Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  Jamieson was so impressed with Crowley he asked what he was earning.

  ‘Six pounds six shillings a week,’ said Crowley.

  ‘How would you like to come to New Guinea for double that, a free house and no tax?’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ was Crowley’s reply, and he went to work for Jamieson’s Guinea Air Traders in Sydney. At the time Jamieson’s company was involved in flying migrants from Europe to Australia, although as Crowley would describe with his own brand of humour years later, it was hardly a tourist trip.

  They’d put them on a plane in Rome or London and let ’em out at Mascot. They used to tell us if they’d let them out anywhere else they mightn’t have got ’em back!

  A few months later, in October 1948, Crowley left for Lae, Papua New Guinea only to find that Jamieson’s promised house didn’t exist, but after drowning his sorrows overnight at Lae’s Cecil Hotel he decided to stay on anyway. Crowley had an assortment of aircraft to work on—everything from Avro Ansons to de Havilland Dragons, Fox Moths and Austers—once tongue-in-cheek summing up their fleet as: ‘A total of 37 aircraft in all—three DC-3s and one of everything else!’

  It didn’t take Crowley long to deduce that aviation in Papua New Guinea was something of a ‘closed shop’. From the very early days he saw signs that, with government-owned Qantas already operating there, anyone else was not particularly welcome. He’d only been there a matter of weeks when he experienced some summary bureaucracy firsthand when a Department of Civil Aviation engineering surveyor arrived one morning to inspect the five Ansons in the fleet. The Ansons were wooden aircraft with a three-ply floor and Crowley looked on in dismay as the surveyor pushed his foot through the floor of the first one then continued to do the same to the other four.

  ‘Then he announced he wanted them all burnt. I said, “Okay, I’ll get around to that.”’

  ‘I want it done now.’

  ‘So we had to burn all five of them on the spot. There wasn’t much doubt DCA was running the country.’

  For Crowley it would be the opening round in a lifetime battle with aviation bureaucracy, and one he would have to use all his determination and guile to win.

  With restrictions on the number of times per month any other operator was permitted to fly into an airfield if Qantas was already flying there, and overwhelmed by a mountain of regulatory paperwork, Jamieson finally gave up and five months later flew his aircraft out, never to return. Crowley, by now with a commercial pilot’s licence, stayed on, bought a half-share in a two-seat Tiger Moth with another local, Ray Stockden, and established his own charter operation. Never one to let the normal carrying capacity of the Tiger Moth restrict his passenger load, Crowley was often seen cramming more than one passenger into the Moth’s single-front cockpit.

  The late 1940s were a time of a burgeoning aviation industry in Papua New Guinea. The war had opened and upgraded many of the airstrips in the country’s major centres and had proved beyond doubt the value of the aeroplane in a land where there were no roads and certainly none providing access to the agriculture-rich highlands. In fact, it would be almost another twenty years before an all-weather road would be carved through the Kassam Pass between coastal Lae and Goroka and the Highlands beyond.

  Administratively the country was divided into two parts, with northern New Guinea as a Trust Territory of the United Nations and the southern section, Papua, under Australian Trust. Both would later be joined and administered by Australia as the Territory of Papua New Guinea.

  In aviation terms, Australia’s Department of Civil Aviation held responsibility for operational and safety standards in the air and for the provision of facilities such as airports and air-traffic control. Night flying was banned due to the mountainous terrain and there was little doubt that in the daytime it was government-backed Qantas which was favoured. Smaller operators, like Crowley and Gibbes Sepik Airways—started by Second World War fighter ace Bobby Gibbes at Goroka and Wewak—were regarded as interlopers.

  ‘This was an Australian government show and if Qantas was king then DCA was God,’ recalls Crowley.

