by Jim Eames
18
NOT YOUR NORMAL PASSENGER SERVICE
For thousands of European immigrants heading for a new life in Australia in the 1960s, be it from places like Ankara in Turkey, Madrid in Spain, Malta or a half-dozen other locations, the first identifiable image of their new home was a Qantas Boeing 707 waiting on the tarmac for them to board. Often, years later, it would be the same Boeing 707s that brought them back to their country of origin, this time on what would be known as ‘Affinity Group’, or ‘Visiting Friends and Relatives’ charters.
Some of the earliest charters that followed the signing of bilateral immigration agreements between Australia and other countries in the 1960s were pioneering affairs. Those out of Ankara, Turkey were a typical example.
The initial task fell to the staff of the Australian embassy in Ankara who spent months processing the first 2000 immigrants who would make up the quota for 1968–69, to be followed by a further 3000 the following year. Most flights would operate between February and November to avoid the Anatolian winter and, with few exceptions, would land in Sydney or Melbourne, from where the immigrants would be gradually processed out into the community.
Such charters were often quite different from normal passenger services, not least because most of those involved had never flown before and presented a range of new challenges for government and airline officials. Extensive pre-embarkation training and briefing sessions were used to overcome the problem, along with discouraging plans to take everything from kerosene stoves to massive steel trunks on board. Some had never used a Western-style toilet before and had to be discouraged from standing on it.
Phil Button spent two years attached to the Australian embassy in Turkey in the early 1970s and had the initial responsibility for selecting the immigrants involved from all parts of the country. Button remembers the flights arriving in around midnight, needing to be refuelled and having to be airborne again by around 2 a.m., an arrangement made all the more complicated thanks to a government-imposed curfew to combat a threat of terrorism.
‘Martial law had been imposed to take care of “Grey Wolf” terrorist dissenters, so seeing the flight off around 2 o’clock and then waiting around the airport for four or five hours made it a very long and tiring night,’ Button says, although he admits there were small compensations: ‘I was able to hear some Aussie accents and get some Aussie newspapers from the crew.’
One of Button’s locally engaged staff accompanied the charters to Australia, acting as a translator during the flight. Button says between 1968 and the end of the program in 1975, more than 14,000 Turkish immigrants arrived in Australia on Qantas charters. Many thousands more came from other areas of Europe.
Qantas’s John McHarg oversaw ground arrangements for other immigrant charter flights out of Malta, a highly anticipated event locally. He estimates if the island’s population was 400,000, then it seemed most of them were actually inside the terminal and overflowing into the car parks, but adds: ‘The crowds were invariably happy and good-natured, although there were plenty of tears as goodbyes were said to families and friends.’
McHarg says the take-off of the fully loaded Boeing on hot nights from the short Malta runway was exciting to watch: ‘I sometimes wondered whether the skipper, as the concrete was about to run out, simply retracted the undercarriage and left the whole process of flight in the aeroplane’s hands.’
Other Qantas charter assignments over the years often took the form of actual rescue missions, as in the case of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 when the Australian government chartered a 747 to bring Australians out of Beijing and Shanghai. Bob Parker, who was on that flight, believes it broke the record for the most senior group of cabin crew ever sent on such a mission.
‘Denis Liston’s team was comprised almost entirely of flight service directors. Denis had around 30 years of service at that stage, I had 25 and when we added up the total years of service of the FSDs, the chief steward and Denis’s wife who was also a cabin attendant, the total came to 309.
‘In fact the chief steward just happened to arrive in the office when we getting ready for the flight and decided to come along as well.’
Parker remembers an eerie Beijing airport with hardly a human being in sight: ‘It’s a strange sensation to arrive at an airport with no people around.’
Reminiscent of the record uplift of the Qantas Boeing 747 out of Darwin after Tracy in 1974, Parker’s aircraft was so loaded when it took off for Hong Kong some adults and children were sitting on the floor. Then it was on to Shanghai to repeat the process.
But when it came to charters, whether human or animal, those flying in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s always managed to set the ‘standards’ few other subsequent Qantas efforts were able to match.
Carriage of native workers, known in those less politically correct days as ‘boi’ charters, was designed to meet the requirements primarily of Burns Philp, Streamships Trading and other major island companies with large plantation holdings through the Territory.
If labourers were needed, the companies simply placed an order for the number required with the Australian Administration’s Native Commissioner and away went a Qantas DC-3 to a centre in the Highlands or a coastal town where workers had been gathered for carriage to Port Moresby, Rabaul on New Britain or Buka on Bougainville.
It was all pretty straightforward by the standards of the day although inevitably there would be the odd ‘conscript.’
If 60 or so villagers were needed and the numbers were slim, some unsuspecting local who had merely come to the airport to see what all the fuss was about would find himself on his way to Rabaul for twelve months’ work on a plantation. Five shillings a month and all the stick tobacco he could smoke added to the adventure.
But there were occasions when a native’s return home must have fallen short of his expectations.
Captain Roger Wilson set out in his DC–3 to take a group of workers back to Wabag in the Western Highlands only to have the weather close Wabag, forcing him to land at Baiyer River, about 65 kilometres away.
