8.
In the Heart of the Sea
‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’
MARGO CHANNING, ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. From the Qantas flying boat itinerary I had tracked down, I knew the last stop in Indonesia was a place called Klabat Bay. Of course, place names in Indonesia had changed since 1938. While some, such as Djakarta, were easy to decipher, others seemed to have disappeared. After a year of research I still hadn’t located Klabat.
Studying the charts in my Palembang hotel room, I noticed a bay on the island of Bangka, about halfway between Jakarta and Singapore. I compared the bay with the old Qantas route map. It looked the same. Google Maps listed the waterway as Selat Melaka – or, as most people know it, the Strait of Malacca. I switched to Google Earth, where the bay was named Teluk Kelabat. A local map called it Kelebat Baai. I compared the shape of Kelebat Baai with the Qantas diagram of Klabat Bay. They were a perfect match. I was thrilled at the discovery and started reworking my flight plan straightaway.
It took a couple of hours to get to Kelabat from Palembang. As soon as I arrived, I understood why Qantas had chosen this remote location to refuel. The large body of water was protected from any wind direction. Several big fuel tanks that looked like they had been there since the 1930s still sat on the waterfront. The scene highlighted the logistical difficulties of the journey in the 1930s. It was a remote bay on a remote island, and ships must have delivered high-octane aviation fuel just for Qantas. Staff, fuel and spares would have been needed at every point along the route, and some other points were just as remote as Kelabat.
I circled the bay in the Sun and identified the stretch of water the Qantas planes likely used. I briefly landed among a few small fishing boats and then took off without stopping – a procedure known as a ‘touch-and-go’ for land planes, and commonly nicknamed a ‘splash-and-go’ for seaplanes. As pleased as I was to have found Klabat Bay, I was also keen to get to the reporting point for Singapore air-traffic control.
One of my ambitions was to land the Southern Sun on the equator and conduct an experiment. I grew up sailing, and therefore crossing the equator was a pretty big deal for me. If I weren’t flying solo, a traditional seafarers’ King Neptune equator-crossing ceremony would definitely have been on the cards. After crossing in the air, I planned to land just south of the equator and cruise across, like a boat. But landing on the open ocean would be much riskier than my usual touchdowns in protected bays or on lakes and rivers.
When I got to the equator I was so excited that I videoed the GPS position indicator shifting from south to north. I then turned the Sun around and nudged her into a spiral descent over zero degrees of latitude. What could go wrong? Even though I was hundreds of kilometres from land, there wasn’t much wind at sea level. As I looked down from hundreds of feet, there seemed to be no waves. A ship on the horizon gave me a sense of security. It wasn’t like I was completely alone.
I pulled the Sun out of her descent a few metres above the water. As I looked out the windscreen I realised there was a swell, but, excited about my plan, I decided to land anyway. The Sun hit a wave, bounced into the air, hit the water again, bounced a few more times and finally stopped. Ouch.
The poor landing left me feeling frazzled. I was not used to landing in swells and was caught off-guard. All seaplane pilots experience a rough water landing at some stage, but still they are fraught with danger. In a split-second they can go very wrong if the controls aren’t managed properly. I’d hit pretty hard on that last bounce, and I was annoyed at myself. But the Sun was down and seemed undamaged.
I taxied across the equator and got on with what I thought was a pretty clever experiment. Water in the Southern Hemisphere goes down drains anti – clockwise, and vice versa in the Northern Hemisphere. But what happens on the equator?
As a child I had enthusiastically devoured a television science show hosted by Professor Julius Sumner Miller, who used to ask: ‘Why is it so?’ I wanted to make a tribute video. Surely no one had ever landed a seaplane on the equator to discover which direction the vortex takes in an emptying sink, if one occurs at all?
My dashboard-mounted navigation iPad was changed into video selfie mode. I opened the window, leaned out into the Natuna Sea, scooped up a bucketful of water and watched it drain through the sink from Palembang. ‘The water flows straight out,’ I told millions of future YouTube fans. It was slower than usual, and there was some bubbling and gulping, but no vortex swirl. Wacko, I thought. I probably could have found that out on Wikipedia. But hey, I am living it!
