Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  After nearly twenty years of negotiating the airline’s fuel requirements around the world, Brooks stoically suffered the occasional colleague’s comment that he had oil in his blood. His response would be that he needed it. Once merely an item that had been taken for granted as simply something you pumped into an aircraft’s tanks, the oil price rise of the seventies had seen aviation fuel take up an inordinate proportion of an airline’s cost base.

  Brooks had to know the industry intimately and to do that he spent a great deal of time in the air between Qantas’ major ports and even more time watching pricing trends on the world’s oil markets. Early in 1989 Brooks began receiving strange queries over the phone from Qantas’ deputy chief executive and chief operating officer, John Ward.

  ‘What’s the density of the fuel in London?’ Ward asked.

  Brooks thought the question a strange one at the time, even more so when Ward was back a week later with another one.

  ‘That fuel density of ours in London. Is it at the higher end or the lower end?’

  Ward at last let him in on the secret. If a nonstop flight was to be achieved they would need special high-density fuel.

  Brooks explained there were problems. While a version of high-density fuel was relatively easy to obtain on the west coast of the United States where it was cut from a particular crude and used by US Air Force aircraft, London was a totally different proposition. Swearing him to secrecy, Ward sent him off to London to see what he could do.

  Although Qantas had close relationships with all three fuel suppliers in London, even before he arrived Brooks knew what the answer would be, and when he put the proposition to the first of them, Esso, there was a polite, but definite: ‘NO.’

  ‘That was pretty well the start and the end of the conversation,’ Brooks recalls.

  Chevron told him they would have a look at it, but a message soon came back that they had no access to such fuel in the United Kingdom. His confidence lifted when Belgium’s Petrofina had better news. They had access in the United Kingdom to a fuel known as JP10, also specially designed for US military use. A little surprised by the news, Brooks asked why he’d never heard of it.

  ‘It’s used in Cruise missiles,’ came the explanation.

  Buoyed by the information, Brooks fired off a signal to Boeing in Seattle to see how JP10 specifications would stack up for use in a Boeing 747. Boeing shot back an instantaneous reply explaining the JP10 was so heavy that if you filled the 747’s tanks with it, the wings would fall off.

  ‘That was the end of the JP10 idea,’ says Brooks.

  Then his hopes were raised again when another supplier, British Petroleum, told him they might have found a source.

  ‘The trouble was it was in Nigeria and the quantity we wanted—around 50 000 US gallons—would have to be transported to London in 44-gallon drums!’

  The problem really boiled down to the fact that an amount of 50 000 gallons, or 189 270 litres, was too small to be specially made at a refinery, and too large to be produced by a laboratory. It was at this point that Shell suddenly expressed an interest. They had a small refinery near Hamburg, in Germany, which might just be able to produce the right type of crude for the job.

  Shell’s association with Qantas dated back to the earliest days of the airline in the 1920s, providing fuel at some of the most isolated places in outback Australia and earning the deep gratitude of its founder, Hudson Fysh. For subsequent decades that loyalty was repaid as Shell remained the major fuel supplier to the airline until the jet age of the sixties when jet fuel replaced gasoline and other fuel company options became available and Shell itself withdrew from some of the areas Qantas served. Through it all, though, Shell retained a special place in the minds of many Qantas old hands.

  But even Shell was finding it hard to overcome a reluctance on the part of its German subsidiary to break into its rigidly controlled production schedule to produce a one-off batch of special fuel. In the meantime, John Ward was showing a degree of impatience, at one stage telling Brooks, admittedly with a wry smile:

  ‘Peter, if we have to cancel this because we can’t get the fuel, your out-of-pockets are coming out of your salary.’

  Brooks found himself once again on the way to London.

