Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  A last-minute request from Sydney head office hadn’t helped. They asked if he could take another passenger, an engineer who had come to London to assist in the turnaround servicing of the aircraft at Heathrow. For Massy-Greene, who had banned everything beyond the barest hand luggage for the 22 already on the flight, an extra passenger now was the last thing he wanted, but the figures which had come out of the computer after the Seattle–London flight had been better than expected so he reluctantly agreed.

  Indeed, weight had become such an obsession with the crew that, when someone in London had arranged with Australian cricket captain, Allan Border, to pass them a ball used in the Fifth Test for symbolic carriage back to Australia, Heiniger had jokingly suggested they would have to weigh it first.

  There would be no customary start-up of engines when they pushed back from the terminal and, as the tug hooked to the front undercarriage assembly slowly began to tow them out across the airfield towards the end of the runway, those on the ground watched in mild disbelief as fuel spilled out from the wingtip vents. Fuel man, Peter Brooks, watched without comment. It might not have been a sight easily associated with the operating procedures of one of the world’s leading airlines, but calculations showed it would save half a tonne of fuel between the terminal and the start of the runway.

  Massy-Greene would later admit to a substantial feeling of relief when the first engine started normally. ‘Although there was no reason to doubt the engine would start, this was the first time this fuel had been used,’ he recalls.

  In a gesture which would prove typical of the cooperation they would receive for the entire flight, London air-traffic control had granted permission for City of Canberra to use the arrivals runway at Heathrow, slotting them between two arriving aircraft and thus avoiding any delay they might experience. Then, with an official of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the organisation responsible for the oversight of all aviation record attempts, standing nearby to record the exact time, the wheels began to move and the City of Canberra was on its way.

  Once in the air, air-traffic control helped again by giving the 400 direct clearance to 33 000 feet, thus avoiding the requirement for any steep climbing in the normal ‘step-up’ procedure through various altitude levels across Europe. This was a northern summer and a busy time on European air routes as numerous holiday charter flights joined the already crowded skies. But not only were air-traffic controllers below showing interest by asking the City of Canberra for details of flight times and crew complement, it also quickly became evident that air-traffic control were in fact moving aircraft out of the 400’s way.

  When one airline pilot over Germany complained that he was looking to conserve fuel on a long-range flight and requested the City of Canberra’s altitude, the 400’s crew heard the controller explain that they already had an aircraft at that altitude: ‘And he’s going a bit further than you are.’

  With the airways virtually parting in front of it, the aircraft tracked over Frankfurt, right of the Austrian Alps, across Yugoslavia—where a Belgrade controller passed on the official greetings of the government—and Bulgaria towards Ankara in Turkey where it changed course slightly to head directly towards Tehran, then onto a more southerly course towards Muscat, Oman.

  Up to now all had been going smoothly, but as the aircraft climbed to 37 000 feet it became obvious the headwinds were much stronger even than forecast. For the next three hours, as it headed for Colombo, the crew could do nothing but watch as their fuel reserve started to diminish. Massy-Greene was now even starting to regret adding his extra passenger.

  In the cabin of the aircraft those on board had settled into a routine of their own. Night had fallen as they crossed the Middle East, but there were still things to do. Arrangements had been put in place for live broadcasts to be made from the aircraft by the ABC at various stages of the journey and the journalists on board were busy with requests for interviews from numerous radio stations in Australia and other parts of the globe.

  For the two cabin crew on board, Dave Cohen and Mal Callander, both senior flight service directors, the flight was anything but normal. With two daylight and two night sectors, all of them very short, along with a weight limit on what could be catered, a decision had been made early that everyone would eat when they felt hungry. Cohen and Callander had made sure, however, that nobody would have reason to complain about the menu.

  The choice for brunch was fillet steak served with spinach and croquettes of potato, or grilled halibut with parsley butter. Dinner came as medallions of veal or poached salmon, with strawberries and a selection of cheese and fruit to follow. Breakfast offered rolled oats and a cheese omelette served with tomato and bacon. With exercise important on such a long flight the vacant aisles of the aircraft became a walking track for many with Mrs Davenport taking it one step further by jogging circuits in her tracksuit.

  For Davenport, the dramas of the corporate world now thousands of kilometres away and himself a former pilot, the flight was of more than usual interest. Serving in wartime Europe he had once led his squadron of Royal Air Force Beauforts from England to Russia to protect North Sea convoys on the last stages of their hazardous journey to Murmansk. Not only was the flight from England to Russia at the extreme end of his Beaufort’s range but he would later reveal that, once based in Murmansk, the Russians were so concerned that he and his crew would decide to take the first opportunity to return to England that they only provided them with enough fuel to enable them to meet the convoys, provide temporary protection from German raiders and return to Murmansk. Davenport knew what saving fuel was all about.

  The long hours would leave lasting impressions on some of those aboard. Dave Rowley, aviation writer from the Australian newspaper, had migrated to Australia from the United Kingdom only eighteen months previously and couldn’t believe his good fortune in being assigned to cover the flight. He recalls the narrow margin between success and failure hitting home when they were even being towed to the end of the runway before starting up.

