by Jim Eames
Taking to the Skies
Daredevils, heroes and hijackers
Australian flying stories from
the Catalina to the Jumbo
JIM EAMES
First published in 2014
Copyright © Jim Eames 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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To our Benjamin and a proud Australian heritage
Contents
Introduction
1 Through two dawns to war: The Qantas Double Sunrise Service—Perth to Colombo
2 RAAF 200 Flight: Secret missions behind enemy lines
3 Reopening war-torn Darwin to the world
4 Papua New Guinea and clouds with hard centres: Training grounds don’t come any harder
5 The kingdom of Collopy
6 ‘How far ahead is he?’
7 Nonstop across the world
8 There’s something about low flying
9 Crime in the skies
10 ‘I’ll blow this aeroplane up: you, me and everyone else.’
11 The ‘great plane robbery’
12 Aerial suicide and murder at Alice
13 Messrs ‘Brown’ and ‘Smith’ and the business of extortion in the air
14 Buying a Boeing
15 Embarrassing moments
16 Ansett International arrives—well, in a fashion!
17 When a runway ‘isn’t long enough’
18 Cyclone Tracy and the forgotten story of the uplift
19 Aeroplanes and animals—often not a good mix
20 Humour in the air and the thoughts of Chairman Hugh
References
Acknowledgements
Introduction
This book came out of a desire to revisit events which have marked significant landmarks in Australian aviation, primarily since the Second World War. Some of these events, seen in isolation, might have been well recognised at the time, but the recollections of them have faded over the years. Others provide a sometimes surprising insight into Australia’s involvement in aviation, both domestic and international. Others still have remained largely unknown.
In some instances gathering them together has produced unusual results. For instance, not many these days would be aware that Australia has experienced no fewer than five aircraft hijackings, the first of which occurred years before hijacking itself was to become established as the weapon of choice by terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. Two of these crimes resulted in the deaths of the hijackers.
The use of the Second World War as a starting point is deliberate, and for several reasons. First, hundreds of thousands of words have been written, many of them in quite recent years, of the achievements of aviators like Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and Bert Hinkler, who have become household names. Through such men, Australia punched well above its weight in the international aviation-pioneering sphere, a fact easily demonstrated by one simple statistic.
All of the major oceans of the world, with the exception of the Atlantic, were first crossed by Australians: Kingsford Smith and Ulm tamed the Pacific in 1928, then crossed the Tasman the same year. Three years later, in October 1931, Hinkler crossed the South Atlantic Ocean west to east from New York via Jamaica, Africa and Europe to London. P.G. Taylor crossed the Indian Ocean from Port Hedland to Africa in 1939 and followed that up postwar by crossing the South Pacific from Sydney to Chile in 1951. And the last remaining ocean, the Atlantic, did not go unchallenged by Australians. In May 1919, long before the exploits of his fellow pioneers, Harry Hawker set out on the first attempt to cross the Atlantic nonstop, only to crash-land at sea when his engine overheated.
All of these larger-than-life characters left a legacy of achievements for other Australians to build upon, but the legends they created often left large shadows, shadows which occasionally tended to obscure the feats of those who followed as the aeroplane became a more familiar part of our lives.
The use of the Second World War as a starting point is important for another reason. In the six years of war the advances in aircraft design and engine development were little short of remarkable. What had been largely a biplane era of wood, wire and fabric up to 1939 had morphed by 1945 into high-performance fighters, like the Mustang, and bombers, like the Lancaster and the B-29 Superfortress, while military transports, such as the Douglas DC-4, were destined to launch a postwar civil role as airliners. Meanwhile, in the background was the hissing sound of the jet engine, soon to sweep all before it in terms of speed and efficiency.
Whichever way it’s looked at, change has been the one constant in aviation since 1945, not simply in the aircraft themselves but in the people who have been part of the industry and the way they have gone about their business—although much of the industry today is unrecognisable from that which existed even in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
The war also represented a changing of the guard in aviation leadership, with a war-torn United Kingdom struggling to regain its prewar eminence alongside a United States which had ended the war with unassailable advantages in aircraft production and manpower. It was therefore the United States which convened the Chicago conference of 1944 resulting in the creation of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which would go on to establish the guidelines for the operation of post-war aviation.
Fortunately, in keeping with the original contributions of our early pioneers, Australia had a seat at the table as a member of the governing council of the ICAO when it gathered in Chicago in 1947—in itself a credible achievement for a country with such a small population.
