Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  More locally, smaller operators, such as Connair, with limited crews to man their aircraft, were able to extend their flight-time limitations with the help of other local general aviation pilots from other individual charter operators, flying clubs and even missionary pilots whose aircraft had been destroyed in the cyclone. Many volunteered to fill in as unpaid first officers on the airline’s DC-3s and Herons.

  At first there was little in the way of organisation at Darwin. Residents simply heard the sound of aero engines and figured that if you made your way to the airport you could get out. For most there was nothing left to stay for anyway, with houses uninhabitable and power, water and other essentials gone.

  On 27 December the first of the uplift records would be broken when Ansett Captain, Don Pitts, and his crew took off for Adelaide with 321 people on board his Boeing 727, almost double the normal loading. Pitts’ flight is still believed to be a record uplift for a Boeing 727. His record would be almost matched later by a TAA Boeing carrying more than 300.

  Two Qantas Boeing 707s would also return on 27 December, one bringing with it as a passenger another Qantas captain to assess whether Darwin would be able to handle the airline’s Boeing 747s.

  Gradually an assortment of aircraft began to descend on Darwin. Interspersed with the Boeings and RAAF Hercules, a Royal Air Force Nimrod arrived to carry 38 British military and civilian personnel to Singapore and a Bush Pilot Airways (BPA) DC-3 came in from Cairns to evacuate staff, only to face a similar problem Qantas’ Captain John Brooks had when his 707 arrived the previous day: someone threatened to commandeer their aeroplane.

  Arriving in Darwin in the early afternoon after an eight-hour flight, BPA Captain Bill Kelman and his crew, not planning to leave again until the following day, had helped some locals erect tarpaulins to shelter those awaiting evacuation. They were enjoying their second beer when a RAAF vehicle approached and an officer asked if they would fly some people to Alice Springs. When they explained they were out of hours and had been drinking, they were told it was an emergency and if they couldn’t do it the DC-3 would be commandeered and they’d get RAAF pilots to fly it. Not wanting to lose his aircraft, Kelman and his crew set off for Alice Springs, returning to Darwin the following day to finally load up and head back to Cairns. By the time he reached Cairns on the night of 28 December, his thirty-fifth birthday, Kelman’s log book showed a total of more than 25 hours.

  As desperate people waited in the heat and the rain for their turn at the airport, airline staff, gradually being supplemented by other colleagues and supplies arriving on inbound aircraft, handled the throng as best they could. There were no official aircraft ‘manifests’ as such. Names were taken at the steps before people boarded and, as often occurs in such circumstances, ingenuity rose to the fore.

  Not only had Darwin been a major port for Qantas, but it was also the distribution point for all the airline’s supply of barramundi. Sourced and purchased locally, the barramundi was sent to the airline’s Sydney catering facility where it was cooked and served on its worldwide network.

  With no power and facing the prospect of the large supply of fish being destroyed, Qantas airport manager, Peter Snelling, and his staff quickly provided a solution. Turning two large, damaged filing cabinets on their backs and stretching a sheet of arc mesh between them, they lit a fire and they set about cooking all the barramundi fillets to be distributed to those waiting to board. As the numbers increased beyond the availability of hot food, cold meal packs of sandwiches, pastries and cake were handed out from supplies being brought in by air. The Salvation Army was also on hand to disseminate food.

  Whenever possible, pets were also fed. People turned up at the airport with cats and dogs, cockatoos and parrots, many prompted by reports that an edict had been issued that all stray animals were to be shot to counter the threat of disease. The rumours proved true. Such an order had been issued. For many their pets were all they had left. Some pets, though, weren’t fated to return to their original owners. TAA Captain, David Baker, who flew those pregnant women and Darwin hospital’s cats to Mackay in his Fokker Friendship, recalled: ‘I somehow ended up with the cats, who both lived to a great age and cost a fortune in vet bills. I never did find the owner.’

