by Jim Eames
Their main concerns were whether the undercarriage would hold on landing despite appearing locked, and whether the wheel brakes were still functioning. By the time they were ready to attempt to land there was no longer any discussion about which runway they would use as the Mascot fire engines and safety vehicle lined up along Runway 16.
Making their final approach from the north their plan was to get the landing speed down as low as possible by using flaps, but as the flaps extended there was a succession of loud bangs which stopped as suddenly as they had started. Unknown to James and Spiers the movement of the flaps had ripped away one of the landing-gear doors. It was subsequently found in the backyard of a house on the approach path.
‘The landing was pretty well as normal as it can be when you don’t know what’s going to happen,’ was Spiers wry comment. (So normal in fact that one passenger told the Sydney Morning Herald that passengers were still tensing themselves ‘before they realised the plane was rolling along the strip’.)
As soon as Jimmy applied the brakes on landing it turned out one of the brake de-boosters on the right-hand side had gone so we lost the brakes as well. As we came to a stop there was a bit of smoke around the wheels because that was where the leaking hydraulic fluid had gone. We weren’t sure if it was going to catch fire, but I do remember saying to Jimmy: ‘There’s an awful lot of smoke out there!’
On the ground, the extent of the damage to both aircraft could at last be seen. Jagged chunks of fractured metal and hydraulic pipes hung loose around the gaping hole in the 727’s wing. The Boeing had torn 2.4 metres from the top of the DC-8’s tail fin, ripping open the Boeing’s starboard wing in the region of the wheel bay from immediately behind the wing’s leading edge and as far back as the rear of the wing itself.
Most of the covering which normally protected the air-conditioning ducting, the heat exchanger and the aircraft’s cooling turbine unit was gone, the starboard main landing-gear doors had been torn from their hinges and both undercarriage tyres had been slashed, causing the inboard tyre to deflate. Score marks and skin punctures from debris from the impact stretched all the way along the lower fuselage to the tail.
Although the crew and passengers of VH-TJA were now safe on the ground, the repercussions of that Friday night would continue for years to come, eventually reaching to the highest court in the land. The following morning, Saturday, the various elements of the air-safety investigation began to gather, but on this occasion their numbers would be larger than normal. Unlike an accident involving a single aircraft, this incident, along with an Australian domestic component in TAA, had an additional international component in CP Air, as well as the Commonwealth Department of Civil Aviation’s air-traffic control. And indeed, there were signs already of some of the vested interests.
Within hours of the accident the night before, as press inquiries began to swamp his home telephone, TAA’s public relations manager, John Tilton, became alarmed at the tone of some of the media questions, which tended to suggest it was unlikely air-traffic control could have been to blame. Tilton recalls at one stage crossing words with his opposite number at Civil Aviation, Ken Williams, over his suspicions that Williams’ boss, the Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Donald Anderson, was making sure his side of the paddock was ‘fenced off’. (Tilton’s suspicions may not have been that far from the truth as Anderson had been instrumental in the establishment of Australia’s postwar air-traffic-control system and was known to be extremely protective of his progeny.)
What was working against Tilton and, of course, the crew of VH-TJA, was the fact that, even within days of the accident, those five words: ‘How far ahead is he?’ were widely known to exist on the air-traffic control audio tape of radio conversation that night. They were also expected to be on the cockpit voice recorder in the Boeing 727, but the confirmation of that was to become a significant legal issue in itself.
The first of the TAA team to take part in the investigations arrived in Sydney on the Saturday morning to debrief Jim James’ crew and once the leader of the team, TAA’s training manager and one of its most senior pilots, Captain Frank Fischer, heard his crew’s account he told them he could not find that they had done anything wrong. As far as Fischer was concerned they had not disobeyed any air-traffic-control instructions and had done what they were told. Doug Spiers says TAA support for the crew’s actions that night never faltered over the months that followed.
James and Spiers were taken off the flying roster to recover from any initial shock involved. In Spiers’ case it was only for a week, but he needed it.
It had been a bit hairy. I was fidgety, couldn’t sit still even for a few seconds. You didn’t know whether you’d done the right thing or the wrong thing, whether someone’s going to blame you, whether you have a job or not.
As well as that you’ve had the shit scared out of you. I didn’t need anything more like that again.
He admitted that his company’s support helped him to quickly resume his normal flying career.
Meanwhile, the accident investigation weaved its painstaking way through interviews with those involved, cataloguing wreckage-distribution patterns on Mascot’s runway and revisiting aircraft manufacturer’s performance charts. The air-traffic-control audio tapes and the Boeing’s Flight Data Recorder, or the frequently mistitled ‘Black Box’, which records the aircraft’s pressure altitude, airspeed, heading and vertical acceleration on a stainless-steel tape, were sent to the National Transportation Safety Board’s laboratories in the United States for analysis.