With my experiment completed, it was time to take off, and it began to dawn on me that I had an issue brewing. When I pushed the throttle forward and increased speed, I saw that the size of the swell would make taking off problematic: it was rough, wet and bouncy.
In my rush to get airborne, I pulled the control stick back too early. The Sun tried to lift into the sky and then smacked back down on the water several times, probably the hardest she had ever hit. As she finally climbed away from the water, I realised something was terribly wrong: the control stick wouldn’t move forward. The craft was stuck in a perpetual climb.
My initial instinct, apart from panic, was to land again before I got too much higher. But given the waves and my distance from land, I decided that wasn’t a good idea. First, I had to work out how much control I had over the Sun.
I couldn’t lower the nose with the stick, but I found that by adjusting the throttle I could get her to fly level. The nose was still pointing higher than normal, which was slowing her down to a car-like 60 knots, but at least we weren’t in a permanent climb. At 1000 feet I slowly raised the wing flaps, increasing our speed to 65 knots. It was an improvement, but how was I ever going to land in Singapore? I needed to test the Sun’s capabilities further. I climbed a little higher, and then tried easing back on the throttle. The Sun began to sink, with her nose still slightly higher than her tail, but I was comfortably in control.
In all facets of flying, and especially in emergencies, pilots are taught to recall a simple hierarchy of priorities: aviate, navigate, communicate. The first and primary step is to keep the plane flying. Then you must focus on where you are going. Finally, maintain contact through the radio; if you’re in a life-threatening situation, issue a mayday.
Over the next few minutes I established that the Sun could fly and land. The rear of her three wheels may touch down first, which wasn’t normal but was survivable. I climbed to 4500 feet and turned towards the location where I would have to report to Singapore air-traffic control. Should I declare an emergency? Or at least a pan-pan, which is a distress call that does not require immediate assistance? Not just yet, I decided. Let’s try some more flying and see how this turns out.
Of course, I was also trying desperately to work out why the stick wouldn’t move forward. I looked around the seat, where the control linkages were, but couldn’t find anything amiss. It seemed likely that the hard sea landing had bent the tail, jamming the controls to the elevators, the horizontal edges on the empennage that make the plane ascend or descend by moving up and down. I began to fret. Was this going to be the end of the trip? Were some external parts damaged or had the Sun’s main structure bent? The thought of hiring a shipping container to take the damaged Sun home was a depressing one.
As I approached the first navigational waypoint inside Singaporean airspace, I called air-traffic control. ‘Singapore radar, Searey amphibian, November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, at REPOV on Golf five seven nine, for Seletar.’
‘November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, we’ve been waiting for your call. Please advise ETA Seletar.’
On my flight plan I’d allowed an extra hour for my diversions, but the Sun’s painfully slow speed, combined with a stronger headwind than expected, had put me a further hour back. It was a long delay, and the Singaporean controllers were probably considering raising the alarm for a
missing aircraft. I realised I should have communicated my predicament earlier. It was shaping up as a day of tough lessons.
Tiny Singapore has one of the world’s busier airspaces. The Singapore Air Force has a base adjacent to the giant Changi International Airport. A few miles away is Seletar airport, which caters to private jets and amateur pilots like me. The crowded skies required a lot of radio calls to controllers and switching of frequencies. It was busy but I managed, helped by the staff’s professionalism.
I was directed to fly over Changi Airport at 5000 feet. It was bizarre seeing Boeing and Airbus passenger jets passing beneath the tiny Sun on their way to landing. I snapped a single photo, which was perhaps a bit cheeky, given the extra work it was taking to fly the Sun, not to mention the importance of maintaining a straight course when there were a lot of other planes around.