Wilson quickly gathered the natives, explaining to them in pidgin: ‘Yupela got savvy along dispel ples, name bilong Wabag?’
‘Yes,’ was the reply. So, pointing in the direction of Wabag, Wilson sent them on their way on what amounted to a walk of several days.
Gordon Power was once given the job of flying a thoroughbred racehorse from Port Moresby into a newly established horse stud at Baiyer River in the Highlands.
Everyone appeared quite excited about the Baiyer River stud concept and arrangements had been made to record the horse’s arrival there as part of a documentary film on the new venture. Unfortunately Power’s first attempt had to be abandoned when the animal became so unsettled while loading that it reared and damaged the interior of the DC-3.
When the next attempt was made a few days later the horse continued to act up but, with a combination of injections from the vet and a degree of ‘physical encouragement’, the horse, now almost comatose from the injections, was finally locked in its stall.
Midway through the flight, loud thumping noises coming from down the back alerted the crew that the horse had recovered, so the vet headed off into the cabin to deal with it. Soon the thumping stopped but when the vet arrived back in the cockpit, his face now ashen, he announced the animal was dead. By now they were approaching Baiyer River where they were joined by the Cessna and the film crew, cameras rolling, flying in alongside them to record their landing.
‘After we had parked they managed to get some magnificent footage of the first breeding horse being delivered tail first out of the DC-3’s door,’ Power admits sadly.
19
GOUGH … AND OTHER ‘ROYALS’
Carrying VIPs has come with the territory since the very early days of commercial flying. Not only was air travel a time saver for movie stars, entertainers or royalty on occasions but they were among the few who could afford the status achieved by a
rriving somewhere by air.
In Australia’s case, at the other end of the world from the main artistic or cultural centres, transporting VIPs became commonplace for Qantas and early photographs show leading lights such as Charlie Chaplin and Noel Coward standing nonchalantly beside the fuselage of a DH-86 or coming ashore from a Hythe flying boat.
As the years went by the British royal family became regular passengers. The files of those days tell of an element of unspoken rivalry between the UK’s own national carrier and its ‘colonial’ airline counterpart. Thus, if you were carrying the royal pennant, things had to go right and while weeks, and occasionally months, were spent developing procedures to cover every contingency, Murphy’s Law could suddenly take over, which is what happened spectacularly when one of the Qantas Lockheed Constellations had the prestigious job of taking Queen Elizabeth, the queen mother, home to England in early 1958.
The queen mother had left England late in January 1958 on a marathon around the world journey via Montreal, Vancouver, Honolulu, New Zealand and finally to Australia, where she officially opened the British Empire Services League conference in Canberra. Such was her popularity that extra police had to be called on to control the crowds and in three weeks she managed to pack in visits to most major capital cities as well as Tasmania. By the time she left Sydney, on 5 March in the Qantas Super Constellation, Her Majesty was probably looking forward to a smooth, uneventful journey home, the only major duty on her way being to declare open Nairobi’s new £2.5 million airport at Embakasi on 8 March. Embakasi and its 3000-metre runway apparently represented much more than just slabs of concrete and an impressive new terminal complex; in the expansive words of one British journalist sent to attend the opening, it was ‘evidence of the country’s stake, and firm belief, in civil aviation and the symbol of the dark days of an African rebellion.’
It was a reference to the Mau Mau terrorist insurrection and civil war that had cost more than 12,000 lives and, as our correspondent took pains to point out: ‘the analogy of Embakasi airport rising from the ashes of rebellion comes to mind when it is realised that the runway was almost entirely hand-built by large squads of Mau Mau undergoing “corrective” labour.’
The queen mother left Australia amid lavish praise from the Australian press at the resounding success of her visit, although in hindsight, given the unpredictability of the Constellation’s Curtis Wright engines, perhaps they should have held their enthusiasm until she had actually made it back to England.
The royal flight’s itinerary took it from Sydney to Adelaide, Kalgoorlie, Perth, Cocos Islands, Mauritius, Entebbe, Nairobi, Malta and finally, London.
The feverish preparations going on in Nairobi were doubtless hardly in the minds of the Qantas crew when, halfway between the Cocos Islands and Mauritius, a cylinder shattered, causing one of the four engines to fail. It was then that Murphy’s Law really took over. Although a fresh engine was quickly installed, there was no replacement for the damaged engine cowling available at Mauritius but one was immediately dispatched from Australia aboard another Constellation only to have the rescue Constellation suffer a fuel pump failure in Perth. They quickly replaced the fuel pump, only to have a cyclone alert cause a further delay.
By now the Mauritius stopover had crept into three days, during which HM was forced to spend the time at a British embassy largely unprepared for such an eventuality, while the disappointed Kenyans reverted to Plan B, forcing Kenya’s governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, to step up to the dais and read a message from the marooned queen mother, declaring the new airport open in her absence.
Spare a thought for Qantas engineer George Dusting back in Mauritius, working to get the aircraft moving again. It must have been a frustrating time as, even after the replacement engine was installed and the new cowling fitted, the engine test run revealed that three other cylinders had to be changed.