Right from the earliest stage it was evident that what had been heard and said in communications between those involved would be a critical factor in apportioning blame for the accident. From the CP Air viewpoint there were four pilots on board that night: the captain, the first officer, the second officer and a senior CP Air captain carrying out a route check on the captain in command. All four had been wearing headphones and were monitoring communications with the tower and all would insist they had heard the aerodrome controller direct them to, ‘. . . backtrack if you like—change to 121.7’, thus remaining on the runway instead of turning off onto the taxiway.
In a further ironic turn of events the cockpit voice recorder on the DC-8 would be unable to play any role in the subsequent investigation. Informed by air-traffic control while they taxied towards their parking position that they had been struck by the 727, the CP Air captain called forward a ground engineer who was travelling as a passenger on the DC-8 and directed him to pull the circuit breakers on the cockpit voice recorder to preserve its contents as evidence.
Unfortunately, he inadvertently pulled the circuit breakers for the aircraft’s Flight Data Recorder instead, thus leaving the cockpit voice recorder running. Cockpit voice recorders are of the recycling type and retain a record of conversations for a period of 30 minutes prior to the point it is stopped by interruption of the power supply. Thus the instant the aircraft was parked and ground power was applied its contents were erased.
As for the more critical content of the cockpit voice recorder on the Boeing, if would become the subject of a struggle between the accident investigators and later the courts, as the Australian Federation of Air Pilots (AFAP), the pilots’ union, fought to deny its use as evidence. Designed primarily as an air-safety aid to assist in utilising information on the recorders to help prevent future accidents, the AFAP had originally agreed to their installation in Australian airline aircraft only on the basis that they not be used in any investigation of an accident or an incident in which the crew survived.
DCA, on the other hand, had always claimed that while it agreed to this restriction because of the value it would bring to such fatal accidents, its own view was that the restriction only applied to accidents in Australia involving Australian-registered aircraft. Despite their argument that, in this particular case, a foreign-registered aircraft was involved, DCA reluctantly accepted that the evidence on the cockpit voice recorder would not be availa
ble to the investigators.
But beyond this mix-up in communications, the most intense concentration of the inquiry was on the actual collision itself and the decisions taken by the TAA crew leading up to the accident. It was here that both a technical, and a somewhat judgemental argument, would develop to determine the cause of the accident. The question boiled down to whether, immediately after they became aware that an aircraft was on the runway, the crew of the Boeing should have abandoned the take-off.
Take-offs in any aircraft require constant transition by pilots from monitoring the performance of the aircraft through instruments inside the cockpit, to monitoring the visual situation outside the aircraft. Depending on its performance characteristics, each individual aircraft type has a speed on take-off which, in lay terms, could be called the ‘point of no return’. This is known as V1, where such factors as remaining runway length, aircraft weight etc., determine that it is too late to abort the take-off.
Neither James nor Spiers could accurately pinpoint the instant they became aware that something was wrong ahead. James said he became subconsciously alerted to something abnormal at about the point where he went on to full instrument reference, but it was not until during the rotation of his aircraft that he saw the DC-8 more or less across the strip. Even then, he said, he could not determine how far ahead it was. Spiers told the inquiry he first saw a flashing red light shortly before the Boeing reached take-off speed, but he also had difficulty in recognising how far ahead it was. As they reached rotation speed he saw it was an aircraft, but by then believed it would not have been possible to stop without a collision.
There was also the question of the rate of climb of the Boeing once it was committed to taking off. The investigation team considered that if James had ‘over-rotated’ the aircraft, forcing it into a steeper climb-out, he could have avoided taking the tail off the DC-8. Spiers says James argued with DCA that pilots were trained not to under- or over-rotate on take-off as this diluted the performance profile of the aircraft.
‘DCA said this wasn’t so, but they weren’t running down the runway at 150 miles an hour!’
He said a later Boeing analysis of the flight path on takeoff confirmed that the Boeing was right on its correct take-off profile on lift-off.
The investigation’s study of air-traffic-control’s performance that night revealed that the controller saw the DC-8 commence a turn to the right towards a taxiway and had no reason to believe his instructions had been misunderstood. After all, the crew had acknowledged his directions. Even so, however, the report said, given the distance from the tower to the DC-8, it would have been prudent for the controller to request CP Air to report when it was clear of the runway before issuing his take-off clearance to the TAA Boeing.
The report went on to raise another interesting contributing factor to the accident, and an aspect which highlighted the differences which might exist between Australian and international aircrew when it came to interpreting air-traffic-control instructions at busy airports. Backtracking on a runway at a busy airport like Sydney is a most unusual procedure and would be used only when normal taxiways are not available. The report noted that any Australian aircrew given the instruction, ‘backtrack if you like’ would have almost certainly queried it, particularly a clearance which offered a choice of action.
‘In these circumstances,’ the report said, ‘it would seem that a greater familiarity with operations at Sydney Airport would have prevented the Canadian crew from falling into an error of this sort.’