  There was plenty of business for all, however, provided you were quick enough. Scores of small village centres in the higher valleys, most under the administration of patrol officers, or kiaps as they were known in the local pidgin-English vernacular, not only needed trade goods, building materials and anything else required to make an ‘out station’ function, but were a vital source of vegetables and other produce to feed the increasing populations of coastal towns like Lae, Madang and Wewak. Highland coffee plantations also needed some way of getting their valuable commodity to the coast for shipment. It was all charter work and Crowley had no hesitation in exploiting his main opposition’s heavy government oversight.

  ‘By the time the Qantas fellows filled out all the paperwork I’d been in and out of Boana several times that morning,’ he says.

  When onerous government regulations forbade the transport of fuel by air, vital for outstations, Crowley flew it in anyway.

  The Boana he spoke of was a postage stamp of an airstrip nestled at 2800 feet on the edge of the Saruwaged Ranges to the north-west of Lae. Here Crowley had established his own coffee-storage facility and commanded the bulk of the produce for transport to Lae, in those days New Guinea’s aviation hub. Surrounded by high ground the Boana airstrip was short and had a steep gradient, but provided you took off in the uphill direction you could handle it in most weather. Years later, after the business had developed, Crowley would use Boana as a training ground for the pilots who would fly for him. He’d fly in with them first to check them out, then he’d give them as many trips into and out of Boana as they could handle in daylight hours before he allowed them to graduate to other more dangerous airstrips.

  By the 1950s, with his Canadian-born wife, Betty, handling the paperwork and keeping their Lae hangar functioning, Crowley had worn out two Tiger Moths and replaced them with others, but the operation was existing on the proverbial wing and a prayer. At times Crowley was even struggling to pay for his fuel, but luckily for him he had a friend called Pappy Duff who drove the refuelling tanker for Vacuum Oil in Lae.

  ‘Pappy would turn up at the end of the day and tell me he had some left in the tank and we’d drain it out.’

  To replace the tired Tiger Moths he purchased a Curtiss Robin in Sydney with Stockden and he remembers having one shilling and sixpence between them when they arrived in Cairns. After sleeping under the Robin’s wing at Cairns airport they slipped into Cairns’ Great Northern Hotel for a shower where they had the good fortune to bump into an old Qantas mate of Crowley’s who loaned them money to buy enough fuel to reach Lae.

  As the business developed Crowley bought Stockden out, selling him one of the Tiger Moths, which Stockden used to fly himself around the Territory. One morning not long afterwards word spread around Lae’s small aviation community that Stockden had failed to return from a flight in the Moth to an airstrip on the edge of the mountains, to the south-west. A search was quickly organised and for hours aircraft with spotters on board crisscrossed the area they thought Stockden might have traversed, with no luck. Late in the afternoon Stockden walked into the Cecil Hotel, surprised to find the bar deserted.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked the barman.

  ‘They’re out looking for you, you silly bastard,’ was the reply.

  Stockden, it transpired, had crashed into trees while making a landing approach, walked out to the coast, borrowed a canoe and rowed back to Lae.

  Crashes were commonplace and Crowley, too, had his own close brushes with disaster. Taking off from Boana in the rain one day he was forced to poke his head outside the window of the Robin to see his way when a slab of mud hit him in the eye. Unable to see he felt the Robin lurch as its wheels struck mud and with a sheer cliff drop off at the end of the runway ahead he decided to jump.

  ‘Trouble is I’d forgotten I had the seat belt on so I ended up back in the cockpit!’

>   He attempted to ground loop the Robin but it was all too late and over the cliff they went. Fortunately, however, the Robin’s engine snagged on a large tree 800 feet over the cliff edge and the aircraft stopped abruptly, although Crowley, still attached to his seat by his seat belt, finished up a little further down the cliff face.

  By the time he’d climbed back to the strip natives had a rope attached to the Robin and were hauling it by its tail back up onto the airfield. The only damage was a bent wheel strut so he stayed the night at the missionary’s house trying numerous times to reach DCA by radio to tell them what had happened, but such were communications it was to no avail. The only person who could hear him was his wife, Betty, in Lae. Relieved he was still alive, she rang DCA for him.