  It did give me time to consider that if a few moments of taxi time were the key to us making it over the runway threshold beyond Qantas Drive in Sydney, I’d have gone on a more rigorous diet beforehand to lighten the load!

  He still found it difficult to grasp he was part of making history, thundering down Heathrow’s runway in a first-class seat.

  Surely it had to be tougher than this to be a pioneer? Surely we had to be struggling with oil-specked goggles like Kingsford Smith or one of the other great aviators?

  Other memories of the flight would remain. More than twenty years later Rowley would compare the increased security restrictions with those of that ground-breaking flight, where the cockpit door stayed open and the four pilots were happy to answer his interminable questions.

  Unexpectedly the pilots even provided him with an opportunity to boast. His father, Allen, also a former aviation writer, had achieved a career highlight by dashing across the North Sea at the speed of sound in a US Air Force Super Sabre, so the crew patched him in from the flight deck to his family’s home phone in Leeds.

  Of course sat-phone links are common nowadays, but in 1989, for my folks to get a call from a Qantas 747-400 en route to making history was hugely exciting—though I think initially they thought someone was playing a prank on them from the local phone box.

  Sydney Morning Herald aviation writer, Tom Ballantyne, who enjoyed a cigarette or two, had other reasons to be thankful.

  I believe David Massy-Greene and I were the only smokers on board and David kindly declared the cockpit a smoking zone.

  He was even impressed by some of the contents of the limited catering, commenting for the Herald story:

  Because of weight restrictions, crucial to the success of the flight, only 350 kilograms had been allowed for food and beverages. That meant rationing of drinks.

  The official drinks list included only two dozen cans of Fosters, not much beer for a 20-hour flight. Bu
t there were five bottles of champagne, two bottles of white wine and two of red and various bottles of spirits.

  It turned out to be enough.

  Up front, as they passed Colombo and headed towards Cocos Island, the crew noticed the winds turn in their favour as they climbed to 41 000 feet, but there was continuous fuel monitoring and attention to the aircraft’s trim to ensure it had the optimum profile to cut through the air.

  Then, over Cocos, came the news they had been dreading, particularly at this late stage of the flight with their already reduced fuel reserves. There was a revised weather forecast for Sydney, predicting intermittent thunderstorms about the time of their arrival. If this forecast persisted it would mean regulations would require they would need double their reserve fuel. A quick calculation revealed that at this stage they didn’t have even 30 minutes of reserve fuel, let alone the 60 minutes required. Luckily, the winds had begun to turn, swinging around to their tail and in their favour. They began to make up lost time and their fuel situation started to improve.

  By the time they crossed the Australian coast at Carnarvon, Western Australia, the crew’s confidence had improved markedly and, while they now had enough fuel to reach Sydney, that Sydney thunderstorm forecast and a requirement for a diversion could mean the agony of last-minute failure. They knew the weather in either Adelaide or Melbourne was good in case they had to divert, but Massy-Greene was now remembering the words of his boss, Ken Davenport, who had mentioned during the planning stages that if he had to divert in the final stages he should not expect to fly home on the aircraft.

  ‘A bus,’ cautioned Davenport, ‘will be much more appropriate!’

  Unknown to the City of Canberra’s crew, however, now abeam Adelaide, that same Davenport was busy working some weather miracles from his operations centre at Mascot. On an open line to the weather forecasters he was suggesting it could be possible to change the forecast from thunderstorms to ‘heavy showers’, thus removing the requirement for that extra 30 minutes of fuel.

  To Davenport’s immense relief they agreed and a revised forecast was immediately flashed to the aircraft. Minutes later Davenport, still on an open line to the weather people, heard a shattering burst of thunder above him and directly over Qantas’ Mascot Jet Base.

  ‘What the **** was that?’ exclaimed the weather man.

  Legend has it that Davenport’s response was that no one at Mascot had heard anything!

  Approaching Mascot out of the cloud and rain from the north, sheets of spray spewed from the undercarriage as the big 747 touched down on the runway, twenty hours, nine minutes and five seconds after lift-off from London, half a world away. Despite the rain, crowds had gathered on the airport fringes to watch its arrival and hundreds of airport staff, groups of VIPs and media waited outside the Qantas hangars as the City of Canberra came to a stop. The four captains emerged first, to be immediately surrounded by a pressing media throng, but not before one of them inadvertently dropped Allan Border’s cricket ball, which clattered down the steps onto the tarmac.

  The months of planning, anxiety and doubt were over. They had done it and still had just over 45 minutes of fuel remaining in the tank and to follow would be dinners and congratulatory toasts and a general feeling of teamwork at its finest.

  Peter Brooks, however, would long harbour a tinge of regret. He had been determined to drain a tiny sample of the fuel from the City of Canberra’s tanks as a memento of the flight, but when he went to do so he found they had already refuelled the aircraft.

  ‘You know, they were so quick about it I’ve often wondered whether they didn’t want anyone to know how much they really had left,’ he says, with a slight smile.

  On November 2012, a Boeing Airplane Company’s 777-200 Long Range commercial airliner broke the Qantas distance record, flying between Hong Kong and London in 22 hours and 42 minutes. Massy-Greene, by now a Boeing employee, was among the first to congratulate those involved.

