by Jim Eames
Trans-Australia Airlines Flight 552 on the night of 8 June 1979, barely had time to climb to its designated altitude of 8000 feet when Captain Grahame Mackelmann and his first officer, John Pyman, were told to descend to 4000 feet for the approach to Brisbane airport. Just as they pointed the nose of the DC-9 down, Mackelmann turned to see passenger Phillip Sillery burst into the cockpit, waving a sawn-off shotgun at him and demanding the aircraft climb to 20 000 feet. Despite the demand, accompanied by a blast of abuse, Pyman, who was hand-flying the aircraft, continued the descent but immediately switched on the DC-9’s emergency transponder which would alert air-traffic control that they had a hijacker aboard.
Pointing the gun at Mackelmann’s head, Sillery insisted the cockpit door be closed and told him to use the aircraft’s public-address system to instruct the passengers to remain seated. While Pyman commenced a slow circle over Brisbane, still descending, Mackelmann began to talk to Sillery, pointing to the fuel gauges and the limited amount of fuel in the aircraft’s tanks and explaining that the aircraft would have to land. Sillery, on the other hand, realising the aircraft was still descending, became more and more agitated, claiming he was not going to let the aircraft land and at one stage threatening:
‘We will crash the aeroplane. Put it into Moreton Bay, land or water, I don’t care. I’ve got nothing to lose.’
As was normal procedure during an airliner’s descent, the crew had earlier programmed their altitude settings to alert them when the aircraft reached their assigned descent altitude and now, as the DC-9 reached 4000 feet, the amber warning light began to flash on the instrument panel.
Acting on instinct, Pyman reached forward to cancel the flashing light, only to have Sillery smash the gun barrel down on his arm and demanding he put both of his hands on top of the cockpit panel in front of him. Pyman did so, placing right hand over left, only to have the gun crack down on him again and Sillery insist it be left over right.
With Pyman’s hands now on the panel there were moments where the aircraft was not under the control of either pilot, and as it passed through 3000 feet Mackelmann told the hijacker: ‘I have to fly the aircraft,’ at the same time taking the control column, and pressing his radio button to warn air-traffic control that they were now at 3000 feet.
With that Sillery pressed the gun to Mackelmann’s head.
‘Shut up. Don’t use the radio.’
Trying to think of ways to reason with the man, Pyman ventured: ‘What about all the kids down the back?’
The question seemed to have an effect on the hijacker who then told them he had a wife and two children. Realising this might present an opportunity Mackelmann began to explain that unless they landed the children would be killed.
‘I’ll make you a deal. Let us land, allow the passengers off and I’ll refuel the aircraft and take you anywhere you want to go.’
To Mackelmann’s relief Sillery agreed, but with the proviso that there were to be no police and they taxi to the dark end of the aerodrome. He also demanded Mackelmann show him on a map of the aerodrome where they intended to park the DC-9.
By now the DC-9 had entered the circuit area of the airfield, on a wide downwind leg before lining up on the runway, but Sillery again became agitated and kept changing his mind about landing, while Mackelmann and Pyman kept insisting they had to land. The worst moment came when, with the aircraft at barely 200 feet above the runway, Sillery, the shotgun pressing against Mackelmann’s head shouted: ‘Don’t land! Don’t land!’
Demonstrating remarkable courage, Mackelmann made a critical decision. He had identified the shotgun as a single shot and with only one cartridge in the chamber he was confident Pyman could continue the landing if Sillery pulled the trigger. In short, he was willing to risk his own life to save his aircraft and its passengers.
But Sillery didn’t fire and Mackelmann remembered experiencing a moment of incredible relief when, seconds before touchdown, Sillery moved from behind his seat into the centre of the cockpit. For an instant Mackelmann considered slamming on the aircraft’s brakes but rejected the notion for fear the hijacker would topple and discharge the shotgun.
Once they had taxied to the holding area and shut down the engines, there followed a period of negotiation where Sillery at first refused to release the passengers but then finally agreed to let one of the flight attendants open the rear door of the DC-9 to allow the passengers to disembark.
