by Jim Eames
Before leaving Terrell decided to use a largely unnecessary ‘test flight’ as an excuse for inviting the patrol officer, his family and some of the local natives on board as a thankyou for their hospitality.
‘It was a great hit. For several of them it was their first aeroplane ride.’
By late 1958 the Qantas Catalinas were approaching their final days in Papua New Guinea. Terrill admits that as wartime veterans they were no longer young aeroplanes.
‘You could put your finger through bits of the hull and flying through a New Guinea rainstorm the water just poured in.’
He remembers once remarking to his first officer as they both became progressively saturated: ‘I think the only way we’re going to stay dry is if we turn this damn thing upside down!’
Alan Terrell would spend his entire career with Qantas, become Qantas’ chief pilot in the Boeing 747 era and, ironically, Ken Davenport’s boss.
Like Terrell, Fred Fox, another Qantas captain, also figured in a dramatic air-sea rescue when the crew of a Department of Civil Aviation de Havilland Drover was forced to ditch in the Bismarck Sea in April 1952 after a propeller blade came adrift and hit the fuselage, badly injuring the DCA pilot, Clarrie Hibbert. Just after that the Drover’s two remaining engines failed and Tom Drury, another pilot on board, took over and landed the Drover on the sea. After a searching DC-3 located their dinghy, Fox and his Qantas copilot, Ian Ralphe, flew to the scene, landed on the open sea and took the three in the dinghy on board their Catalina and back to Port Moresby, where Hibbert recovered in hospital.
Along with a talent for open sea landings, Fred Fox would record what he believed to be the first aerial delivery of poultry from an aircraft, an experience he would later relate in his own words to another Qantas operations colleague, Greg Banfield.
It all started when Fox flew into Lake Kutubu with a government patrol, soon to be assigned to establish a post in a remote area of the Papua New Guinea highlands.
They wanted some chickens to stock the post, to help provide a food supply. As it turned out the patrol officers had a big rooster which crowed early in the morning and woke them all up, so they told us to practise on him. If the air drop worked they would be very pleased. If it didn’t they would have him for dinner.
‘Chooks are not very smart birds,’ Fox acknowledged, revealing he had obviously studied the flight characteristics of various birds, at least to some extent.
Unlike pigeons they will not open their wings until they have slowed down. So we decided to wrap our rooster in a double sheet of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, not tightly but just to put around him so he couldn’t see, and then put another sheet around that.
When dropped from the aircraft the paper would all blow off in a very short time but it would slow him down.
And that is exactly what happened. The rooster slowed down and then glided to the ground with no problem. ‘So we then did the same with more hens and roosters, dropping them in on the station as it was formed.’
Like scores of other Australian aviators over the years, Fred Fox and his compatriots would regard the time they spent in New Guinea as an incomparable flying experience. As Fox would attest: ‘You learned to operate an aeroplane on the mainland, but you learned to fly an aeroplane in New Guinea.’
5
The kingdom of Collopy
Australia’s early aviation history is dotted with pioneers who have become household names. Charles Kingsford Smith and C.T.P Ulm crossed the Pacific in the Southern Cross, Ross and Keith Smith collected a 10 000-pound prize from Prime Minister Billy Hughes in 1919 as the first people to fly from England to Australia and Bert Hinkler followed up nine years later by flying the same journey solo.
There also exists page after page of names of those who were an integral, albeit often barely recognised, part of Australia’s aviation history. Not all were pilots. Some were mechanics, navigators, surveyors of airways or builders of airports, each of their individual musterings playing a critical part in developing the aviation industry we take for granted today.
A few, like brothers Ross and Keith Smith, were family concerns. So, too, were the Collopys, Jim, Frank and Bert. All three brothers learned to fly, with Bert eventually winning his aviation ‘spurs’ as a pilot with Qantas. But in their early days, the two older brothers, Jim and Frank, would operate in the same aviation world as the Smiths and the Ulms, a world of wire-and-fabric aeroplanes, with limited communications tools and little beyond schoolboy atlases as navigation aids. Before their careers ended both would be witnesses to some of the most historical, often adventurous and occasionally even humorous incidents which help bring such Australian characteristics to life.
