by Matt Wright
The army principle of saluting someone’s rank rather than the individual was something that rang hollow. I just couldn’t respect someone if they were on a power trip, no matter their rank. It was an attitude that got me in strife. On one memorable occasion, I was severely punished for talking back to a sergeant during a stifling hot parade drill. He was giving everyone a hard time and really getting off on it. Eventually, I came in for some attention.
‘Recruit!’ he roared, a couple of inches from my nose. ‘Your uniform is dirty! Why is it dirty?’
I kept silent.
‘Wright!’ he persisted. ‘Why is your uniform dirty?’
‘Get stuffed,’ I said.
The sergeant’s face turned red and spittle started forming at the corners of his mouth. He was so stunned that he was literally lost for words. I thought he was going to take a swing, which I would’ve welcomed. Just give me one excuse to punch you, I thought.
Eventually he found his voice. I was blasted for about five minutes and then told to report to the CO’s office. I waited outside while the sergeant got together with the other NCOs to work out what to do with me. About an hour later I was called back onto the parade ground. To make an example of my insubordination, my punishment was shouted out so that everyone could hear. I was made to camp in my swag outside the CO’s office for a week. While everyone ate, I was expected to march on my own back and forth across the parade ground. For food, I would eat pack rations, which had a reputation for being disgusting. The week was made that much worse because it coincided with a period of sustained rain.
I was always getting into trouble. Sometimes the reasons were just flat out ridiculous. One time, I ended up getting lumped with extra duty for misplacing my jocks. Nobody would have known were it not for the fact that I lost them on the day we were being taught how to dress in uniform. It was a pretty involved exercise. A corporal assembled each platoon in a room and then told us all to drop our pants. I hesitated.
‘Wright!’ shouted the corporal. ‘What are you doing? Drop your trousers.’
Both male and female recruits looked in my direction. I shrugged my shoulders and dropped my dacks. Everyone, except the corporal, started laughing when they saw I was free balling. I thought it was all a bit of harmless fun, until I came in for more disciplining.
Being back in a highly regimented institution seemed to draw out the rebel in me. Just like during my school days, I was a magnet for individuals who got a thrill from doing exactly what we were told not to do. One such person was one of my dorm mates, who I will call Wilson.
One Friday night, after a particularly arduous week of training, Wilson and I decided we needed a beer. We got into full dress uniform, snuck out of the barracks and found the NCO’s wet mess. This was the bar for Kapooka’s corporals and sergeants. It was strictly off limits to recruits. So Wilson and I had to play our part – we were Sergeant Wright and Corporal Wilson for the night. Nobody seemed to notice we didn’t have the appropriate number of chevrons on our shoulders to gain entry. It was probably because everyone was so pissed. Luckily, none of our instructors came down for a drink.
We spent the night chatting up the army girls and getting completely smashed. We staggered back to the barracks and slipped into our dorm room in the wee hours. We got away with it that time. But there were times we pushed our luck too far.
* * *
While frantically cleaning everything up in our room before an inspection, Wilson made a mockery of the army tradition of keeping clean socks turned up. We were supposed to fold our socks in such a way so that they formed a smile. Don’t ask me why. Wilson obviously thought the whole tradition was stupid. He started pretending that his upturned socks were giving him a blowjob. He even pulled his dick out of his trousers. The rest of us in the room thought it was hilarious. The sound of our laughter drew the attention of the sergeant, who burst into our room with a corporal standing either side.
‘Recruit!’ shouted the sergeant. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
Wilson stood to attention, doing his best to keep the smile off his face, as the sergeant pulled away his socks leaving his dick hanging out of his trousers. I got up on the cupboard behind the NCOs and threw down another pair of socks.
‘Cover yourself up, recruit!’ I bellowed.
Wilson, me and our two dorm mates were all placed on reduced rations and instructed to do extra marching for a couple of weeks. How I got through the whole thing without being discharged is a mystery.