  Meanwhile, other requirements in the equation were being quietly studied, perhaps the most important after fuel being the complexity of airways’ clearances halfway around the world. Despite all the pieces which must come together, flying a load of passengers and freight between Sydney and London, two of the most distant cities on earth, is nowadays a fairly straightforward matter. Crews lodge flight plans for air routes and altitudes across sectors which are clearly defined. In years gone by it was a multi-sector task as piston-engined airliners literally ground-hopped through multiple stopping points along the Kangaroo Route, until the advent of the big jets decreased it first to two stops and then, finally, to the point where a London to Sydney flight required only one stop en route.

  But while the number of intermediate points may have decreased, the amount of traffic using the airspace has increased tremendously, no better demonstrated than over Europe where thousands of airliners crisscross the skies along a jigsaw of air routes and at an assortment of altitudes. Add to this the requirement for air space to be quarantined for military use by various countries, along with sovereign borders to be recognised, and the airspace across Europe resembles something of a zigzag pattern. The very idea of suggesting a change to that pattern to allow one aircraft priority to fly any variation of the established routes to travel nearly 18 000 kilometres across the world in one leap was the aviation equivalent to asking Moses to part the waters.

  But if a nonstop record was to be achieved that was what must happen. With fuel burn critical, Massy-Greene and his crew would need the ability to choose the most direct route between various points and, just as importantly, the altitudes which would take advantage of the most favourable winds. Too many headwinds, forecast or not, would put paid to the attempt.

  Gradually the small group gathered on the ‘need-to-know basis’ began a route study to plan the shortest possible ground kilometres for the flight, factoring in numerous alternatives to take advantage of the winds which might be available on the day. There was an early setback. Originally the first aircraft had been scheduled for delivery in April, which was statistically, as far as prevailing winds were concerned, the best time to make the attempt. Production delays, however, had now rolled the date to August, the worst time of the year on the winds front.

  Despite some early Boeing figures using the shorter Great Circle distances across the earth’s surface, Massy-Greene knew that today’s busy skies still would be asking Moses to do too much so the flight would have to use established routes. Working in nautical miles, he calculated that the shortest route would be 9624 nautical miles and to achieve that they would have to squeeze more out of the aircraft, even with all the favourable air-traffic-control clearances they could hope for. And since the best estimate for the aircraft’s maximum range if flown empty was just over 9000 nautical miles they had a way to go.

  As the weeks went by Massy-Greene continued to throw a variety of unique operating procedures into the melting pot, all designed to lighten the load and achieve more efficient fuel burn. Use of only one of the aircraft’s air-conditioning units would reduce the bleed air demand from the engines for operating air conditioning, easing their use of fuel, and since few passengers would be aboard, that would also help.

  The weight of the aircraft would need to be minimised, even down to the quantity of drinking water to be carried. Only safety and galley equipment essential to cater for the estimated 30 people on board would remain, the rest ferried home to Qantas from the United States aboard normal Qantas flights out of Los Angeles. The freight holds would be empty.

  But fuel still remained the critical factor. They first thought of chilling it to increase the quality, but no one really knew whether that would work with 60 000 US g
allons of it. The team knew, though, that if they overrode the volumetric shutoff valves, which automatically prevented totally filling the tanks during re-fuelling, they could gain an extra 1892 litres. They were edging closer but much now depended on Brooks. Then the breakthrough came.

  In June, eight weeks out from the proposed flight, Shell gave Brooks the news that they could provide a solution using their specialised manufacturing-and-research facilities near Hamburg, Germany to produce a fuel. It would be an expensive one-off project, but if it could be done Brooks didn’t much care. At least it now wasn’t to come out of his own pocket!

  A search of Shell’s database narrowed the variety of crudes available from 400 down to 20 which could possibly meet the demands of the Qantas flight. From there followed an intense programme of blending and testing until a suitable high density could be achieved, although getting the fuel mix across Europe to London’s Heathrow airport would be a challenge in its own right.

