Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  Below them at Porgera, the local government patrol officer was supervising around 200 natives working at one end of the airstrip and when he first saw the Caribou above he wasn’t particularly concerned. He had been alerted to military exercises in the area and even as the aircraft began to lose height towards the field he assumed it was simply carrying out an aerial reconnaissance. On board the Caribou, however, the flaps and undercarriage were being lowered and they were preparing to land.

  It wasn’t long before the stark reality of what was happening dawned on those below. The natives, although used to light aircraft landing on their airfield, had never seen an aeroplane of this size before and began to bolt for the jungle, leaving the patrol officer to watch as the Caribou roared low over his head, flew for some distance just above the ground, then, the engines roaring tried to climb away.

  Meanwhile, in the cockpit of the Caribou, time and distance were already running out. Realising that the ground below him was sloping, the captain attempted to climb the aircraft away but despite his efforts to lift the nose the rising ground in front gradually beat him. Behind him, the patrol officer saw the Caribou disappear out of sight over a ridge. There were a few seconds of silence as the engines stopped, followed by a dull thud.

  It took him only minutes to reach the aircraft, embedded in thick growth and pandanus trees 366 metres uphill from the strip. By the time he arrived the copilot, his back injured, was lying on the Caribou’s rear loading ramp while the aircraft’s captain, badly hurt, was still in his seat. Using parts of the damaged aircraft as makeshift stretchers, the two crewmen were carried to the patrol post where a missionary doctor and nurse gave first aid. That afternoon a light aircraft transferred them to Mount Hagen where a RAAF aircraft took them on to hospital at Lae.

  In addition to the wrong identification of the airfield, RAAF investigations unearthed an interesting combination of factors which may have contributed to the accident, primary among them the fact that the captain may have been suffering the effects of hypoxia caused by lack of oxygen, thus impairing his judgement.

  Investigators found that although the flight from Wewak that morning had at times reached an altitude of 13 000 feet, neither crewman might have been equipped to handle the results of flying above 10 000 feet, the altitude where hypoxia can begin to take effect. The captain had left his protective helmet and oxygen mask back at his base at Richmond, near Sydney, and had inhaled intermittently from an oxygen hose. He had also failed to properly fit his safety harness before the landing, a decision which doubtless contributed to him suffering serious injuries in the crash. The copilot had his helmet but had not attached it to the oxygen mask, instead holding the mask to his face when he considered he needed oxygen.

  The final report found the accident occurred when the ‘captain attempted to overshoot in conditions beyond the capability of the aircraft’. It also cautioned other aircrew on the insidious effects of insufficient oxygen and its impact on ‘visual changes, poor discrimination, slowing of reaction time’.

  As for the Caribou. It was written off by the RAAF and is still at Porgera, although the engines were recovered. The hull of the aircraft has been put to good use, however—as living quarters for some fortunate locals.

  18

  Cyclone Tracy and the forgotten story of the uplift

  When it began to form over the Arafura Sea off Timor on 20 December 1974, Cyclone Tracy appeared to be no threat to Darwin, or anywhere in the Northern Territory for that matter; something to be watched perhaps, but typical of the tropical lows which occur in that part of the world at that time of the year. Early weather reports over the following days described it as tracking in a west south-westerly direction, and although communities on Goulburn and Bathurst islands off the Northern Territory coast were alerted, no gale-force winds were expected.

  Late on 23 December, however, radar reports showed the cyclone had turned to the south and by early morning on Christmas Eve Bathurst Island was being hit by winds of over 100 kilometres an hour. Then, at midday on the 24th it turned again, this time to the south-east and on a direct line for Darwin.

  Weather forecasters immediately issued a warning that ‘very destructive winds of 120 kilometres per hour with gusts of up to 150 kilometres per hour were on the way’ and Darwin radio stations began to regularly repeat the warnings and offer advice to listeners on how best to prepare themselves.

  Such warnings were nothing new to Darwin residents, of course, and were part of life for anyone living in the cyclone belt. This time, however, no one could have imagined that Cyclone Tracy would cost the lives of sixty-five people and destroy their city in what would be the biggest natural disaster in Australia’s history.