  Other animals had even luckier escapes. Qantas employee Eric Palisa, airlifted out suffering a dislocated shoulder and lacerations, thought he’d seen the last of his beloved blue cattle pup. Several days later a Qantas tradesman who had come in from Sydney to assist, heard a whimper from under the debris of Palisa’s home and the pup appeared. The tradesman adopted it until it could be sent on to join Palisa in Melbourne.

  Connair captain John Myers remembers another dog story, albeit with a twist. Before flying his DC-3 to Alice Springs he’d managed to gather his own fox terrier and several other dogs and smuggled them aboard to avoid them being shot. There were more than 50 people on the 28-seat DC-3 when Myers and his first officer, Rob Huntington, became airborne with an aeroplane that was obviously very heavy.

  The hydraulic undercarriage on the DC-3 is operated via levers beside the crew and when the captain calls ‘Gear up’ after take-off, the non-flying pilot will move the handles to retract the gear. Myers recalls:

  If there’s a malfunction there’s a little spring clip down there which could be used to release and free up the action. I think it was called the ‘dog clip’. So for some reason if the gear didn’t work you would call: ‘Trip the dog.’

  As we got airborne I called for Rob to bring the gear up. Rob put his hand down but nothing happened. I said it again, along with telling him to ‘Trip the dog’.

  Back from Huntington came: ‘I can’t because of the bloody dog.’

  I looked down and there was a snarling dog about to take Rob’s hand off. I patted the dog while he worked the lever!

  On 28 December, more Boeing 707s and 727s arrived and another record would be broken when a Qantas Boeing 747 would make two return trips to Darwin from Sydney. Not only would 25 tonnes of supplies, including portable toilets, be carried in, but one of the flights would depart for Sydney with 673 passengers aboard, another world record.

  In the meantime, what was being achieved by RAAF Hercules crews was little short of remarkable, some of it not without significant risk and, in at least several cases, close to disaster. Tasked with transporting six large generators from Richmond to Darwin to help restore the city’s power supply, Flight Lieutenant Allan Edwards calculated his Hercules, with the generators and a full load of fuel, would be at a maximum take-off weight of 70 306.8 kilograms, but still within the tolerances of Richmond’s 2133-metre runway.

  When the cargo was loaded onto the C-130 Edwards found that the army generators took up most of the aircraft’s massive hold, stretching from behind the forward bulkhead almost to the hinges of the aircraft’s rear ramp, leaving only a narrow walkway down the left-hand side of the aircraft’s interior. The problem was there was no paperwork available to confirm the weight of the generators, a fact which not only concerned Edwards but the squadron’s movements officer as well. All that had accompanied them was some ‘verbal’ advice that the generators weighed 2267.9 kilograms each, and, as there was no way they could be weighed at Richmond and they were urgently needed in Darwin that day, Edwards and the movement officer had to take the army’s word for it.

  Once on the runway the early take-off roll was normal, but as he started to lift off the C-130 Edwards realised something was terribly wrong. The nose wouldn’t rise. Past the point of no return, Edwards’ only option was to continue the take-off and with the end of the runway coming up he again pulled back on the control column and the aircraft managed to ever-so-slowly clamber into the air as grass at the runway’s end flashed under its nose.

  The C-130 barely out-climbed an approaching hill, and Edwards watched as the steeple of a local church passed off his port wingtip. Things would have been much more serious had the Hercules’ take-off path been several hundred metres further left. S
ince there was no point in going back to Richmond they flew on to Mt Isa to refuel before going on to Darwin.

  After they gradually gained height into the flight, Edwards and his crew did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to ascertain how overweight the Hercules had been on take-off, but it would not be until later, when the paperwork for the generators arrived, that the full story would be revealed. The generators weighed not 2267.9 kilograms each but 3855.5 kilograms, putting their take-off weight 9525 kilograms above their original calculations and 453.6 kilograms over what is regarded as the C-130’s Emergency Wartime Loading.

  Edwards would later recount how a VIP passenger riding in the cockpit with him expressed his gratitude to the crew for providing him with such a delightful low-level look at Richmond as they climbed away. That obviously wasn’t quite the way Edwards and his crew saw it.