Even with the passengers gone, however, the drama still had more than an hour to run. After forcing the four flight attendants to sit down on the galley floor, Sillery became alarmed that the rear door of the aircraft had been left open and took one of the women to the back of the aircraft with him to close the door, threatening to shoot her if any of the others moved. While the flight attendant walked down the aisle, Sillery moved at a crouch as if to stay below the window line of the aircraft and not be seen from outside.
Mackelmann and Pyman began insisting to Sillery that if the aircraft was to be refuelled it would need to be taken to a hydrant point near the terminal building. Finally Sillery agreed. However, when the two pilots began their pre-start cockpit check he again became frantic and insisted they start the engines immediately.
As the aircraft taxied across the airfield his tension increased. Still menacing them with the gun, he at one stage broke its barrel to show them it was loaded, at the same time throwing several shotgun cartridges onto the floor of the flight deck. Careful not to be seen by the gunman, Pyman gently edged one of the cartridges out of sight with his foot.
In the tense period to follow, Sillery’s requests ranged from demands to talk to television personality Mike Willesee and to his own wife and family in Tweed Heads and for Mackelmann to immediately take off again. In between he spent time moving up and down the aisle of the aircraft on his hands and knees while looking out of the windows on either side, as if trying to figure out where they were on the airport. Once, when a fuel tanker approached the aircraft with its strobe light flashing, Sillery panicked thinking it might be the police and, hurling abuse at the crew, called for it to be taken away.
With the DC-9 stationary at the southern end of Brisbane airport, police in the terminal building had begun to negotiate with Sillery via the cockpit loudspeaker in the DC-9, assuring him they were trying to contact his family. This appeared to have a calming effect on Sillery and he moved into the front cabin where Esme Qazim and the other flight attendants were gathered. Qazim suddenly noticed Sillery didn’t have his finger on the trigger. Taking the opportunity she grabbed at the gun, at the same time throwing herself onto Sillery and sending both of them crashing to the floor while the other women piled on top of him.
Pyman ran back to help while Mackelmann shouted into the radio, ‘Get out here as quickly as you can. We’ve got him,’ grabbed the shotgun, opened the DC-9’s front door and threw the weapon onto the tarmac. He then handcuffed Sillery, and the crew held him until police arrived. The 90-minute drama was over and both the Queensland Police Commissioner and the airline expressed high praise for the actions of the crew.
Philip Sillery, aged 32, seaman, of Tweed Heads, Queensland, was subsequently charged with having unlawfully exercised control of a plane while armed with a 12-gauge shotgun. Grahame Mackelmann and Esme Qazim both received the Star of Courage for their bravery. Esme Qazim continued flying after this event.
Mackelmann continued to fly as a senior captain with the airline, but it would be a mid-air drama of another type which would occupy much of his time and have a deep and lasting impact on him and his family. In May 1986 the Mackelmanns’ only son, Craig, 22, who had followed his father into a flying career, was killed when his RAAF Mirage crashed off the NSW coast.
Pilot Officer Craig Mackelmann’s Mirage fighter was one of three Mirages chasing a target towed by a Learjet aircraft in a training exercise on the RAAF’s air-gunnery range off the coast when his aircraft crashed in mysterious circumstances. The Mirages had made a series of passes at the t
arget drogue being towed behind the Learjet when, without a mayday alert or any distress call, Mackelmann’s aircraft dived into the sea. Only a few remains and small pieces of debris were recovered.
Grahame Mackelmann refused to accept the results of a RAAF inquiry which determined that no one was to blame for the crash and set about to prove otherwise, a task that was to occupy much of his time for many years. He first accused the RAAF of a cover-up, believing that one of the other Mirage pilots had shot down his son by mistake when he set out to engage the target before Mackelmann had completed his own pass and given the customary all-clear. Other factors were also raised, including the RAAF’s inability to locate camera-gun footage of the exercise and questions about aircraft maintenance.