  Crowley was typical of such operators in Papua New Guinea in those days, as pushing the risk boundaries was often the only way the system worked. Once Crowley was asked to fly to an isolated strip inland from Wewak to bring out a pilot who had broken an undercarriage on landing. When he arrived Crowley discovered the pilot had a passenger so there were now two people to fly out. Since it was only a relatively short distance and Crowley only had two seats on his biplane he suggested the other pilot do the flying, with the passenger in the spare seat. Crowley came out sitting on the wing. Had the authorities been aware of it the consequences might have been dire, but Crowley would always claim that under the circumstances which then prevailed, nothing would be going anywhere if you stuck to the rules.

  Since the proper loading of an aircraft is essential for safe flight and because often no one had any equipment to weigh a load before take-off, even ‘human’ cargo needed to be evaluated by guesswork. To overcome this lack of accurate weighing equipment but still be sure his aircraft was not too far overloaded to take off, Crowley often had to improvise. Judging his loads out of places like Gusap, in the Markham Valley, was one such example.

  When the aircraft was ready to be loaded with local natives to be flown to Lae, Crowley would line them up in single file. He’d done his sums on average passenger weights so once the line stretched 25 metres he had his load. Those beyond that mark had to wait for the next trip. Under such circumstances an adequate number of seat belts might be something of a luxury so a cargo net would be strapped tightly over those who’d missed out.

  Because of his regular charters to fly his own coffee and the increasing need for fresh vegetables for coastal centres, a select number of airstrips saw Crowley aircraft operate almost nonstop service daily. Of these, Boana would remain the major hub of Crowley’s activities as his fleet of aircraft expanded into high-wing Cessna 170s, 172s and 205s along with a twin-engine Piper Aztec. Merely halfway through his time in New Guinea his logbook showed he had notched up more than 6000 return trips from Lae to Boana.

  At one point it was so busy the business people there decided a fare increase was required, a request aviation companies rarely see suggested by the public itself, although Boana’s telegram to Betty Crowley calling for the fare increase included a quaint example of Papua New Guinean vernacular:

  ‘Up here there are too many passengers. Please send too many planes.’

  In the mountains beyond Boana, however, other airstrips in the region had their own operational challenges to overcome. Those who flew with Crowley in later years were always only too well aware of the difficulties he needed to overcome in his early days of flying by the seat of his pants.

  Dave Wiltshire, who joined Crowley in 1963 after gaining his commercial licence in Australia and would go on to become the chief pilot at TAA (Trans Australian Airlines) and later hold senior operational positions after the airline merged with Qantas, still speaks in awe of Crowley’s valuable transfer of his flying knowledge to his pilots. By the time he left Crowley to join TAA, Wiltshire had what is known in New Guinea aviation parlance as an ‘all over endorsement’, which brought with it the ability to fly into many of the most challenging and potentially dangerous strips in the world. Ironically, Wiltshire would be subsequently posted back to New Guinea with TAA to fly DC-3s, Fokker Friendships and eventually de Havilland Twin Otters out of the strips Crowley had introduced him to years before.

  To achieve competence, pilots like Wiltshire operated under Australian Air Navigation Order (ANO) 28, which prescribed certain training must be carried out over a particular route or airfield. The amount of familiarisation necessary altered according to the degree of difficulty presented by the particular airstrip, but as a general rule of thumb, up to five landings and take-offs could be needed for a pilot to be checked out at a new airfield. On most occasions three ‘good ones’ out of the five were sufficient.

  Papua New Guinea’s mountainous terrain, inaccurate maps, variable weather conditions, including the build-up of clouds on the ranges as the day wore on, lack of radio navigation aids, and short, steep, high-altitude airstrips meant that having someone of Crowley’s experience as your tutor could not only be immensely valuable but keep a pilot alive as well. You also needed to know the gaps, the valley structures and, critically, to always have the opportunity to turn back if necessary.

  Gap flying—the ability to fly through depressions in the ranges and into the next valley—is vitally important to the New Guinea pilot. Just knowing which gap you were approaching and the height at which it was safe to fly through was not enough. Wiltshire learned that early on when he pulled out a map as he asked Crowley the height of the gap ahead.