Jim Collopy joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1924 and in 1927 was chosen as part of a team led by the acknowledged ‘father’ of the RAAF, Sir Richard Williams, to undertake a 27 358-kilometre survey flight around Australia. Designed by Williams to obtain an appreciation of the country, his air force was expected to defend and to demonstrate the value of the aeroplane in the Australian environment; it was also something of a flag-carrying promotional tour for the RAAF.
Collopy later would describe the flight as a ‘notable achievement’, largely understating the exceptional planning and formidable air and ground hazards such a venture entailed. The three aircraft involved started off in Melbourne for Adelaide, then flew on to Mildura, Hay and Armidale. Their landing grounds could be anything from former wheat fields to racecourses, often using locals to light fires to allow the pilots to determine wind direction.
The journey was not without incident. They landed on the racecourse at Armidale and as Williams took off the next morning he heard a loud ‘bang’ and saw bits of his propeller disintegrate in front of him. With no option but to put the aircraft down immediately, he slammed into a fence. No great damage was done and they continued after repairs. Then it was via Brisbane to Charleville, Cloncurry, Katherine and Darwin and down the West Australian coast to Broome and eventually Perth. According to a description by Williams years later, they ‘followed the railway’ to Adelaide, made a side trip to Alice Springs and flew back to Melbourne via Camooweal and Bourke. By then they’d flown 112 hours and made 56 landings over terrain which Williams later described as a ‘blank sheet’.
Four years after that epic, Jim Collopy would begin a long career in civil aviation by joining the Civil Aviation Branch of the Department of Defence, a branch which would be the precursor of the future Department of Civil Aviation. First posted to Perth in charge of the Branch’s Western Australian Division in 1931, he kept watch over the safety of an aviation community in the throes of opening up air travel to the far-flung regions of Australia’s largest state. Some of Jim Collopy’s more bizarre experiences paint a picture of a fledgling industry where anything goes, provided you could get away with it.
On one occasion, called to investigate a heavy landing at a remote airstrip, Collopy had to find an explanation as to why a passenger in the two-seater biplane was not there when the aircraft came to a halt. In fact, he had been found back in the middle of the airstrip, where the aircraft had initially touched down. When Collopy first inspected the aircraft it appeared to be intact, but a closer study of the fuselage found the landing was so heavy the aircraft had broken in two under the passenger’s seat and the passenger had literally dropped through, without serious injury. Once the initial heavy bouncing was over, the fuselage partly joined up again. Fortunately for the passenger aeroplane-landing speeds were very slow in those days.
On another occasion, suspecting that one operator was purposely miscalculating the empty weight of his aircraft to enable him to squeeze more paying freight on board, Collopy dipped his finger into the aircraft’s radiator to find the water only went down several inches. The radiator had been blocked off, with the subsequent benefits from the missing water transferred to the freight compartment.
But it was his appointment as District Superintendent in Papua New Guinea which
would see him make a major contribution to bringing the aeroplane to some of the most remote areas of the world, and where fate would place him at the centre of one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries—the disappearance of American pioneer aviatrix, Amelia Earhart.
With Papua New Guinea run as two separate entities, Jim Collopy’s role as District Superintendent of Civil Aviation in Port Moresby and Salamaua was to advise the Lieutenant Governor of Papua and the Administrator of New Guinea on the selection, operation and maintenance of all aerodromes in their Territories. In three years he was personally responsible for selecting, approving and advising on the construction of more than 30 sites, many of which—in the case of places like Rabaul on New Britain, Kavieng on New Ireland, Kokoda and Wewak—would become well known during the Second World War.
When Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Captain Fred Noonan, arrived in Lae on 29 June 1937 on their attempt to circumnavigate the world at the Equator, Collopy was there to meet them and would spend the next three days assisting with the work needed to check and refuel Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10 Electra. Earhart had long captivated the world with her spectacular aviation achievements as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Along with many other records she had a brace of bestselling books to her name. Thus her ground-breaking flight, over areas never previously covered by air, was being closely followed by newspapers and radio stations all around the world and was also expected to result in another book.
