanently to Australia, he witnessed the Qantas area manager knocked unconscious by an uppercut from an engineer. Later the same night as the party progressed Wade watched as a captain was ceremoniously dunked in a 44-gallon drum of water. Unfortunately, the captain, who was short of stature and very drunk at the time, got stuck in the drum and when someone realised he was in trouble they pushed the drum over.
The party pranksters would probably have been hard pressed to find somewhere larger than the drum for a dunking: one of the ironies about life on a tropical island was the inability to find anywhere to swim. Although the ocean lapped Lae’s shores, crocodiles and sharks were an ever-present danger and even those who braved wading in the shallows risked standing on the dreaded stonefish, a precursor to excruciating pain and even a requirement for skin grafts.
Pilots mostly served for around two years but not even they received much special treatment when it came to a posting to Papua New Guinea. Shortly after Gordon Power joined Qantas from Canadian Pacific Airlines in 1957, he was summoned to the office of manager of operations, Phil Howson, and told he was being sent to New Guinea for two years. When Power gave the impression he wasn’t all that impressed with the idea, Howson suggested he go home and think about it, commenting: ‘You’ll be going in two weeks, anyway.’ As it turned out, in later years, Power would readily acknowledge the value of the flying experience gained there.
Out in the workplace, it was a case of ‘expect the unexpected’.
Sitting behind Weekes in a Qantas de Havilland Beaver flying from the Highlands into Lae one afternoon were a New Guinea policeman and his prisoner, a convicted murderer on his way to Lae gaol. When the Beaver began to bounce around in the turbulence, the policeman asked Weekes for a sick bag. A few seconds later Weekes turned to see the policeman being violently ill while the prisoner held his rifle for him.
Papua New Guinea was an early posting for George Howling, who would eventually become one of the airline’s most senior marketing executives. Howling, who had served in the Royal Navy during the war, joined Qantas in London in May 1948 and was transferred to Sydney two years later. He has two vivid memories of his arrival—it rained continuously for days and his ‘induction’ at his workplace on day one went something like this.
‘Who are you?’ he was asked by the chap he had been told to report to.
‘Nice to meet you,’ was the response when Howling explained he’d just arrived from London.
‘What do I do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ was the reply.
At first Howling was assigned to the cargo department but then was told that he would be sent to the traffic office at Mascot airport while a colleague, Ron Pascoe, was posted to Lae. But when the time came for Pascoe’s departure, he was issued with six secondhand shirts as part of his PNG uniform. Disgusted, Pascoe refused to accept them. ‘There was a helluva furore and even the then commercial director Bill Neilsen got involved but Ron still refused to take them. Eventually the shirt saga was resolved, Ron went to New Guinea and I went to Mascot.’
Howling’s Mascot duties included spending time at the traffic office at Rose Bay flying boat base. ‘It was wonderful. We’d all sit around fishing waiting for the flying boat to come in. There was extra pay for being on shift and even an extra week’s vacation.’
After another stint back in head office working with Neilsen, Howling found himself still keen on a posting, so he raised it with his boss. Two days later he was running the traffic office in Port Moresby. Up at 6 a.m. every morning to dispatch the Catalina flying boat service out of Moresby’s Fairfax Harbour, he then spent the rest of the day in the Qantas office, strategically located above the bar at the Port Moresby hotel. ‘The office had a wooden floor and, since most of the staff spent a lot of the time in the bar below, if a customer came into the office to see someone, I’d thump a few times on the floor with my foot and they’d come up.’
But there were times when, Howling admits, he earned his pay. He awoke on his birthday in January 1951 to find himself covered in white dust. It was Sunday morning and since throwing soap powder over anyone celebrating a birthday was part of a local ritual, Howling was still dusting himself off when he heard one of the senior pilots, Fred Fox, shouting that they had to get a Catalina away as quickly as they could. Mount Lamington, on the other side of the mainland near Popondetta, had blown up. Until it happened, no one even knew Lamington was a volcano but its eruption killed more than 3000 people and devastated the country for kilometres around. Once the Catalina had gone, Howling spent the better part of the day kicking relief supplies out the open door of a Qantas DC-3 over what was left of the jungle.
Two months later Howling was posted back to the sales department at Sydney, given a briefcase, no instructions and told to go out and take care of the airline’s travel agent contacts. He’d been at that for twelve months and late one Friday afternoon was told to go see Russell Tapp, one of the airline’s original pilots and now line manager for the Far East.
‘What are you doing tomorrow, George?’ asked Tapp.
Since ‘tomorrow’ was a Saturday, Howling replied: ‘Nothing.’
‘You’re going to Hong Kong. You won’t be up there long as we’re going to pull out of the place as it isn’t making any money,’ explained Tapp.
Howling stood waiting for more information but as nothing more was forthcoming he turned to leave.
‘Oh, one thing, George. There’s a place up there called Lane Crawford. They sell ice buckets shaped like an apple. Could you get one for me and send it back with one of our captains?’
That was the sum total of Howling’s pre-posting briefing.
Ian Burns-Woods’s first pre-posting experience later in the 1950s followed a similar pattern. He had started with Qantas in Melbourne as a traffic officer and was told he was one of two from his section who would be transferred to Port Moresby. After a series of farewell parties, Burns-Woods arrived in Sydney on the due date to receive his pre-posting briefing from the personnel department and collect six tropical uniforms. He had been told he would be leaving the same night for Port Moresby.
‘What do you want?’ asked the personnel officer when Burns-Woods arrived at his desk.
‘I’m here to pick up my tropical uniform,’ Burns-Wood stammered, now not quite knowing what to expect next.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ was the next question.
‘I’m booked on the service to Port Moresby tonight at nine o’clock.’ He p
assed over his ticket to confirm his credentials.
‘We don’t send anyone to New Guinea anymore,’ came the smug comment.
It was only then that he found out they’d failed to tell him his posting had been cancelled a week previously.
But relief was at hand when he was directed to the office of the airline’s traffic manager, who offered a solution. ‘How about three months in Darwin to be followed by a possible two-year posting to Fiji?’
Burns-Woods couldn’t agree quickly enough, as by now anything was preferable to the embarrassment of going back to Melbourne after all those farewell parties.
When they suggested he should get to the airport quickly to catch the Darwin flight, he had to explain he still hadn’t collected his uniforms so all agreed he should leave it until the next day.
Burns-Woods arrived in a Darwin that had changed little in the fifteen years since the war and like Bob Weekes, he found the place somewhat less than exotic, even though its strategic location as the entry and exit point for all flights travelling along the Kangaroo Route to London and to Asia and the Orient ranked it as Qantas’s second-busiest port after Sydney.
But at least it had improved slightly since Hartley Shannon had been posted there at the end of the war to re-establish it as a critical entry and departure point for all international traffic operating to Australia. Shannon had not only to contend with a war-shattered town but had to call for additional manpower from Sydney when the North Australian Workers Union threatened to pull out all the Qantas staff. One of the Sydney relief staff remembers arriving in Shannon’s office to find him sitting with a loaded .38 revolver on his desk. Shannon resolved the strike but not before he was involved in a fist fight with the union’s leader in Darwin’s main street.