  What took place in Darwin in the early hours of Christmas Day, as terrified residents experienced the full fury of the cyclone and their homes disintegrated around them, is well known. Wind gusts which reached 217 kilometres per hour before the anemometer at Darwin’s airport was torn away, literally ripped homes apart, and by daylight on Christmas Day Darwin was a scene of utter devastation. Only 400 of the city’s 10 000 buildings remained intact, 35 vessels of varying sizes in Darwin’s harbour had been sunk, driven aground or damaged, and there was no electricity or water. Sixty-five people were dead, sixteen of them missing at sea, and given the destruction it remains a miracle that the death toll in a city of 40 000 people was not higher.

  In contrast to the deafening winds and torrential rain which had battered the city for hours, in the light of Christmas Day, as people tried to make some sense of it all, Darwin was in a cone of silence. With communications torn apart, the rest of Australia had no idea what had happened.

  Although many were injured and all were shocked and dazed, some began to think about what would need to happen next, and quickly. What was about to take place in the days to follow would represent the largest air uplift of humanity ever undertaken in Australia.

  Its initial phase would involve a lack of any official organisation, little to work with on the ground and even, in some cases, significant bending of the rules, as every available aviation resource in Australia was thrown at the problem.

  People in the air and on the ground would fly and work until they literally dropped from exhaustion, at the same time displaying ingenuity and compassion while reducing Darwin’s population by more than half in a matter of days. Fortunately for Darwin that ingenuity would be evident even before Tracy had arrived, with a result that would have far-reaching effects on Christmas morning.

  Once a cyclone warning was distributed, it was standard practice for Connair, the Northern Territory’s airline, to fly any of its Darwin-based aircraft out of the danger zone. Such a procedure had occurred only weeks previously during an earlier cyclone alert.

  Connair had three of its DC-3s and two four-engine de Havilland Herons in Darwin when news arrived that Tracy had changed course, so Connair operations in Alice Springs ordered them out. The Royal Australian Air Force’s military version of the DC-3, the C-47, had already left for Katherine, a second RAAF Dakota had been secured in a hangar and the base’s Iroquois helicopter chained down. The remaining Heron was still in the Connair hangar and had to be left behind when the other four departed for Katherine at 8 o’clock on Christmas Eve.

  One of Connair’s engineering staff, Ian Badman, decided to remain at the airport and keep an eye on the Heron. As the wind strength increased through the night, Badman, known locally as ‘Nammo’ (short for Namatjira, as he was reportedly handy with a paint brush), decided to do what he could to help the Heron withstand the gale-force winds coming through the open west side of the hangar. So he hooked an aircraft tug to the tail of the Heron and for the rest of the night, reportedly assisted by the contents of a slab of beer and a bottle of rum to help withstand all Tracy could throw at him, manoeuvred the tug around the hangar to hold the aircraft against the wind, saving it from certain destruction. Four hangars nearby, several with doors facing west, had their doors blown in and
all the aircraft inside destroyed. All other aircraft on the airport were either destroyed or badly damaged.

  Two of Connair’s DC-3 captains were still in Darwin and, along with the rest of the city, were to experience the wrath of Tracy first-hand. Both Dave Fredriksen and John Myers had flown Connair runs all Christmas Eve so were out of hours by the time it came to ferry aircraft south. They would later learn that the pilots who had taken the aircraft to Katherine that evening, all of whom had family and friends in Darwin, had all bundled into another Connair aircraft and tried to return late that same night, but the ferocity of the cyclone had driven them back.

  Myers recalls the numbing screech of the wind as his Fannie Bay house was demolished around him and his family, then walking out the next morning to see for the first time the devastation around him and to learn of neighbours who had died.

  Fredriksen, who lived in a unit in the centre of Darwin, arrived at Myers’ shattered home soon after in his Toyota Celica and they picked their way through rubble-littered streets and main roads to the airport, now seeing for the first time the extent of the carnage Tracy had wrought.