Collopy not only oversaw some of the preparations for their aircraft but was able to mix socially with Earhart and Noonan on several occasions during the time they were in Lae, a situation which would later involve him in attempts to unravel the Earhart mystery. During their time together Noonan explained to Collopy that the tanks on the Electra were capable of holding 4353 litres of fuel and 242 litres of oil. They had loaded 4163 litres at Lae and although another fuel tank was capable of carrying 378 litres, only 189 litres of a higher octane fuel would be needed to assist in their take-off from there.
Despite later speculation that Earhart might have run out of fuel, Collopy was certain that the Electra had had sufficient fuel for the 4113 kilometres to their next stop—Howland Island in the mid-Pacific. Watching the take-off on the morning of 2 July convinced him the aircraft was fully loaded. He wrote later in a report to his Civil Aviation Board that:
The take-off was hair-raising as after taking every yard of the 1000-yard runway from the northwest of the aerodrome towards the sea, the aircraft had not left the ground fifty yards from the end of the runway.
When it did leave it sank away but was by this time over the sea. It continued to sink to about five or six feet above the water and had not climbed to more than 100 feet before it disappeared from sight.
In spite of this narrow margin, Collopy and pilots from Guinea Airways standing alongside him, many of whom had flown Electras, were impressed with how Earhart handled the takeoff with such an overload. Earhart and Noonan, however, were never seen again and their disappearance remains one of aviation’s longest-running mysteries, generating a whole range of conspiracy theories which have lasted more than 70 years.
Despite some garbled radio signals received by US coast guard and navy vessels on standby on Earhart’s route and the subsequent seventeen-day air and sea search, reputed to be one of the most costly ever undertaken in US history at that time, no trace of the aircraft was ever found. Speculation about what happened ranged from the aircraft running out of fuel or crashing into an uncharted island outcrop in poor weather and even the suggestion that Earhart and Noonan had been captured and later executed by the Japanese.
The latter theory grew out of the war which was to come within a few years of her disappearance, and the suggestion that the Electra carried photographic equipment which could be used to spy on Japanese installations on islands near the route. Even as late as 1970 Collopy confirmed to a US newspaper that he had seen no spying equipment and that the only cameras on board were a common variety without any telephoto-lens capability.
In keeping with the Collopy tradition, brother Frank would also join the RAAF and later forge a career in civil aviation. In those days, ‘forging a career’ meant everything from the inevitable crash-landings, to battling outback dust storms and maintaining an aviation oversight of a vast area of Australia. One particulr area—spreading from Adelaide to Darwin—would become known as the Kingdom of Collopy, a ‘realm’ which required not only broad aviation experience but often a sense of humour as well.
Frank Collopy—short, wiry, gimlet-eyed and with a ready grin—served six years in the RAAF, from 1926 to 1932, after succumbing to the glamour of the uniform that Jim was wearing home every weekend. But how he lasted that long remains a tribute to the forbearance of his senior officers. He learned to fly on First World War Avro 504K biplanes at RAAF Point Cook near Melbourne and perhaps his answer years later, when asked what Point Cook was like, at least partly sums up the RAAF’s dilemma:
Point Cook was 375 Cyprus pines and 34 fire hydrants. If you were a bad boy you had to water the pines and paint the fire hydrants. I knew every one of them intimately.
Because the RAAF had a total strength of only several hundred in those days, flying the RAAF flag throughout the country was an important pastime for Point Cook pilots. That’s the reason Collopy and five other pilots in biplanes arrived over Nhill, in Victoria’s Western District to celebrate Back to Nhill Day.
They did some aerobatics and formation flying and then lined up for a follow-the-leader flypast down the main street. With the leading aircraft at low level and the others stepped up behind, Collopy brought up the rear but decided he was still too high. So he dropped lower and, in the middle of doing so, spotted a bunch of locals taking part in a clay-bird shoot at the edge of town. So he waggled his wings and gave them a wave and was delighted to see them wave back. He was sent home by train the next day, his shattered aircraft on the same train, bits of high tension wire still wrapped around its undercarriage. Collopy received a 25-pound fine from the RAAF for his trouble and the Cyprus trees received more water.