  Because the high-density component was being produced at a refinery several kilometres from the normal Jet A-1 Hamburg plant, individual rail cars would have to be used as mixing vats to blend the two constituents. They would then be sealed and stored at the refinery until they were loaded into ten road tankers, driven across Europe and carried on different ferries across the Channel to the United Kingdom. The seals would only be released when the time came to transfer the fuel from the tankers to the fueller for the final series of shuttles to the aircraft. In the meantime the rail cars at Hamburg would be shunted backwards and forwards periodically to ensure the mix was retained.

  By now, however, it was July, more people were gradually being involved in the planning and the time for secrecy was running out, not least because the flight was a ‘one off’ and numerous special approvals for flight rights would have to be obtained from countries en route, a process which in some cases might take anything up to 30 days. By now, too, the venture was producing a prodigious amount of paperwork. The flight plan alone for this particular Kangaroo Route operation, normally comprising a few pages, stretched for three metres and had to be read across a Boeing meeting room board table.

  On 26 July Qantas’ director of flight operations, Captain Ken Davenport, announced the airline’s intentions. Along with using the flight to validate the 747-400’s performance data and fuel-management techniques: ‘We intend to enter the flight in the aviation record books.’

  Up to now a South African Airways Boeing 747SP (Special Performance) aircraft had held the nonstop distance record for a commercial aircraft, flying a Great Circle distance of 8872 nautical miles in seventeen hours 22 minutes between Seattle and Cape Town. Until the development of the 400 series, the SP, two of which had once been in the Qantas fleet, had been the longest-range commercial aircraft in the world, sacrificing normal passenger load for longer distance on selected routes.

  Along with Massy-Greene, Davenport announced the aircraft would be flown by three other executive captains, Flight Operations Training Director Captain Ray Heiniger, Flight Standards and Safety Director Rob Greenop, and Manager Flight Simulator George Lindeman. The carefully selected few on board would comprise senior representatives of Qantas, engine manufacturer Rolls Royce, Boeing, Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority and Shell; Qantas’ deputy chairman, Jack Davenport, and Mrs Davenport; and a small group of journalists, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian and the London Times.

  Ironically, the flight would have echoes of Qantas’ epic Double Sunrise service from Perth to Colombo in the Second World War: those on board would see the sunrise twice.

  Freed of the secrecy component and now spending most of his time in Seattle as the aircraft’s delivery date of 9 August drew near, Massy-Greene and the team set about obtaining the approvals and clearances necessary as Qantas Head Office geared up for a publicity blitz to make the most of the opportunity.

  In the meantime, rumours had begun to circulate that if British Airways had intended to attempt a nonstop London-to-Perth flight they had now abandoned that idea and planned to achieve their own media spectacular by landing not one but two 400s simultaneously at Heathrow on delivery. Even with such a reduced opposition media challenge to deal with, many in Qantas were still mindful that if their own venture fell short the laugh might be on the Australian airline.

  The plan was to fly the aircraft from Seattle to London several days before, a flight to be used to test the aircraft’s engine and systems performance, but the unknowns were still there. How would the aircraft perform on its first long flight to London? Were their calculations correct? Even an unscheduled delay in the planned departure date from London would be embarrassing, given the plans to garner maximum media exposure via a press conference at a premier London hotel.

  Added to that, the crew had to be ‘trained’. Because the nonstop aircraft was the airline’s first of the 400 type, it required its crew to have a specific endorsement over and above that required for the 200 and 300 series 747s, which had been part of the airline’s fleet for many years. And because of the tight time frame, endorsement of the pilots would need to be compressed from three days into one.

  Not even Massy-Greene himself had been endorsed on the 400, although by now he had a number of hours on it as part of its acceptance process. Ray Heiniger, however, had already been endorsed by a Boeing pilot, so they managed to achieve the conversion in four hours of intense training over Boeing’s training area at Moses Lake, near Seattle. It was there that their first serious problem arose.