The tower at Seletar didn’t know about my problem. I felt I had enough control that emergency services wouldn’t be needed when I landed. I experimented a little with the throttle, and the Sun responded as expected. Push, and she rose. Pull, and she descended. I just used one stage of the flaps, because I had good control of the plane and didn’t want to drastically change the pitch or anything else on my final approach. This meant the landing would be a little faster than usual, but there were a couple of kilometres of runway to use up.
I took my time, concentrated, and landed smoothly on all three wheels at once. Phew, I thought. Seriously, phew.
A ground controller gave me directions over the radio about where to park, and we were guided into our final position by a marshal with his red ping-pong bats. I was relieved to turn off the engine and shut down the electrics. But I was also very anxious to inspect the damage.
I sheepishly climbed out and studied the tail. All looked normal. I used a torch to look inside the tube between the tail and the cockpit, but still I couldn’t see anything wrong. I tried the stick again – it was definitely jammed. What was going on?
I removed my bags from the passenger seat and rummaged about in the footwell and under the seat. At last, there was the problem: a small spare part was jammed into the base of the control stick mechanism, in a spot I was unable to see or reach from the pilot’s seat. During the rough take-off, many of the spare parts stored in the bow had dislodged. They had slid around the bottom of the plane, where I couldn’t see them but where they could interfere with the linkages from the control stick to the wings and tail. I had been very, very lucky.
My poor decisions made me feel physically ill. I had limped through one of the busiest airspaces in the world in a malfunctioning aircraft. I should have advised the authorities of my limited control, and really I should have thought twice about landing on the equator at all. But I was in love with the idea and had convinced myself everything would be okay. I’d studied this psychological phenomenon in my MBA studies: often we tend to see only the information that supports the result we seek. But the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude has no place in aviation or boating, especially when the two are combined.
It was a classic example of being overcommitted to a goal. When I was just above the water, I should have rationally assessed the wave heights and either pulled out completely or at least gone around and approached at slower speed, which would have allowed a smoother landing. Had I done that, I would not have become so anxious about the take-off. It wasn’t that the waves were too big: it was that my mental framing was out of whack. Having been landing on enormous two- or three-kilometre passenger jet runways all week, I had become used to the approach speed suited to those conditions. When faced with different terrain, I had to mentally reset.
I felt shaken, and I needed to talk. I called Anne and described what had happened. I had promised her I’d be careful, and this was the first time I had broken that pledge.
In a cab to the Singapore Yacht Club, where I was staying, I swiped through my iPad to watch my equatorial Why Is It So? sink video. I had fluffed it. The recording began not when I started the experiment, but when I intended it to stop, and just the rough take-off unfolded.
Over the previous few years I had been pretty critical of the selfie movement, which I regarded as a tad narcissistic. Now, for my first ever video selfie, the god of taking one’s own image – Selfpictus? – was perhaps exacting revenge. The video showed my grimacing and scared face as the Sun smashed from the tip of one wave to another. Then the craft hit the water so hard that the iPad was thrown from its mount to the bottom of the cockpit, still recording, which made it look like the Sun had flipped over onto its back. It was a sickening sight that could have been real. Serves me right, I thought.
The episode taught me a painful lesson, but it’s an incident I’ve avoided talking about. Landing on the equator was such a great story, but it could have ended in disaster. The good news was that the plane was fine. I would secure everything in the front compartment much more carefully from now on. In truth, the Southern Sun was a lot stronger than I was that day. She really looked after me.
9.
Catch Me If You Can
‘You know . . . I’ll bet those Golden Tickets make the chocolate taste terrible.’
CHARLIE BUCKET, WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971)
Qantas’s first international passengers flew in luxury but sometimes slept a little rough. Karumba, Timor and Surabaya weren’t at the forefront of tourist hospitality before World War II. (Nor are they now, truth be told.) It was when the travellers arrived at Singapore that the pampering kicked off. I imagined that as soon as the paying guests stepped off the giant Empire flying boats, they were whisked away by rickshaw to the Raffles Hotel, which was then on the waterfront and one of the grandest in the British Empire.