His luck continued, escaping unhurt when an aircraft he was taxiing at Point Cook had another aircraft land on top of it. Never one to miss an opportunity for a prank, Collopy once slipped the commanding officer’s (CO’s) barge from its mooring while his CO was hosting a picnic party on board. No one in the party noticed until it began to drift through nearby saltwater baths.
Then there was the incident with the bomb. When one of their bombs failed to explode during practice on the bombing range, the base’s bomb-disposal squad descended on the site, taking great pains to surround the hole with fencing and appropriate warning signs. The plan was to allow the base personnel a front-row seat when they exploded the errant missile the following morning. Rumour had it that three shadowy figures, accompanied by much grunting and groaning, were noticed in the area that night and when the crowd gathered the next morning to witness the big event the only thing missing was the bomb. The culprits were never found. Neither was the bomb.
While such stories became legend, they tended to detract from the existence of a more serious, professional side of Collopy’s time as a flying instructor. In fact, entries in his instructor’s log book listed future chief of the air staff, Sir Valston Hancock, another future air vice marshal, along with a sprinkling of future air commodores among his pupils. He’d also been awarded the Air Force Medal, the citation reading, ‘. . . outstanding instructional ability and results’.
But wider aviation horizons beckoned, along with a job flying for Norman Brearley’s Western Australian Airways in Perth, where brother Jim had already established himself as officer in charge of civil aviation’s Western Australian branch. In Western Australian Airways Frank Collopy was following in some exalted footsteps.
While much of Australia’s early aviation history has focused on the exploits of pioneers such as Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, men like Norman Brearley wer
e also playing a critical part in convincing those in the most remote parts of the continent of the value of this exciting new mode of transport. Brearley—like the Smiths, Ulm and Qantas’ Fysh and McGinness—had brought his aviation enthusiasm home with him from the First World War. Barnstorming and joy flights in the vastness of Western Australia had convinced him the aeroplane was the key to bringing isolated settlements and stations within easy reach of cities like Perth, and when the Australian government called for tenders to operate what would be Australia’s first airmail service, Brearley was among the first to apply. He won the contract and while Qantas, formed in 1920 and inaugurating its Charleville to Cloncurry mail service in November 1922, can rightly claim to be the oldest airline in the English-speaking world, it was in fact Brearley’s Western Australian Airways which was first into the air with an airmail service, between Geraldton and Derby in December 1921.
Kingsford Smith’s own time as part of Brearley’s airline was gone by the time Frank Collopy joined in 1932, but the difficulties presented by dust storms, cyclones and monsoon rains hadn’t changed much. Bad weather and poor visibility still required pilots to follow telegraph lines at low level and occasionally forced them to land at places not yet marked on maps. And you weren’t simply the pilot. If an engine played up or some structural failure occurred you were expected to fix it yourself. Years later Collopy would recount how passengers suffered along with the pilot as they sat wedged between such essential items of freight as farm machinery, fuel and foodstuffs. Day-old chickens packed in hat boxes were a popular cargo. You’d load your four passengers first and then stack the chickens around them.
‘All you could see were the passengers’ heads sticking up through the boxes. By the time you got from Perth to Derby often half the chickens were dead,’ he remembers.
Whereas today it’s possible to fly from Perth to Wyndham and return in a matter of hours, for Collopy and his passengers the trip took twelve-and-a-half days with 33 stops along the way. Never one to miss the funny side, Collopy would later admit that there were occasions when his passengers’ tolerance was put to the test. Once carrying a coffin, strapped to the bottom of the fuselage, from Halls Creek to Perth, he almost had a mutiny on his hands. The weather was hot and by the time they reached Geraldton five days later his passengers presented him with an ultimatum: ‘Either he goes or we go.’ The coffin finished the journey to Perth by train.