  As they went through their endorsement flight, they detected what they would later describe as an ‘oil hide’ problem in two of the aircraft’s Rolls Royce RB211 engines. While their instruments would show normal oil pressure, other indicators revealed the engine oil quantity reducing markedly over a period of hours.

  ‘We were concerned about it and sent a message to Rolls [UK] to see if they had another two engines just in case we needed them as at this rate these two wouldn’t make it to Sydney,’ Heiniger remembers.

  As it would turn out, similar problems would occur on the positioning flight to London, causing the crew concern despite the all-important oil-pressure readings remaining normal. Eventually, while Rolls would subsequently find a solution to the problem, crews were instructed to operate normally unless oil pressure decreased also. For his part, Heiniger suggests this ‘oil hide’ problem was exacerbated by the intense training regime over Moses Lake, where the aircraft was consistently engaged on left-hand turns for hours in the circuit area, thus affecting the two engines on the ‘downside’.

  Finally, on 11 August, the Boeing 747-400 City of Canberra, watched by a contingent of Australian television and print media flown to Seattle for the occasion, took off on its positioning flight to London with a mix of nervous expectation among its crew. Despite concerns with the oil-quantity readings the aircraft performed perfectly and computer-performance readouts in London confirmed the green light for the record attempt to leave London on 16 August.

  By now, however, as media interest increased and final plans were put in place for the London press conference, events at Qantas corporate headquarters in Sydney risked diverting the attention of the media in another direction. The airline’s board and its chief executive, John Menadue, were on a collision course and on the cusp of a bitter parting of the ways. Differences between a strong-willed Menadue, with an impeccable public-service background and was a former ambassador to Japan, with the accompanying friends in high places—and Qantas Chairman Jim Leslie—generally acknowledged as one of the finest chairmen since the days of the airline’s first, Sir Fergus McMaster, but equally as strong-willed—had been festering for months, resulting in serious differences between Menadue, Leslie and the board.

  By mid-July, as planning for the flight reached a critical stage, although Menadue’s contract still had two years to run, the Qantas board had already decided to advertise the chief executive’s position ‘and an appropriate
remuneration package’. Menadue was free to apply, but a ferocious behind-the-scenes battle was being fought, occasionally accompanied by dramatic media accounts.

  The issue became further complicated, at least for Qantas Deputy Chairman Jack Davenport, when Leslie had to undergo major heart surgery, forcing him to delegate the carriage of the Menadue issue to Davenport and another board member, Sir Tristan Antico. On 25 July the board announced that Menadue’s contract had been terminated by agreement ‘notwithstanding Mr Menadue’s desire to continue to serve out the terms of his contract’, and that John Ward had been appointed acting chief executive. At the same time Menadue made it clear to staff that he had not resigned.

  With the issue creating daily media interest in Australia, Davenport was hardly looking forward to being the first Qantas board member to be exposed to a baying media pack in London, some of them Australian representatives, where a wrong answer could have significant legal implications. His fears were well founded. The Menadue dispute was among the first questions asked, but he had been well briefed and slid deftly behind an inability to respond for legal reasons. However, he later made no secret of the fact that he was looking forward to boarding the City of Canberra for home.

  Beyond the Menadue questions, the media conference resulted in worldwide coverage of the coming flight, one London daily even carrying the story across its front page, along with a map of the route the 400 would take. Now all the four captains and their aeroplane had to do was achieve it.

  London on 16 August was overcast when the four crew members gathered on Heathrow’s tarmac below the aircraft for a final few words with the media. The aircraft-refuelling truck had run a shuttle the night before to deliver the high density and allow it to contract further overnight and they’d overridden the volumetric shut-off system to allow another 1892 litres as a final top-up.

  Now that it was down to the wire there was a tension in the air, evident when Massy-Greene snapped at a press photographer who wanted him to strike yet another pose. Months of planning and living the problem was beginning to take its toll and he wanted to be on his way. He and his crew had also read something in the weather reports they hadn’t wanted to see. The forecast winds en route were the worst they had been for weeks.