  ‘Throw the bloody map away and look out the window. The map’s sure to be wrong,’ instructed Crowley.

  To ensure you had sufficient altitude to clear the gap you focused your attention on the terrain on the other side of the gap you were flying towards. If landmarks such as timber on the other side grew in height as you approached, you were okay. If they stayed at the same height then you were at the bottom of the gap, worse if they grew smaller, which meant you were below the gap. Other techniques included flying parallel with the ridgeline and across the face of the gap to provide a sneak look at weather conditions on the other side before attempting to cross.

  It didn’t matter whether you were flying a Cessna or an airline DC-3, valley flying also required terrain experience beyond map reading. To fly between Mount Hagen, the main centre in the Western Highlands, to Goroka, in the Eastern Highlands, you would fly first along the 1524-metre-high Wahgi Valley until you reached Chimbu. But if the cloud ahead was down low enough to close the gaps across into the Goroka Valley you would turn right down the Mai River valley and follow the Asaro and Bena Bena river valleys until it was clear enough to fly back into the Goroka Valley from the south.

  But it was the little strips like Kiantiba, south-west of Lae on the slopes of the Owen Stanley Ranges, where the real challenges lay. On the side of a mountain, it was short with a gradient of one in five, or 20 per cent, so steep that once the aircraft had finished its landing run it had to be turned sideways and have the wheels chocked to stop it sliding back down the airstrip. And if that wasn’t enough, up until the early 1960s one of its prominent features was a large 1.5-metre-high boulder halfway up the right-hand side of Kiantiba’s grass runway, perfectly placed to take the wing off any low-wing aircraft which attempted to land there.

  For some time Wiltshire and other Crowley pilots were therefore required to operate the high-wing Cessnas into the strip until something could be done about the rock. In late 1963 the Commonwealth Department of Works’ New Guinea arm agreed to allocate 9000 pounds to the task of removing the rock. Presumably an assortment of heavy equipment would somehow have to be flown in to achieve it. When he heard of the budget allocation, the patrol officer at Kiantiba immediately suggested to his boss, the district commissioner in Lae, that he’d do the job for 1900 pounds. It was well known at the time that the relationship between the district commissioner and the patrol officer at Kiantiba was somewhat strained, so it came as a surprise when approval came for the kiap to go ahead. Indeed, given the size of the rock in question and the limited tools ava
ilable at Kiantiba, there were those in Lae who wondered whether the district commissioner was setting his man up for a fall.

  A short time later the district commissioner landed at Kiantiba on one of his scheduled visits to find the rock was no longer there. Given the delicate nature of their relationship, the district commissioner was at first reluctant to ask how the massive edifice had been removed, but it finally became too much for him and he asked the question. As it turned out, it hadn’t been all that difficult after all.

  Rounding up a team of Kukukuku tribesmen, the patrol officer had employed them for some days digging a large hole into the slope below the rock, while at the same time gradually shoring up the rock with timber. When the hole was deep enough they simply removed the timber, rolled the rock into it and covered it up.

  While Wiltshire was impressed with the patrol officer’s initiative in removing the rock there were times when he was less enamoured with his methodology in other pursuits. Asked to make a supply drop to one of the kiap’s patrols out in the bush, Wiltshire removed the side door of his Cessna 172, loaded the essential bags of rice and other vital provisions and set off with the kiap to locate the patrol. Wiltshire followed his passenger’s directions to an area midway between Kiantiba and Menyamya. Soon they were above the patrol and Wiltshire banked the Cessna into a turn to ensure the cargo was dropped right on the target clearing, only to look sideways to see the patrol officer, his seatbelt unfastened, standing outside the Cessna with one foot on the cabin floor and the other on the aircraft’s undercarriage, raking the bags of rice out over the side. Normally a chap of quiet disposition, Wiltshire launched into a range of expletives until his passenger was once again inside the Cessna.