Land reclamation has since moved Raffles inland, but the hotel still epitomises the grandeur of the British Empire, and there remains an aloof calmness about its marble hallways and staircases. The rooms start at $800 a night but that wasn’t in my budget; I would never part with that kind of cash unless Anne was there to enjoy it too. Instead, I decided to try a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar and write a postcard to my grandmother, who has been a faithful correspondent of mine since I was a young teenager. Glory be to handwritten communication; it was not lost on me that it was the demand for airmail, not passenger travel, that provided the financial impetus to the flying boat service in 1938.
I perched myself at the corner of the bar. After a while I calmed down about my near-miss over the equator, and I began feeling better about having made it this far. It was such a great spot for writing that I decided to eat as well. That would prove a mistake.
Given that Singapore is a cultural melting pot, Anne recommended I try some ‘fusion’ food. Alas, I was boring and just had a chicken satay at the bar. Diarrhoea hit the next morning. On my first full day off in twelve I was suffering from a ‘rather loose stool’, which kept me in my room for several hours. I worked, booking some films for the cinemas back home; wrote my journal and arranged photos in the digital realm in between running to the bathroom.
Around midday some medicine allowed me to get out and visit a few cinemas. Anne and I had done a lot of work for Golden Village in the 1990s in Singapore, so we knew how vibrant the city’s film scene was. At the Lido Art House I watched Child 44, a French-produced movie based on a great, if disturbing, book I’d read about a Soviet serial killer; the film never made it to Australian cinemas. At the Cathay cinema on the famous Orchard Road I also watched the second quarter of Furious 7 but was again forced out by my intolerance for the story’s ludocracy (which is not a real word . . . but it could be).
Leaving Singapore was a lot easier than arriving. By flying north, I avoided the crowded airspace over Changi International. Oh, and I had full control of the plane. I asked air-traffic control for clearance to 6500 feet. When they asked if the Sun could reach 10,000 feet, I reluctantly replied that she could. They assigned me that altitude the whole way over the Malay Peninsula.
Getting that high was a hassl
e and used a lot of fuel. The Sun takes about fifteen minutes to climb to 5000 feet, and another twenty-five to thirty minutes to get to 10,000, where the air is thinner and the rate of climb decreases. It was high for a small plane, even if only a quarter of the height that most commercial airliners fly at, and so cold I had to wear gloves – not what I’d been expecting in the tropics. The ground was a musky haze, making it difficult to navigate by map.
My arrival in Penang, a smaller international airport on the island off the north-west coast of Malaysia, was straightforward. George Town, the capital of Malaysia’s Penang state, was listed as a world heritage site in 2008. I checked into a cheap hotel in the heart of the old city, where many of the colonial buildings and structures are intact and still in use. At Fort Cornwallis, fabulously named after the British general who surrendered to the Americans and French in 1781 at Yorktown, I found a yardarm and an ancient cannon. That made my day. Simple things can be very satisfying.
It was my day off, but I wanted to fill the Sun with more affordable petrol from a service station outside the airport. It took a while to get the fuel and return, but I was making progress when a police car raced up behind me with its blue lights flashing. The police wanted to know what I was doing on the airfield with eight bags of fuel in a wheelbarrow. When I explained and revealed I’d flown from Australia, they drove me the rest of the way, and took turns having their photo taken sitting in the Southern Sun.
The best way to avoid suspicion at airports is to not wear street clothes. Even if you are a private pilot in your own plane, if you are not wearing a uniform, security and airport staff throughout Asia, India and the Middle East may not believe you are a pilot. I usually wore the overalls common among flight crews the world over. Today was the first time I’d been at the airport in civilian clothes, and the airport staff were immediately suspicious. It made me realise how easily I had accessed some secure airport areas in my flying suit, and brought up memories of the movie Catch Me If You Can, about Frank Abagnale Jr, a conman who, among other misdeeds, impersonated pilots. His story, deliciously portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, started to seem very plausible.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 7