  Those on board Flight Lieutenant John Pickett’s Hercules would have an even closer brush with disaster. Pickett’s drama began early when his Hercules’ radar failed on the way into Darwin on 28 December and, knowing radar was necessary to make the approach to Darwin, he circled over Katherine until another inbound Hercules caught him and the pair flew on in formation for a letdown. Once on the ground the radar transceiver-transmitter was changed and tests showed it was working once again.

  It was towards midnight by the time the Hercules was loaded with evacuees and ready to depart, and Pickett’s load of 179 passengers—87 above the normal C-130 capacity— would be another world record. Pickett remembers:

  We had people sitting in their seats with their seat belts on and then people sitting on their laps with tie-down straps run over them to provide some security. It was a bit rough and ready!

  About two hours out from Darwin they were threading their way through a series of storm cells when the radar failed again and they found themselves in the middle of one of the cells. Although Pickett would later describe it as ‘a pretty wild ride’, the next few minutes were to be a horrifying experience for those on board.

  Pickett recollects they were at about 12 000 feet when he reduced the C-130’s four engines to idling speed to help him handle the storm. Then, virtually blinded by a series of lightning strikes, and with Pickett’s ability to control the Hercules becoming increasingly difficult, the C-130, in Pickett’s words, ‘suddenly went down like a brick for about 4000 feet then went up like a lift’. Pickett remembers the airspeed indicator showing 300 knots during the ascent as they shot out of the storm at 20 000 feet with the aircraft almost inverted.

  In the middle of the frightening ascent Pickett recalls saying to his crew: ‘Sorry, fellas. I can’t handle this.’

  The only reason I realised we were upside down was because all the artificial horizons had toppled, the compass system was ‘rats’ and I could see the moon through the Herc’s chin windows when we popped out!

  Not surprisingly perhaps, in the middle of it all, a woman passenger suffered a heart attack and the RAAF loadmaster administered oxygen. It transpired that she had discharged herself from hospital several days previously.

  Incredibly no one was injured, but with the heart attack victim and terror and chaos down the back, Pickett turned towards Darwin, now also concerned at the airframe stresses the aircraft had been placed under.

  Again without radar and at night he was forced to fly wide around Bathurst Island and intercept the Kununurra–Darwin track to choose his approach to Darwin. Once on the ground: ‘We hosed the aeroplane out and got some sleep.’

  Another Hercules captain, Bill Mattes, was on the ground when Pickett’s crew came off their aircraft.

  ‘They were as white as sheets,’ Mattes says.

  It says volumes for the sturdy Hercules that a check of its fatigue meter in the wing root revealed that the aircraft had not been overstressed. Pickett and his crew flew out on another evacuee mission to Adelaide and on to Richmond the next day.

  Pickett’s world record for passengers carried on a Hercules would be short-lived. Three months later, although only an estimate and never officially documented, a RAAF Hercules in Vietnam would reportedly carry around 240 passengers.

  Operations peaked again the following day, 29 December. By now the inbound flights were providing the urgently needed supplies not only to keep the evacuation going but to assist in restoring Darwin to some semblance of normality. Two flights each by Qantas Boeing 747s and 707s, along with domestic 727s, Bristol Freighters, RAAF, Royal New Zealand and RAF Hercules, along with US Air Force CL-141 Starlifters, were bringing in everything, from emergency police and medical personnel and supplies, foodstuffs, tradesmen, tonnes of blankets, generators, water purifiers, air beds, gloves and just about anything called for from Darwin.

  For Qantas particularly, the single sideband radio brought in on Brooks’ first 707 had proved invaluable, allowing a direct liaison with Qantas head office to determine what was most urgently needed on future flights. As requested by medical staff, sterile, throw-away milk bottles for use by infants arrived on the next flight.

  Burns-Woods says it didn’t matter what you asked for, it arrived. He suggested to Qantas Sydney that a motorcycle would be more useful than a car to help with movement around the airport and with communications generally. The next day one of the 707s brought in two motorcycles, along with 200 pairs of sunglasses the airline had managed to gather from Sydney stores.