Finally, after four days, the royal party was airborne for Entebbe, only to have another engine develop distributor problems and another delay. This time Uganda’s local British diplomatic mission found itself the unexpected host to HM while Dusting and other engineers again were in action, at one point their labours resulting in a false start, when, after being told the aircraft was ready for departure, the queen mother arrived at the airport to find work still in progress. Still hoping for a departure she decided to rest aboard, only to finally give up around 1 a.m. and return to Government House.
Meanwhile, a BOAC Britannia aircraft had been strategically positioned at Nairobi, its crew anxiously waiting to come to her rescue. One of the cabin crew later recounted how excited they were at the prospect. But Qantas wasn’t finished with its regal patron yet and after an eighteen-hour delay she was on her way again, only to have another mechanical problem develop at Malta.
By now, to her enduring credit, the queen mother had stuck with the Australians well beyond any normal expectations, but it seemed Malta was the last straw. The BOAC Britannia, already on its way—empty—to London, was diverted to collect her for the final leg home. Those on the Constellation reported through it all she had shown a remarkable degree of patience and understanding. Although the English press couldn’t resist the odd barb at Qantas’s expense, at one point wondering why Qantas could not have come to its own rescue by using a ‘Constellation it had standing by at London,’ the queen mother herself was gracious in her later comments, commending the efforts of the crew.
Fortunately for Qantas, most of the royal flights over subsequent years went off without a hitch and are remembered more for the more private, personal and at times humorous incidents that occurred. Carrying the Duke of Edinburgh was always an enjoyable experience for Qantas crews, although one anecdote among Qantas engineers from the Constellation days has him being roughly pushed away from a window during the start-up procedure by the flight engineer who was unable to check whether No. 2 engine had fired. Apparently the prince was blocking his view.
There’s little doubt the dedicated Constellation or Boeing 707, configured with a special bedroom, lounge and other private facilities, encouraged a relaxed atmosphere, particularly for the duke, himself a pilot, who often spent a large amount of time on the flight deck with the crew. Qantas captains who had served in England during the war found they had much to talk about although sometimes they got a little more than they bargained for. Former Captain John Fulton tells of flying the duke back to Karachi after he had opened the Commonwealth Games in Perth in 1962. First officer Arthur Whitmarsh, who had won a Distinguished Flying Cross with No. 460 Lancaster Squadron during the war, had been reminiscing with the duke about flying, racehorses and a range of other subjects and thought he’d check with the duke on whether, on such flights, it would be polite to invite the queen into the cockpit.
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘She’s only interested in anything that eats hay and farts.’
Fulton reports that Whitmarsh, the aircraft’s captain Neil Snodgrass and himself stared fixedly ahead for a few moments before any one spoke.
There would be other embarrassing moments carrying royals. Captains Bob Rosewarne and Geoff Jones had Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne and, as the second officer was handling the descent into Melbourne, Jones decided to tidy up the cockpit by clearing away the crockery. Unfortunately nobody had told him the royal couple were changing clothes in the upper-deck lounge. As Jones, coffee tray in hands, kicked open the cockpit door to place the cups and saucers in the galley he was confronted with the princess fastening her bra.
Rosewarne later dined out on the story, describing how there was a crash of crockery as Jones dropped the tray and scuttled back into the cockpit to the sound of Mark Phillips laughing uproariously, with Rosewarne quietly suggesting that Jones could expect twenty years in the Tower of London if he was lucky.
While the royals might have been in trusted hands on such flights, other captains discovered there was intense British activity behind the scenes. Before flying the queen
from London to Singapore in a Qantas 747 in 1992, Roger Carmichael was given a detailed briefing by the Royal Air Force air commodore in charge of the royal flight.
‘The RAF will be watching you, flying underneath you all the way, listening. Don’t talk to them if you don’t have to,’ Carmichael was told. Once they reached east of India, an RAAF aircraft would take over the assignment.
On Carmichael’s Boeing 747 all of first class had been converted into a bedroom with 28 members of the royal entourage and security officials the only others on board.
Carmichael remembers some interesting exchanges he was to have during the flight. They were due to arrive in Singapore at precisely midnight but as he began his descent he realised they had gained time on the flight and, since such royal arrivals had to be precise, advised Singapore air traffic control he would circle in a holding pattern for a few minutes.
‘You can’t do that,’ came the reply.
‘I suggest we can. We have the queen of England on board,’ Carmichael explained.
‘No, you haven’t. She’s not coming until later in the month.’
It was at this point Carmichael realised the air traffic controller had got his arrival confused with the date the queen was actually returning to Singapore from Australia. There was a silent interlude until his holding pattern was duly confirmed, presumably when a more senior air traffic controller intervened.
Protocol on landing dictated that Carmichael quickly get out of his seat, leaving the rest of the crew to shut the aircraft down while he went back to take possession of the traditional signed memento of the flight from Her Majesty.
Under strict instructions to speak only if spoken to, Carmichael stood by as the queen thanked him, then the duke appeared, looked at him and asked: ‘Did you land at the right airport?’
Momentarily flabbergasted, Carmichael could only reply, ‘Yes. I’m sure I wouldn’t have my job if we didn’t.’