Mackelmann also refuted an early implication that his son had been drinking the night before the exercise and that alcohol had contributed to his death, a claim that eventually won him something of an apology after he gathered evidence that Craig would have had a zero blood-alcohol reading by the time he set out on the exercise at midday the following day.
Amid RAAF refusals to allow him to talk to the other pilot, Mackelmann took the issue repeatedly to the media and politicians, on one occasion encouraging his local member, Kevin Rudd, then in Opposition, to ask a series of questions in Parliament. He continued his campaign after Rudd became prime minister. A total of seven inquiries were subsequently held, including a Board of Inquiry, a Coroner’s inquest, appeals and further reviews of some of the findings, none of which would provide Mackelmann with the closure he sought. He was still pursuing the case at the time of his death in April 2012.
Although additional steps would be taken to improve airline security following the Mackelmann DC-9 incident, four years later, in February 1983, TAA again would be the target of a hijack, this time on one of its wide-bodied Airbus A300s. And while flight TN 005 would not be the subject of one of the random security checks then in force before its early-afternoon departure from Perth for Melbourne, given the ‘weapon’ subsequently involved, it’s doubtful security staff would have noticed anything untoward in one particular passenger’s carry-on luggage even if they had checked.
With 139 passengers and a crew of fifteen under the command of Captain Ken Wakeman, a 34-year veteran with the airline, the early stages of the flight had been perfectly normal until after it had passed Esperance, 643 kilometres east of Perth. That was about the time Wakeman became aware of a weather front developing ahead of him.
While Wakeman considered what he might do to avoid it, back in the aircraft’s cabin Senior Flight Attendant Deborah Dare was being confronted in the galley by a man carrying what appeared to be an old-fashioned portable tape recorder, who told her he wanted to see the captain. When Dare asked him what he wanted to see the captain about, the man held the device out in front of him and replied: ‘You take me to the captain or I’ll press this button.’ Dare and the man immediately headed for the cockpit. Once there the man told Dare to leave and lock the door behind her.
In the cockpit itself, Wakeman, until now preoccupied with the weather ahead, suddenly found himself confronted by a passenger suggesting that unless he did what he was told, he would ‘blow the aeroplane up’ and proceeding to show Wakeman how he could do so by pressing his finger on a button on the recorder in his hand.
Wakeman noticed immediately that although the intruder spoke softly he appeared determined and disturbed.
‘We’re going to the Franklin River,’ the man said.
‘This aircraft cannot land in Tasmania,’ replied Wakeman.
Wakeman then attempted to distract the man’s attention by explaining that there was difficult weather ahead, but the man kept insisting on a diversion to Tasmania. When told they would need charts to fly to Tasmania the hijacker said they should divert to Adelaide, but Wakeman managed to talk him into going on to Melbourne on the basis that the charts could be acquired there and it was ‘closer to Tasmania’.
In the meantime the copilot, First Officer Peter Andrews, had thrown the emergency hijack alert switch so that those on the ground knew they had a crisis on board. As they flew on, Wakeman, Andrews and Flight Engineer Stan Scaplinski carried on a three-way conversation with the man, one largely initiated by the hijacker and mostly centred around political injustices, the influence of ‘power groups’ and ‘racial prejudice’.
Gradually, the crew felt they were beginning to gain the man’s confidence and he first agreed to release the passengers and shortly after announced he would release the crew as well. At the same time all three crew members noticed he kept his finger poised above a button on his little black box.
Wakeman was starting to get the impression that the man was confused, particularly after saying he would release the crew then realising he couldn’t fly the aeroplane to Tasmania himself. About 40 minutes out of Melbourne, by now apparently convinced the crew were totally in agreement with his own political views, the man suddenly handed the black box to Scaplinski with the suggestion that they should descend and throw the bomb into the sea. Wakeman told him such a move would be risky as the device might strike the side of the aircraft and cause an explosion.
During the final minutes of the flight into Melbourne the man remained quietly in his seat, but Wakeman still had serious concerns about the situation and was determined to evacuate the passengers as quickly as possible. He became even more troubled when, during the landing run, the passenger asked how long they had been flying. When Wakeman told him three and a half hours he said: ‘I’m not sure whether there is a time device on the bomb.’