  8

  There’s something about low flying

  It was Lae, Papua New Guinea, early 1966. The telephone rings in the New Guinea Times Courier office. Brian Costello, local manager for Ansett-ANA, is on the line:

  There’s a Royal Air Force Hastings coming in from Honiara in the Solomons with hydraulic problems. He’s in for an emergency landing. You better get down here.

  Dusk is approaching as the vague outline of an aeroplane appears a long way to the south over Huon Gulf and gradually it takes the shape of a four-engine Hastings, a type based in the British Solomon Islands for transport duties. This aircraft, it turns out, is on its way back to England at the end of the crew posting and word from the captain is he may have problems with his undercarriage. He’s called for an emergency landing in case the gear doesn’t come down or collapses on landing.

  Fire engines and an ambulance are standing by as he makes his final approach from over the water and onto the runway. Fortunately nothing untoward happens and the aircraft rolls to a stop and taxis to Lae airport’s hardstand parking area.

  Ansett-ANA in Lae are charged with the handling of such itinerant aircraft, so Costello walks out to greet the crew as they climb out of the aircraft. He’s standing under the aircraft’s wing looking up as the captain, a flight lieutenant, comes around to join him.

  ‘What happened, skipper?’ Costello asks, a quizzical look on his face.

  ‘We had a bird strike and I think it may have fouled the hydraulics,’ is the reply.

  Costello, known locally for his quick wit, can’t help himself as he keeps staring up at branches and small twigs protruding from the lower wing and engine nacelles.

  ‘Christ, were they still in the bloody trees?’

  It hadn’t taken much to work out what had happened. The traditional low-flypast farewell had stayed a fraction too low for too long and cleaned up the tops of some trees at one end of Honiara’s airport. The result would be easily fixed, but presumably the flight lieutenant would have some explaining to do when he finally made it back to his squadron in the United Kingdom.

  One couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sorrow for him, at least from a Papua New Guinea point of view. A low flypast farewell was nothing out of the ordinary in the years after the war and into the 1960s. Lae, for instance, was at the extreme end of the Australia–Papua New Guinea services for Ansett-ANA and Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) who had taken over the route from Qantas. Thus most days of the week Ansett and TAA would alternate overnight Lockheed Electra services from Sydney and Brisbane to Port Moresby and on to Lae, arriving at their termination point in the early morning.

  To many in Lae the daily arrival was a little more than merely an airline flight. In a country where few roads existed and aviation was its lifeblood, the regular morning Electra was a link with the world beyond. It meant the mail, people coming back from leave in Australia and others going south for the same reason. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think of those old Western movies where everyone turned out to see the stagecoach come in. In 1960s Lae, with an airport, in typical PNG fashion, right in the middle of town, folks looked forward to the first appearance of that distant shape appearing out over Huon Gulf and the thin stream of black oil vapour trailing from its four engines. Around 7.30 in the morning you could almost set your watch on the sound of aero engines at reverse thrust echoing through the township as the Electra landed.

  Such an affinity with the aeroplane made it a special occasion when someone was ‘going finish’, the pidgin-English interpretation that their time in the Territory had come to an end and they were leaving, or ‘going south’, for the last time. This not only applied to residents but occasionally also to the aircraft captains who perhaps were moving on within the airline or retiring for good.

  And there was no better parting gesture than a flypast, usually achieved by the aircraft’s captain asking Lae air traffic control, somewhat tongue in cheek, for permission to: ‘Set Course down the runway’.

  The set pattern was a take-off towa
rds the sea, execute a slow turn inside the mountain range to the south and approach Lae from up the broad Markham Valley. Then it was a drop below the hill at the other end of the airstrip and a high-speed run at only a hundred feet or so above the middle of the runway and a soaring climb out once again over the Gulf.

  To the scores of Lae residents gathered at the airport it was as impressive as it was traditional and, sadly, it died when the airlines replaced their Electras with the Boeing 727 jets which terminated in Port Moresby. Lae airfield was no longer capable of handling such an aircraft and somehow the feeder service from Port Moresby with Fokker Friendships didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

  That said, low flying has been around since the Wright Brothers started things at Kittyhawk in 1903. Indeed, it was a daily occurrence in Australia’s early aviation where joy-riding and barnstorming were part of the romance of this new flying machine and pilots revelled in an environment where rules were few and those tasked with applying them were far away.

  Indeed in the days of the aforementioned Frank Collopy and his low-level salute to the clay shooters at Nhill, it was the rule rather than the exception, fortunately only costing Collopy a fine of 25 pounds rather than his life, and you didn’t need to be a daring young air-force aviator to try it.

  No one has ever been able to prove whether the tale is apocryphal or otherwise, but Frank’s brother, Jim, also a pilot and in charge of the Department of Civil Aviation’s Western Australian branch, told of once going out to a remote station to investigate a bird strike which had resulted in a badly damaged aeroplane. Jim had his suspicions about the cause and decided to take the feathers and other samples back to Perth for analysis. The story goes that Jim confirmed it was a case of low flying alright. They were chook feathers!