  There they found Nammo and the Heron, both still intact. It was about 8.30 a.m. and not only had the Heron escaped damage, there was a chance that its radio might function. They first thought of towing it out of the hangar to improve the signal quality, but the tug’s motor was now awash and it wouldn’t start. To their delight the radio worked and the call they made to the Air Services station at Katherine would be the first Australia would know of the disaster which had befallen its northernmost city.

  To those standing by in Katherine, Fredriksen’s voice coming over the radio with the words, ‘Charlie Lima Tango. Check Call’, the call sign of the Heron, must have sounded like a call from a ghost aeroplane.

  ‘Where are you? The whole world’s been trying to contact Darwin and no one can talk to them on radio,’ came the reply.

  When he told them that 95 per cent of Darwin had been destroyed they asked what help he needed.

  ‘Everything,’ Fredriksen said, not quite knowing how else to describe it.

  The Connair crews who had taken their aircraft to Katherine were standing by the radio and soon Fredriksen was being bombarded with anxious questions about their families in Darwin. ‘I told them it would take us an hour or so to find them if I could.’

  Myers and Fredriksen found a RAAF air-traffic controller and they left him to handle the radio while they headed back into Darwin to try to locate Connair staff and their families. It took them under an hour to find the families. Fredriksen smiles when he tells how his earlier experience of driving in car rallies helped him weave his way around fallen telegraph poles, timber and iron roofing from houses and other debris on the streets.

  By the time they returned to the airport the Connair DC-3s and Katherine Heron were overhead and looking for somewhere to land, so Myers, Fredriksen and Nammo jumped on a tug and headed for the runway to clear what debris they could. And here, with the aircraft circling above, with no aids to assist them, no idea of wind direction for landing, Nammo Badman would come into his own once again. Taking off his trousers he held them above his head as a makeshift windsock.

  ‘There wasn’t much wind by this stage, but there was enough to blow his trousers. It was a pretty effective effort,’ Myers says.

  On their way back to the hangars they were confronted by a RAAF officer who demanded to know what was going on. When Fredriksen told him the aircraft above were going to land he said: ‘They can’t land. This is an emergency.’

  ‘I just told him to fuck off,’ says Fredriksen. It wouldn’t be the last sharp encounter a civilian pilot would have with the RAAF in the confused early hours of Tracy’s aftermath.

  One by one the Connair aircraft, operating without any air-traffic control, organised themselves into the aerodrome’s circuit and landed. As it turned out, also coming in was the RAAF’s DC-3 from Katherine. It would be on the ground only minutes before taking off on the first post-cyclone mission from Darwin to collect RAAF Darwin’s commanding officer, Dave Hitchins, who had been on leave at Smith Point, 209 kilometres to the north-east.

  Hitchins was shocked by what he saw when he stepped from his Dakota mid-afternoon on Christmas Day. Darwin, a major support base for air-force operations in northern Australia, had been totally laid to waste by Tracy. Hangars had been demolished, there was no communications facility left functioning, the second RAAF Dakota which had remained in Darwin the night before had been blown out of its maintenance hangar and down a roadway, ending up wrecked almost at the front garden of Hitchin’s own house. The Iroquois helicopter had broken its ground chains and was badly damaged.

  Conditions everywhere were chaotic. The base’s hospital was congested, it had no water or power supplies and its one medical officer and two RAAF nurses were struggling to cope with an influx of service and civilian casualties suffering serious lacerations and shock. The one saving grace in it all was that of the total RAAF establishment of 670 RAAF members and their dependants, no one had been killed.

  Hitchins was one of the RAAF’s most experienced officers, a former Second World War bomber pilot who had been in charge of air-transport operations for the RAAF in the Korean War. He was also a former commanding officer of the RAAF’s No 36 Squadron whose C-130 Hercules aircraft would play a critical role in what was to come. He immediately set about trying to bring some order to the chaos.

  In the meantime the rest of Australia remained largely oblivious to what had happened but enough information of deaths and casualties was becoming available to declare Tracy a disaster and prompt the despatch of Major General Alan Stretton, Director General of the National Disaster Organisation.