  While the congo lines of evacuees inched forward and Major General Stretton took the first essential steps to bring order to the chaos of Darwin, it was perhaps inevitable that differences would arise between those charged with the major responsibility of reducing Darwin’s population as quickly as possible. In fact, it would be the early portion of the airlift which would later receive some criticism from the RAAF’s Group Captain, Hitchins. He and Stretton had been clearly in conflict over how the uplift should be organised.

  In a later oral history, Hitchins would point out that the aim of the three services—RAAF, navy and army—had been to move quickly to get their own people out, along with any civilians they were asked to take. His main aim, he explained, was to have this task completed so that the resources at his disposal, such as several squadrons of Hercules transport, could be fully employed to help evacuate Darwin’s population en masse.

  The problem was that after I was told by the civilian authorities that I had no authority to do this they seemed to take exception to my poking my nose into that and I just said, right, I’ll leave them to it.

  Hitchins saw the early part of the operation as a matter of the airline companies ‘sending aircraft to Darwin for a purpose they could only guess at’.

  Aeroplanes would arrive, they’d be filled up with people, half of whom were to go to Brisbane and half to go to Perth and aeroplanes would be all over the place.

  While he claimed there were no problems with the organisation related to military aircraft, he pointed out that local committees waiting at capital-city airports to receive Darwin evacuees:

  had no idea who was coming there, who they were, where they lived, did they have any relatives living locally, what the precise requirement would be . . . I was unable to say, ‘Right, there’s an aeroplane going to Brisbane. I want a whole lot of Queenslanders to get in it.’

  Leaving no doubts about his impressions of this early period he went on:

  . . . anyone who wants to criticise the operational aspects of the civil air evacuation and says it was chaotic would be absolutely right. It was.

  He said it was not until 10 a.m. on 28 December that he finally received a direction in writing from Stretton to take control of the destinations of outbound aircraft.

  It is probably fair to say that Group Captain Hitchins had a point and other sources have since suggested that he and Stretton certainly didn’t see eye to eye on other aspects, but there is little doubt that both he and Stretton were under incredible pressure in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Tracy.

  In his case, Stretton’s response to Burns-Woods�
� pleas about the urgent need to transport people on board his 707 may have been a sign of the initial strain he was under in attempting to grasp the extent of the situation. There would be other examples where he left some of those directly involved somewhat perplexed to say the least.

  Burns-Woods clearly remembers waiting outside while the Qantas board director, Robert Law-Smith, and the airline’s general manager, Bert Ritchie, met with Stretton at the height of the uplift to see how the airline could help further. When he finally emerged, Ritchie, a former Second World War pilot and a man renowned for his genial, easygoing personality, turned to Burns-Woods to say: ‘Ian, if there’s another war, I hope he’s on the other side!’

  Qantas’ regional director, John Ward, who was at the meeting that day, says Stretton came across as ‘pompous and did most of the talking.’

  But the thing that got up Bert Ritchie’s nose was the scene-setting theatrics upon our entering Stretton’s office, with him pointing to a red phone, intimating it was his direct line to the PM and we would have to leave immediately if it rang. But we all waited in nervous anticipation and the phone remained silent.

  Burns-Woods himself was to have another brush with Stretton, this time over one of his directives. As New Year’s Eve approached Stretton issued an order that there would be no celebrations allowed, doubtless to avoid any such activities getting out of hand. For those who had survived the trauma of the cyclone and worked almost nonstop for days, there was never any intention of agreeing to such a direction and the Qantas party, along with the local yacht club and other groups, went ahead.

  Such fractious occurrences are probably understandable given the problems facing those attempting to bring some order out of the chaos of Darwin immediately post-Tracy, but there is little doubt individual experiences like that of Qantas Captain John Brooks left lasting impressions. For his part, Connair’s John Myers was particularly critical of the lack of response in the short term from army personnel based at Larrakeyah Barracks. A former army reservist, Myers headed for the barracks on Christmas morning in an effort to get some help, only to find the gates locked. When he called to an army man to suggest those outside could do with some help he was told the army had problems of its own.