The Flying Kangaroo

by Jim Eames

  There were two other significant developments that would have a major influence on Qantas after the war. The first was the phenomenal development of land-based airfields under the demands of the war, where countries like England and Australia came to resemble massive aircraft carriers, used as launch pads for assaults against the enemy in campaigns in Europe and the Pacific. This proliferation of airfields would mark the death knell of the large commercial flying boat within several years of the war’s end. The second development was the unassailable advantage the United States had in terms of aircraft production capacity, and sheer numbers of aircraft and equipment, over its traditional aviation rival the UK, which was struggling to regain its former aviation prestige while being crippled by war debt.

  In Australia’s case, perhaps it was inevitable that a shattering of an important aspect of its traditional alliance with its UK partner would need to occur if Qantas was to ensure its future as a major international airline. Indeed, the decision that Fysh’s team had to make about aircraft purchases, when viewed in the context of traditional ties, would result in a prolonged, often bitter struggle that would reach the highest levels of both the Australian and UK governments.

  Both had much to lose—Qantas risked being forced into a position which would rob it of its competitiveness against a United States seeking civil air supremacy via airlines like Pan American; while the British battled to rebuild their former aviation status with a viable industry. In British eyes, this was not simply a choice of aircraft but a threat to one of the cornerstones of the old Empire itself.

  As for the aircraft themselves, two contenders were in question—one American, the Lockheed Constellation 749 already flying, and the other British, the Avro Tudor 11, still under development. From the point of view of Fysh and his senior people, there was never any doubt about which aircraft to choose. Fysh himself had flown on the prototype of the Constellation while visiting the United States towards the end of the war and was immediately convinced it was the way of the future for his airline. In many respects, the Constellation was destined to become one of the classic aircraft of its generation; its sleek, arching fuselage design and distinctive three tails brought with it the next step in long-range air transport services.

  As for the British, their arguments were based on the traditional association of Qantas and the British airline BOAC overcoming the drawbacks of an aircraft that wasn’t yet beyond the development stage. The Tudor 11, a descendant of the famous Avro Lancaster bomber, might have promised 60 seats but its design was regarded by Qantas as ‘uncompetitive, already obsolete and uncertain in performance’, about as unforgiving a description of a new aircraft as one could imagine.

  But beyond the actual aircraft themselves, the real battleground developed between the British and Australian governments, already complicated by the fact that part of the Australian government aircraft industry was gearing up to produce the Tudor 11.

  Regarding the Australia–UK route on which any new aircraft would be operated, something had to be done relatively quickly as the two aircraft flying it had varying degrees of obsolescence. Passengers who could afford the airfares of those days either had the choice of the more leisurely five-and-a-half-day journey from Sydney to London on a Hythe flying boat or cut the journey to 67 hours jammed in sideways-facing seats in the primitive interior of an Avro Lancastrian, little more than a civil version of the wartime Lancaster bomber. Perhaps the most telling description of the latter came from one C.G. Grey, editor of the UK’s Aeroplane and Aviation magazine in a letter to Fysh:

  When you have time to write, do tell me who is responsible for that absurd sideways seating in the Lancastrian. I asked Avros about it and they said BOAC insisted on it. Then I asked BOAC and they swear they had nothing to do with it and it must have been a freak of MAP’s [the Ministry of Aircraft Production].

  Anyhow, the picture of nine V.I.P.s sitting solemnly in a row, as if on a bench in the House of Commons, all staring out of one side of the machine and not able to see anything on the other side is ludicrous.

  Describing the steward’s pantry as ‘a crime against humanity,’ Grey went on, ‘Even if you select your stewards for their littleness, you could have difficulty getting them small enough to squeeze between the refrigerator and the electric cooker so as to get into the crew’s quarters.’

  Grey didn’t even bother to mention the inconvenience of the aircraft’s wing spar that passed through the centre of the fuselage, requiring passengers and crew to clamber over it while moving through the cabin. Given that such a significant purchasing decision affecting relations with the UK would require Australian government approval, and although there is no record of Fysh doing so, adding Grey’s description to his submission to the government for a quick decision might have had some value.