  Stretton, with aides and an emergency medical team, left Canberra for Darwin in a RAAF BAC-111 VIP jet aircraft at 3.30 p.m. on Christmas Day. They would pick up Dr Rex Patterson, minister for the Northern Territory, in Mt Isa on the way. At the same time a RAAF Medivac Hercules C-130 from No 37 Squadron at Richmond, under the command of Squadron Leader Bill Fewster, was on its way to Darwin with a RAAF medical team.

  Listening on his radio, Fewster learned that the BAC-111 flight had landed at Mt Isa and faced a problem. Fewster had limited knowledge of the weather ahead and already knew he would have to land at Darwin without any aids, thus relying on the Hercules’ radar for the approach, something the BAC-111 did not have.

  Fewster also calculated that the BAC-111’s limited range would mean the VIP jet would have difficulty reaching an alternative airport if it had to hold over Darwin for any length of time due to the weather. With Minister Patterson and Stretton therefore facing the prospect of remaining in Mt Isa overnight, Fewster diverted to Mt Isa to carry the Stretton team on the final leg.

  Fewster’s flight engineer, Keith Kershaw, would later recall those aboard the C-130 feeling the first effects of the cyclone somewhere around Katherine as they began their night letdown into Darwin. With no external aids available they used their own radar to locate the runway and landed down a path of kerosene flares. By the time they came to a stop, however, Darwin’s airlift was already in motion, although in a very limited fashion.

  Throughout the afternoon Connair’s Myers and Fredriksen had been busy gathering Connair families together. Connair had authorised Myers and another Connair pilot, Larry Olajos, to bring out their staff. It had been the Connair practice for the married pilots to host the single pilots to Christmas dinner so one of the first decisions Myers and Fredriksen made was to head for their homes and fill the Celica with food from their now useless fridges.

  Their next ‘raid’ was back at the airport where they siphoned enough fuel from the other aircraft to get the DC-3 to Katherine and then on to Alice Springs. Their fully loaded DC-3 was the forerunner of the largest airlift in Australian history when it took off shortly after 6 p.m. on Christmas Day. While Myers distributed the former contents of his fridge to the mainly Connair staff, his son hugged the only thing he’d
salvaged—his teddy bear.

  ‘Larry was the captain. All I had was what I stood up in: T-shirt, shorts and thongs, and I remember the zip on the shorts was broken! ’ Myers recalls.

  Such was the dearth of information about Darwin that when they arrived at Katherine, a mere 300 kilometres south, the aircraft refueller and the Department of Transport air-services officer were asking them what had happened.

  When they finally arrived at Alice Springs late that night Myers remembers a policeman asking what was needed at Darwin. Myers told him: ‘Just about everything you can think of, but you probably need to relieve your staff.’ Myers himself would be back to Darwin the next day to continue what they had started.

  Only minutes before the Connair DC-3 left that night the first airline aircraft, a Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) F.27 Fokker Friendship had arrived at Darwin. For TAA Captain Ray Vuillermin and his crew, 25 December had begun as a perfectly normal scheduled service from Alice Springs to Darwin via Tennant Creek and Katherine. On arrival at Alice Springs Vuillermin was told ‘something unusual’ had occurred at Darwin. No one knew any specifics, but a ‘severe weather event’ was mentioned as a possibility.

  Vuillermin flew on and at Katherine received the first news of the cyclone. ‘Someone suggested the city was 80 per cent destroyed. That sounded unbelievable,’ says Vuillermin.

  They were told no passengers could be taken on but to carry medical staff and equipment. Vuillermin did take one passenger onward, however, his nine-year-old daughter, Nicole, who had been on her way to spend Christmas in Darwin with her grandmother. With no TAA staff normally stationed at RAAF Tindal, Katherine’s airport, he had no intention of leaving Nikki there.

  Vuillermin remembers the weather was good as they approached Darwin and as he made his descent he realised for the first time that the 80 per cent estimation of damage had in fact been well short of the mark. Staggered to find the whole city in ruins, wrecked aircraft strewn all over the airfield, vessels stranded on dry land, and unable to make radio contact and concerned about landing among the debris on the runway, he circled Darwin while deciding what he should do.