* * *
Mum came up for the march out parade – the Kapooka term for the passing out parade. She was absolutely bursting with pride. She took one look at me in my dress uniform, clean shaven and fitter than I’d ever been in my life, and started to cry. I felt a genuine sense of satisfaction from completing the course. At that point, it was the greatest achievement of my life.
One of the NCOs approached Mum and predicted I’d go full time in the army. It was intended as a compliment and I appreciated him saying it to Mum. But I knew in my heart that I’d never go full time. I’ll admit, there were times at Kapooka when I had given it serious thought. I was inspired when a couple of SAS guys came into our barracks and spoke to us about service in Australia’s elite special operations force. It was hard not to be in awe of those guys. Stories of SAS training were legendary – a whole different level of hardship and endurance compared to Kapooka.
One SAS guy actually approached me. It turned out that a couple of the instructors had identified me as a person that might fit the mould of an SAS soldier. It was a genuine honour to be singled out in that way, and the SAS soldier made an impressive pitch. He’d obviously done background research on me, because he started off talking about how boring and pointless he found marching on the parade ground. He said that not much of that sort of stuff was done in the SAS. He then went on to congratulate me on my scores in the shooting drills and asked if I was interested in becoming a sniper.
He told me that going up to Regiment, as they call it, was no cakewalk. In fact, statistically, I was unlikely to make it. Training was based on weeding out the ones that didn’t have what it took to be the best of the best.
‘You probably won’t get in,’ he said. This guy was hitting all the right buttons. At that time in my life, if you said I couldn’t do something, I’d go out of my way to prove you wrong. But something held me back from going down the SAS path. I guess I just didn’t like the idea of being flung from warzone to warzone and sent out on operations to kill people.
So I returned to my drilling job in Darwin. The Army Reserve assigned me to North-West Mobile Force (NORFORCE), the Top End’s reserve infantry regiment. Just like at Kapooka, there were elements I really enjoyed. Doing exercises throughout Arnhem Land, firing rocket launchers and testing claymores – highly explosive anti-personnel mines – was great fun. But the same things that bugged me at Kapooka were just as infuriating with NORFORCE.
It felt like every other Thursday I was heading out to Darwin’s Larrakeyah Barracks, marching back and forth in the blazing heat and shouting out, ‘Yes, sir!’ every five seconds. My sergeant made matters worse. He was a complete dickhead on a power trip. When I found out he worked at McDonald’s, I knew my time was up. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to people who work at a fast food joint, but I found it hard to take orders from some weekend warrior who flipped burgers for a living. Besides, I was beginning to develop a new passion – one that would completely change the course of my life. I wanted to become a chopper pilot.
Training to become an infantryman at the Army Recruit Training Centre at Kapooka, one of the toughest experiences of my life.
9
Choppers
I was cleaning the trucks in the drilling yard at Winnellie, a northern suburb of Darwin. It was towards the end of the drilling season, just before the rains arrived. The pressure hose was throwing red dirt and shit all over me and, with all the trucks and trailers in the yard that needed washing, it was going to be a l
ong day. I gritted my teeth, wishing I was anywhere else, when suddenly I became engulfed in dirt and dust.
I looked up. Swooping low overhead was a group of Australian army Kiowa helicopters. The pilots were really throwing them around. I was captivated. I’d always wanted to fly choppers. But two things always held me back: one, I didn’t think I was smart enough; and two, I didn’t think I’d ever have the money to do it.
Dave Dickson, the father of my schoolmate Phil, had first put the thought of learning to fly choppers in my head years earlier. Dave ran his own tooling business and was an avid helicopter pilot. When I’d last been home, he was designing an experimental helicopter and was already sourcing the parts. Dave’s enthusiasm for choppers was infectious, but nothing got my blood flowing quite like seeing mustering pilots in action.