  So the battle raged, with Fysh and his Qantas team arguing with the BOAC chairman Lord Knollys and his people of the dire commercial consequences for both sides. But Qantas refused to give ground.

  Finally, after a flurry of telegraphic exchanges, in September 1946, a nervous Fysh found himself sitting outside Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s office in Melbourne while Chifley and the Minister for Air and Civil Aviation Arthur Drakeford met within.

  Finally ushered into the ‘presence’, Fysh found Chifley puffing on his pipe, waving him to sit down and running his hand over a telegram on his desk.

  ‘You see this? This is an urgent telegram from Clem Attlee, Prime Minister of England, begging us not to go on with the Constellations you want.’

  There was a pause, doubtless an agonising one for Fysh, before Chifley’s face broke into a smile and uttered the words Fysh was anxious to hear: ‘Well, anyhow, I have decided. We’ll give it a go.’

  Even with the passage of time since that fateful meeting, Fysh’s description of Qantas’s decision to purchase the Constellation 749 as ‘one of the most momentous decisions in the history of what was then known as Qantas Empire Airways,’ remains largely true today. For some students of aviation history it remains an echo of an earlier, although largely much more dire, statement by Chifley’s predecessor John Curtin in the dark days of March 1942 as an isolated Australia, beyond any British help, faced the threat of the Japanese. Curtin’s plea ‘We look to America …’ ushered in a new alliance that remains to this day.

  Qantas too, in aviation terms, had ‘looked to America’ and an aircraft relationship that would last decades into the future.

  As for the Tudor, few were ever built. Two crashed with loss of life while operating with British South American Airways in 1948 and 1949, the only airline ever to use them. Ironically, the UK’s own airline BOAC, itself employed the Lockheed Constellation on the Atlantic route.

  The introduction of the Constellation marked the emergence of an engineering and operational ethos in Qantas that built on the company’s already highly respected reputation. This was not to be an aircraft you bought off the shelf. Because of the Constellation’s sophistication and the sheer size of the investment in aircraft and spares, Qantas now entered the era of the technical representative: having a man as a direct, on-site link between the manufacturer and the airline. It would be largely this situation upon which Qantas’s future engineering reputation would be built, and contribute markedly to the way other airlines would use Qantas’s aircraft choices as a guide towards choosing their own.

  The technical representative and his team would be there through the subsequent purchase of the larger, longer range Lockheed 1049 Constellation, at the airline’s entry into the jet age with the Boeing 707 and on to the Boeing 747. They needed to have an intimate knowledge of the areas for which they were responsible, whether it be the engines, the landing gear or the interior configuration. Unlike the American airlines on Lockheed’s order books, Qantas would have to be pretty well self-sufficient, as they were taking their Constellations to their own engineering base on the far side of the world.

  But as more 749s and its successor the 1049 were added t
o the fleet and the airline began to stretch its wings to new routes, problems developed—problems not commonly known today but that presented a massive operational and economic challenge at the time.

  It was all to do with the engines. The Constellation might have earned Fysh’s own description as a wonderful aeroplane but the Wright Cyclone engines that powered it proved to be little short of a disaster, to the point where it became obvious Lockheed had basically produced a beautiful aeroplane that had got ahead of engine technology. (Decades later Boeing would confront a similar dilemma with the Pratt & Whitney engines on its first 747s but in that latter case Qantas’s depth of expertise in aircraft assessment would enable it to skip through it unscathed.)

  Within weeks of the first Constellation services along the Kangaroo Route to London in 1948, the Wright Cyclones presented problems. Mechanical delays began to stretch the scheduled 55 hours of flying time to interminable lengths.

  Qantas engineers had initially factored in a requirement for eight spare engines to be positioned at strategic points along the 19,000 kilometre route but soon had to lift that 100 per cent to sixteen engines, along with spare parts. Some were relatively minor faults causing frequent shutting down of engines, and others were so catastrophic that cylinders exploded out through the engine cowling! While under normal circumstances the engines would be removed every 800 hours for scheduled overhaul, at one point Qantas found that just over half of the engines were being removed before that. As engine failure followed engine failure, the airline partly remedied the problem by converting one of its Lancastrians, using its bomb bay as an engine carrier via a special, hinged fairing that enabled the spare engine to be loaded and unloaded quickly. The protruding fairing underneath quickly resulted in the aircraft becoming known as ‘Yates’s Pregnant Pup’ after Ron Yates, the Qantas engineer who designed the concept and who was destined to become a chief executive of the company. For a time the Pregnant Pup chased the Constellations up the Kangaroo Route with spare engines but, unfortunately, the addition of the fairing caused dangerous instability in the Lancastrian and it was soon abandoned.