But while Australia’s international contribution would be important, its own industry at the far end of the earth from engine and air-frame manufacturers (such as Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed), not to mention those producing smaller aircraft, had to ensure it had the expertise on its own continent to keep aircraft flying. That essential requirement bred a talent pool the equal, and in some cases superior, to anywhere else in the world. There was little alternative. Taking an aircraft all the way back to the United States even for an essential ‘factory fix’ was not an economic option. Added to a self-reliance would be an innovative streak which would lead to breakthroughs not only in engineering techniques but across other parts of the industry, from important roles in the development of aspects of air-traffic control, navigation and landing aids in worldwide use, to adaptions such as the combination escape–slide raft subsequently to be fitted as standard equipment on aircraft like the Boeing 747.
Terrain also played a part, particularly when it came to the training of aircrew. Finding your way across a featureless outback without recourse t
o navigational aids of any sort called for astute observations and attention to detail. Connellan Airways pilots flying out of such places as Alice Springs, in part earned their wings by creating ‘mud maps’ of ground features, such as dry creek junctions and water bores, which they used to plot their course to isolated stations. Today any such course would be a brief input into a GPS.
When it came to learning the hard way, most postwar pilots will tell you nothing approached the advantage of having Papua New Guinea on our doorstep. Picking their way through treacherous gaps between 3650-metre mountains, or landing on short airstrips with uphill gradients ending in a cliff face at the top, left little margin for error. As one pilot who would later become a senior check captain on Boeing 747s explains: ‘You learned to operate an aeroplane on the mainland. You learned to fly an aeroplane in Papua New Guinea.’ Much of what they learned translated into an enviable safety record in the years to follow.
In training, too, technology has taken over because such hands-on training grounds have receded. Where once airlines like Qantas had several Boeing 707s operating full-time on training duties at Avalon, near Geelong, now most of the teaching is carried out on state-of-the-art flight simulators at the Qantas Jet Base, where aircrew proficiency can be assessed against every possible in-flight emergency and any major airport on the airline’s world routes can be called up in a matter of seconds.
Woven through these changes has been the story of those who have built on the legacy of the early pioneers, the often unsung heroes who have contributed to what is Australian aviation today. The term ‘heroes’ is not one I use lightly, at least certainly not to be confused with the ill-conceived use of the same word today to describe some individual sporting achievements. Such usage hardly compares with the accomplishments of the crews who flew the secret Qantas Double Sunrise service between Perth and Ceylon to maintain the link between Australia and the United Kingdom during the war, airborne for upwards of 30 hours, most of it through enemy territory. Operating mostly at night and navigating by plotting their position via the stars, the pilots’ chances of survival had they been detected by the Japanese were virtually nil, as were their likelihood of rescue had their Catalina flying boats failed them. Not only are these deeds virtually unknown today but the pilots were denied any recognition by the Australian government at the time.
The exploits of the Royal Australian Air Force’s 200 Flight are also not widely known, largely due to the secrecy of their mission. Flying from Leyburn, near Toowoomba in southern Queensland, their operations ranged as far afield as North Borneo to drop Z Special Unit commandos at dangerously low levels behind Japanese lines. Not only did these pilots lose half their aircraft and crews on such missions, but there are no references to them in the comprehensive RAAF history of the war, hidden as they were behind secrecy requirements until the 1980s.
Also sparsely recorded are the efforts of their latter-day RAAF colleagues, who took part in the uplift of the population of Darwin after the devastation of Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day 1974. Overshadowed by the scale of death and destruction wreaked by the cyclone, RAAF and civilian aircrews often flew themselves to a standstill evacuating medical cases and traumatised survivors to hospitals and safety to the south, creating aviation records as they did so.
And there were those on the ground. Engineer George Roberts and his team, whose engineering expertise kept those Qantas Double Sunrise crews alive by keeping their Catalinas in the air, and people like Hartley Shannon, who was handed the formidable task of reopening a shattered Darwin to air services after the war. Shannon’s story is significant because intentionally or otherwise, when it has come to history being written about the introduction of a new service, most attention has been focused on the much-heralded arrival of the first aircraft to land there, with little account of the hardships and obstacles which had to be overcome to make that first flight happen.
There is, of course, another, albeit less savoury, thread to the story of Australian aviation. That is the history of hijackings and aviation extortions in Australia, the tragic murder–suicide flight which left four Connellan employees and the suicide pilot dead at Alice Springs in 1977, and the intricately planned attempted heist of $800 000 in-flight from several carefully chosen Trans-Australia Airlines flights in the 1980s. They are worthy of the telling if only to highlight the exceptional courage demonstrated by some of those involved.
Mixed in with all this come examples of that rare brand of humour, at times as a response to adversity, at other times fatalistic, but more often simply a uniquely Australian way of looking at things.
Measurements in Australian books are usually metric. You’ll find here that we use metric for most measurements but imperial measures for altitude as that’s still the worldwide convention in aviation.