Mustering pilots are vital to the effective management of a cattle station. A chopper is very versatile, capable of reaching places that are inaccessible to land-based vehicles. Back in the day, a team of 12 stockmen and two horse trailers and up to 75 horses would be hobbled out to round up cattle. The stockmen would be gone for over to two weeks, driving cattle over incredible distances. With helicopters, the same job can be done in a single day. Chopper pilots are the drovers of the modern age. The northern part of the country is totally dependent on them to keep the cattle industry afloat. In 2015 alone, nearly 1.3 million head of cattle were exported from Australia. Shifting those sorts of numbers is only made possible because of choppers.
But it’s a dangerous job. Over the last decade, around about 15 mustering pilots have died on the job. When you see these pilots in action, it isn’t hard to work out why. To do the job of mustering animals from the air, a pilot must fly the helicopter to the absolute limit. They have to operate at very low altitude, which obviously increases the likelihood of crashing. Misread a gust of wind, fail to see a tree or lose your bearings for a split second, and it’s all over.
I loved to watch them in action. On my days off from drilling, I would take on extra work as ringer on cattle stations. It was a great way to make a little extra cash and I loved the work. My favourite job was mustering cattle. The station owner would stick me on the back of a quad bike and send me out to assist the mustering pilots drive the cattle or water buffalo into the yard. Seeing those pilots shooting around in their little Robinson R22s was mesmerising. To me, these guys were gods.
The problem was money. Getting a chopper licence would take time and it was hard to make a living as a junior pilot. Financial security had suddenly become important. I was seeing a girl and things were getting serious. She wanted to buy a house and start a family. The idea of settling down drew out anxieties about my ability to provide. I was determined not to have a family that lived paycheck to paycheck. Drilling provided me with a steady income. That seemed more important than anything. That was until the drilling job went to shit.
The turning point was on a job near Daly Waters, 600 kilometres south of Darwin. The incident happened the night after a drinking session in the Daly Waters pub. I had come across a mustering pilot by the name of Phil Irlem who was propped up at the bar. I bought Phil rum for the whole night and peppered him with questions. Phil knew exactly what was going on.
‘Mate, you’ve got to bite the bullet and just do it,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘If becoming a mustering pilot is what you want to do, there’s no point waiting around.’
I told Phil that my girlfriend and I were already looking around for houses. Becoming a student for a year while I learnt to fly a chopper and then earning a pittance was no way to pay a mortgage.
‘I don’t mean to be disrespectful,’ he said, ‘but you’re only young. I’m guessing this girlfriend won’t be your last.’
I laughed in a sort of dismissive way. But Phil had struck a chord. I wasn’t sure I was ready to settle down. The drilling job was stagnating too. I wanted to be progressing faster up the ladder. After more than 18 months in the job, I was still a driller’s assistant – that was code for shit kicker. All I was qualified to do was operate a front-end loader and drive a road train. Until I could operate the actual drill rig, my career was stuck in a rut.
I took it up with the head driller the next day. He said I wasn’t ready. I reckon he was worried about me taking his job, and I said as much to his face. Things got heated and I ended up taking a swing at him with a 36-inch pipe wrench. It sounds serious, but these sorts of blow-ups happened a lot while drilling. It was a way of sorting out differences and letting off steam. Blokes would often have it out and then everything would return to normal. But this for me was the tipping point.
‘I’m not going to fight for this job,’ I said. ‘You can have it.’
I got a lift back to Daly Waters and hitched a ride to Darwin. I had just kicked a life of financial security to the curb. The funny thing was, I’d never felt better. It was one of those moments of absolute clarity. My future wasn’t drilling or working the land. It was flying.
My girlfriend didn’t see things quite as clearly. Not only was I unemployed, I was planning to take myself out of the workforce for a year to become a student. There was no way we were buying a house any time soon. It was time to go our separate ways. It was a tough decision but definitely for the best.
I packed my bags, loaded up the car and drove two days straight to the Sunshine Coast. I was heading for Blue Tongue Helicopters – the best chopper school in the country. When I arrived, I walked straight up to the reception desk and enrolled in the full-time program. The course would end up costing me about $40 000. That was every cent in my savings account plus a loan from the bank and my grandmother. It wasn’t easy shelling out that sort of cash or taking on debt. But it definitely gave me an incentive to make it work.