So, in August that year, after a detailed list of conclusions, Air Safety Investigation’s report decreed that the accident had three primary causes: the misreading of the taxi clearance by the Canadian crew after landing, that error not detected by the air-traffic controller who cleared the TAA Boeing for take-off and the flight crew of VH-TJA not adopting ‘the most effective means of avoiding a collision’.
But the story of this Mascot near-miss was far from over and would trail through the courts for five years, as all three parties, DCA, through the Australian government, TAA and Canadian Pacific Airlines took legal action against each other, the High Court finally coming down with a damages spread divided almost equally between the three organisations involved. In the process the AFAP lost its battle not to have the cockpit voice recorder admitted in evidence when the judge ruled it should be heard.
Not that it made a great deal of difference. Analysis had proved ‘How far ahead is he?’ were Jim James’ words, alright, but Jim James couldn’t remember saying them and Doug Spiers is adamant he didn’t hear them.
‘There’s nothing said to answer them,’ said Doug Spiers, reliving those moments years later. He’s also adamant that they made the right decision to continue the take-off.
We would never have been able to stop in time and we would have run into him. That would have been Tenerife before it happened!
On Sunday 27 March 1977, a KLM Boeing 747 taking off on fog-shrouded Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands collided with a Pan American Airways Boeing 747 taxiing on the runway.
583 people died in the deadliest accident in civil aviation history.
7
Nonstop across the world
Precisely where and when the idea originated within the Qantas structure—whether in the flight operations division, in the commercial division, in the London office or at a public-affairs branch meeting—is still the subject of some debate. One thing is certain, however: the moment it was suggested that the airline should look at introducing the first of its brand-new Boeing 747-400s by flying it nonstop from London to Sydney, something within the airline’s DNA was instantly activated.
If there was one thing beyond its safety record and its engineering and operational excellence that Qantas was proud of, it was its reputation as the airline which operated the longest sectors in the world. Right from its earliest days it had pioneered long-distance flying, cutting its teeth on keeping the Australia– United Kingdom air route open for flights of over 30 hours nonstop during the Second World War. Even as it entered the jet era in the late 1950s, it had pushed the Boeing Company to build an extended-range version of the Boeing 707 to specifically cater for an airline based at the end of the world.
Certainly, the 400 promised to be an exceptional addition to the 747 fleet, its bigger engines and, for the first time, the ability to carry fuel in the aircraft’s tail, offered long-range, high passenger volume and comfort, and excellent cargo capacity. But flying a 400 nonstop 17 850 kilometres, even with a minimal passenger load, might just be taking it, to misuse an old Second World War metaphor, a bridge too far.
The first thing required was secrecy. The 400, titled City of Canberra, was due for delivery to the airline in April 1989, and if such a gamble was to be attempted it needed to be kept under wraps until its feasibility could be tested beyond reasonable doubt. And even among the handful of people ‘in the know’ there was initial scepticism.
When the airline’s flight operations chief, Alan Terrell, first asked Captain David Massy-Greene, who for two years had been the project pilot for the introduction of the 400 series, whether he’d like to fly the first aircraft nonstop, Massy-Greene doubted it could be done. But it didn’t take him long to start factoring in the possibilities, without drawing attention to what he was up to. Like most of his breed, a challenge like this was far too good for any pilot to pass up.
There were important reasons for secrecy. Against the risk of the whole idea being impractical were the tremendous marketing advantages to be derived from creating a world record in an airline industry, which for many years had pretty well presented a ‘one-size-fits-all’ image to the travelling public.
Most of the world’s international airlines flew the Boeing 747, with only their livery, choice of engines, seating configurations and in-flight service offering degrees of variations. Looking at the television and print-media advertisements for most carriers it was hard to tell the difference beyond the fares they were ch
arging. Every airline on the Boeing 400’s order books was looking for ways to differentiate, and if Qantas could capture the public’s imagination with such an achievement it would give the airline a unique advantage with its launch services.
There was also the opportunity for Qantas to steal the march on its traditional rival, British Airways. The two airlines, with links which went back to Qantas’ very earliest days in the 1930s, were fierce competitors on the Kangaroo Route between Australia and England and, as it turned out, were to take delivery of their first 400 aircraft at the same time.
Rumours started to circulate that British Airways was planning a spectacular coup—a nonstop flight from London to Perth—a venture sure to maximise publicity for the airline and its new type. Since he was spending considerable time at Boeing in those early days of gathering information for the attempt, Massy-Greene had to be doubly careful. He was part of a small team of airline executives, including from British Airways, who formed a consultative development panel advising Boeing of their airline’s individual requirements for the 400. One slip and the secret would be out of the bag.
But the person within the airline who would have to seek the most critical information necessary to allow the decision for the flight to go ahead, would be the man in the airline known as ‘Mr Fuel’, Peter Brooks. As planning progressed behind closed doors, it became obvious that even if the aircraft performed perfectly, there would be no way it could fly the distance required on standard Jet A-1 jet fuel.