Finally, perhaps, I should acknowledge that if much of what follows contains something of a bias towards Qantas stories and people then I make no excuse for that. It has not only played a prominent part in Australian aviation history but in my own working life as well.
1
Through two dawns to war
The Qantas Double Sunrise Service—Perth to Colombo
Soon after 2 a.m. on 4 February 1942 Qantas Captain Bill Crowther began to thread his big four-engine Empire Class flying boat through the melange of junks, workboats and other small craft scurrying across Singapore’s crowded harbour. There had been a two-day lull in the Japanese air raids, but the panic and fear that gripped the population of this crossroads of Asia was now plain to see and, for Crowther, there was now no doubt what the imminent result would be.
The Japanese had smashed the series of fruitless rearguard actions that had taken place along the length of the Malay Peninsula, critical British military installations like Tengah airfield were already within range of Japanese artillery and the combination of British, Australian and Indian forces were only days away from the largest surrender in British military history.
Due to the danger presented by the advancing Japanese there could be no flares to guide him, but fortunately for Crowther and the 40—mainly British men, women and children—refugees on board, the local Singapore director of civil aviation personally supervised the clearance of a path through the crisscross of traffic. Eventually the Empire flying boat climbed away into a darkened sky, leaving Singapore to its inevitable fate.
As he set course for Batavia, Crowther listened in on Japanese radio reports about his own departure, further confirmation that had he been delayed much longer things might have turned out quite differently for the last civil aircraft to depart Singapore. What Crowther and his Qantas colleagues also realised was that the Japanese advance had now severed the vital air link operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation and Qantas between England and Australia. For the next eighteen months the only alternative would be the long, circuitous route across the Pacific to the United States and then across the Atlantic. With a war in Europe already two years old even that was not an attractive option.
The entry of the Japanese into the war and the loss of Malaya, Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies also had further important implications for Qantas itself. Formed in 1920 by two First World War aviators, Hudson Fysh and P.J. McGinness, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas) had pioneered air routes in outback Queensland before linking with Britain’s Imperial Airways in 1934 to jointly operate the London to Australia route. At first the two airlines had met at Singapore with Qantas flying DH.86 biplanes through Darwin.
When both airlines introduced Short Empire flying boats in 1937–38, Qantas’ route responsibility had been extended to Karachi. Now, however, with the loss of Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies, and the Japanese advance on Papua New Guinea threatening Australia, Qantas would find itself in a full wartime role, its aircraft and crews flying troop-support missions and evacuating the wounded. It would be a costly involvement for the airline. Indeed, by the end of hostilities, most of its Empire flying boats
would be casualties of the war.
However, for Fysh, Crowther and their colleagues, all this was in the future. The immediate problem was to convince the Australian government that their airline had the experience to re-establish the shortest, most practical link with the old country. Fysh was aware that his British aviation counterparts were also thinking this way, but Qantas was soon to find out not everyone agreed.
The first plan put forward by Fysh, within weeks of Crowther’s last Singapore flight, was for a nonstop operation to Ceylon using B-24 Liberator bombers, but it soon became obvious that the availability of B-24s for bombing missions outweighed any other priorities. The alternative might be Consolidated Catalina flying boats, which although also designed for a wartime patrol role, might fit the requirement. But when Fysh approached the Department of Civil Aviation’s (DCA) director general, A.B. Corbett, he would have none of it. Nor did he mince words in his written response. Not only did he consider the possibility of obtaining Catalinas remote, he felt ‘such a proposal would be little short of murder of pilots and I would strongly oppose risking crews’ lives’.
While Corbett’s sentiments might appear well-intentioned, the fact that Qantas crews were already risking their lives in war zones to the north of Australia didn’t appear to factor into his reasoning. Corbett’s attitude would represent a continuing pattern of lack of cooperation by his department in the coming Qantas struggle to establish the service—even after the Australian government’s approval. Fysh, however, believed he was a player in a higher stakes game—in effect the very future of his airline. War or no war, he considered it essential that Qantas retain its position as an international airline and that it should also benefit from the experience his crews had already gained on long-range, over-water operations that, ironically, involved Catalinas.
Between January and October 1941 Qantas had formed a special Long Range Operations Division, under the leadership of Captain Russell Tapp. Like Crowther and Captain Lester Brain, Tapp was one of Qantas’ ‘originals’, a small, select group who had joined the airline in its formative years in the twenties and thirties. The Long Range Division had been formed for the specific purpose of ferrying eighteen Catalinas from the United States for delivery to the Royal Australian Air Force. Under normal circumstances the RAAF could have been expected to transport the aircraft themselves, but with the United States still not at war and President Roosevelt testing the boundaries of American isolationist policies with support for Britain and its allies with Lend Lease, it was deemed necessary for civil crews to collect the aircraft from US territory at Honolulu.