I managed to find a cheap place to rent near the chopper school. The night before my first day at the controls of a helicopter, I couldn’t take the smile off my face. It wasn’t long before that smile turned into a frown. Learning how to fly a helicopter was hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
The people who are drawn to flying helicopters are all cut from the same cloth. I can usually pick the sorts of people who want to learn how to fly helicopters. They are more often than not big-talking blokes interested in cars, bikes and anything mechanical. They are generally accustomed to picking things up quickly and expect the same to happen when it comes to flying.
‘I can ride a motorbike, surf, ride horses and operate machinery,’ they’ll say. ‘I’ll be able to fly a chopper.’
When I returned to Blue Tongue Helicopters as an instructor years later, I would see the same sort of bloke swagger into the school, talking about how easy it was going to be. I didn’t judge them because I was exactly the same. I thought it was going to be a breeze, too.
I was part of an intake of nine other aspiring pilots. Our preflight instructor, who taught theory classes in the weeks leading up to our first individual flight, did his best to knock us down to size.
‘Flying helicopters is a highly challenging and extremely dangerous occupation,’ he said, straight off the bat. ‘The stats suggest that one in four helicopter pilots will die on the job.’
The room fell silent. It was a hell of a way to begin our training.
‘These days,’ he continued, ‘the vast majority of accidents are the result of pilot error.’
I wasn’t convinced that the stats were accurate. I just figured he was trying to scare us into paying attention. And it worked. All of us buried our heads in the theory, reading the operational handbooks and textbooks cover to cover. Each night, before going to bed, I would imagine myself at the controls, holding the chopper in a hover above the pad, impressing the hell out my instructor. I felt like I had everything sorted. I was ready for the real thing. I was in for a big wake-up call.
I can’t remember ever being as excited as I was on the morning I was to fly a helicopter for the first time. I strode out
to the chopper waiting for me on the pad. I was going to be trained in an old Bell 47, a vintage helicopter with a distinctive full-bubble canopy and exposed welded-tube tail boom. My trainer was Graeme Gillies. It’s no exaggeration to say that Graeme is among the very best helicopter instructors in Australia. He has been flying choppers since the late 1970s and has racked up nearly 17 000 hours’ flying time. He cut his teeth as a mustering pilot at Magoura and Victoria River Downs stations.
Graeme was from the old school. I’d already seen him tear strips off more than a handful of students who weren’t progressing at the expected rate. I even saw him chase a struggling student across a helicopter pad before throwing his headset at the poor bloke. The student had been at it for months and was showing no signs of improvement. When the student brought the helicopter’s tail to within inches of hitting the ground, Graeme lost it. Obviously I was eager to impress. The last thing I wanted was a headset hurled in my direction.
Graeme powered up the chopper and got us airborne. I’d been in choppers on cattle stations before – the thrill of your first ever flight is something you’ll never forget. Every part of your body hums as the rotors chop the air above and the engine growls behind you. But this time was different. To think I was actually going take control of this machine was a whole new level of excitement.
The first thing I was going to be taught in training is the hardest thing to master as a chopper pilot – the hover. While hovering, a helicopter generates gusty wind, which acts against the fuselage. To remain steady requires constant, tiny adjustments to the controls. This is far easier said than done.
There are four key control inputs – the cyclic, the collective, the anti-torque pedals and the throttle. The name of each instrument refers to the effect each control has on either the main rotor or the tail rotor. Graeme started me on the pedals.
The pedals control the tail rotor, the function of which is to compensate against the incredible spinning force of the main rotor. Without the tail rotor, the fuselage would spin around uncontrollably beneath the main rotor. This effect is known as torque. To compensate, the tail rotor – also known as the anti-torque rotor – pushes the tail boom against the force of the main blades. Two separate foot pedals control the intensity of the tail rotor’s spin. Pushing down on the left pedal will increase intensity, pushing with greater force against the main rotor and turning the nose of the chopper right. The right pedal decreases the resistance allowing the tail boom to turn left with the main rotor.