Extremely worried, Wakeman taxied to the end of the runway and initiated an immediate evacuation of the Airbus via escape slides, leaving only the aircrew on board.
Once all the passengers had gone it came time for Wakeman and the hijacker also to evacuate the aircraft. When the two men walked to the forward slide the hijacker told Wakeman to go first. Wakeman was having none of it and insisted they both slide down together. And they did, Wakeman to safety on the ground and Clifford Watego into the waiting hands of the police.
TAA files reveal that Clifford Watego, 28, arts student, of Logan Lea, Queensland, pleaded guilty to a charge of hijacking under the Crimes (Hijacking of Aircraft) Act, but evidence tendered in court alleged that he had attended an Aboriginal writers’ conference where a paper he had presented had been ‘ripped to shreds’ by delegates, an experience which had led to a nervous breakdown. He was subsequently released by the Supreme Court on a $1000 three-year, good-behaviour bond, a decision which left TAA less than impressed and one they claimed paid insufficient regard ‘to the considerable trauma experienced by our flight crew and the risk of injury to our passengers in the resultant aircraft evacuation’.
In a letter to then minister for aviation, Kim Beazley, TAA Chairman, R.R. Law-Smith, also pointed out that while considerations other than deterrence may be taken into account when sentencing offenders, ‘there did not appear to have been due consideration given to Australia’s international obligations when dealing with offenders of this kind’.
What might also have been in the minds of those at TAA were the costs involved. Repairs to the A300’s escape slides, accommodation of passengers who missed connections, hire of buses, refreshments, labour and materials, had come to more than $18 000.
As for Cliff Watego, although the leniency of the sentence was criticised at the time, he would recover from the trauma of his breakdown and subsequent trial to become the first Aboriginal and Pacific Islander student to graduate with a masters degree from the University of Queensland and later worked helping to motivate young Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders to go to university.
11
The ‘great plane robbery’
When Rockhampton airline porter, Neville Cantrell, opened the cargo door of TAA’s D-C9 service Flight 465 late one September morning in 1982, he could never have imagined he was about to foil one of the most daring and imaginative attempted robberies in
Australia’s criminal history.
As the door swung open, Cantrell’s eye caught the movement of a gloved hand as it closed the lid of a large pine crate near the side of the hold—setting off a chain of events which would see police racing to airports across Queensland to make arrests in what was to become known as the Great Plane Coffin Caper. Inside the Rockhampton box was Lance James Woolcock, 35, cramped and cold after a two-hour flight from Brisbane in the DC-9s pressurised hold. Stacked around him in the crate was $200 000 in Reserve Bank notes, which he’d managed to transfer from their original security box in the hold. The notes had been replaced by telephone books.
Within minutes Woolcock was handcuffed by the aircraft’s captain and Rockhampton police were on their way to the airport, but not before a quick-thinking Rockhampton detective had joined some mental dots and figured there might be more than one prospective thief airborne over Queensland that morning.
He was right. Alerted by the Rockhampton discovery, detectives in Townsville and Mt Isa were waiting as two other flights with similar $200 000-Reserve-Bank consignments arrived at their respective airports and by early afternoon five men were in police custody, several of them with suspected links to Melbourne’s notorious Painters and Dockers Union.
Police acknowledged the attempted heist must have been months in the planning and would have required intimate knowledge of the Reserve Bank’s transfer methods, along with details of air-freight procedures. Those months of planning came together on the morning of 21 September when the Reserve Bank consignments, destined for Commonwealth Banks at Mt Isa, Rockhampton, Townsville and Cairns were due to be loaded on TAA flights.
Booked as freight on the same flights were four crates, pine boxes each measuring over a metre in length and just over half a metre in width. Everything went according to plan except for one of the boxes, which for some unknown reason missed being loaded onto the Cairns flight and was left sitting in TAA’s Brisbane freight terminal.