  Much to Qantas’s dismay, the engine problem continued, compounded by the fact that the engine’s manufacturer, Curtiss-Wright, refused to provide field support for the engines, leaving Qantas to manage for itself. That decision had a significant long-term impact on Curtiss-Wright. When Qantas was looking at a gas turbine engine for its entry into the jet age with the Boeing 707, senior engineers like Ron Yates would not even consider them an option. ‘Whatever happened we would never fly another aircraft that was powered by a Wright engine,’ Yates later confessed—a decision he considered might have had something to do with Wright eventually ceasing to build aircraft engines.

  Over the years the unreliability of the Constellation’s engines became something of a running joke within the company. Old hands occasionally referred to the aircraft as the ‘best three-engine aircraft the company ever operated’, while historian Bruce Leonard, author of several excellent histories on Qantas engineering, recalls once hearing a Qantas engineer watching a Constellation make an approach to land at Darwin remark, ‘Now there’s an unusual sight.’ When asked to explain the engineer offered: ‘All four engines are still operating.’ Even the ground-breaking achievement of Qantas’s first around-the-world service with Super Constellations in 1958 was often referred to as ‘Around the World in Eighty Delays’.

  Poor engine performance aside, Fysh was correct in describing choosing the Constellation as the right decision to take his airline into the relatively comfortable age of pressurised aircraft.

  NOT EVERY CHOICE WAS PERFECT

  The Constellation, the 707 and the advent of the jumbo cemented Qantas’s reputation for exceptional aircraft choices, but there have been some exceptions along the way. One of these was relatively minor; the other remains something of a mystery even today among old Qantas hands.

  Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Qantas operated services in Papua New Guinea with an assortment of aircraft. There were few roads. Catalina flying boats handled the isolated island communities on the coast and those on lakes in the country’s interior, DC-3s carried out the passenger and freight tasks between major centres, and the several single-engine de Havilland Canada Beavers scurried backwards and forwards between the smaller mountain airstrips.

  When the four Beavers needed replacing in 1958, the company chose de Havilland’s Beaver successor, known as the Otter. Beyond its floats to allow it to operate as an amphibian to service communities and mining research establishments up rivers, the Otter’s outward appearance closely resembled that of the Beaver but, as it would turn out, that’s where the similarity ended.

  Alan Terrell, who flew every type of aircraft Qantas operated in Papua New Guinea, harboured a particular dread of the Otters and decades later, after rising to become the airline’s Director of Flight Operations, he still shook his head when he spoke of flying them. ‘I can’t understand anyone having bought it in the first place because it was built for Canadian winter operations and certainly not for hot clime flying of New Guinea.’

  In the short four months he flew the Otter amphibian based in Port Moresby, Terrell lodged twelve incident reports describing problems with the aircraft, including a full-engine fire. He found the aircraft hopelessly underpowered and, while the Beaver weighed 2.4 tonnes and had a 450 horsepower engine, the Otter’s 600 horsepower engine had to propel an aircraft twice the Beaver’s weight.

  Added to that, de Havilland had fitted a stall warning device to alert the pilot when the speed was get getting dangerously slow, but because the aircraft was flying close to stalling most of the time, the stall warning light never went out.

  ‘Finally we found it so distracting we just disconnected it.’ In later years, as he rose through the airline’s executive ranks, Terrell made several attempts to find out who in the company was responsible for the Otter’s purchase in the first place. ‘I was never able to find out because whoever did it would probably never admit it!’

  3

  THE NADI ‘BUMP’

  At the start it was reminiscent of wartime dogfights—but this time it was two former allies who were pitting their flying machines against each other, with shades of empire battles past. In the end it was Qantas’s entry into the jet age with the Boeing 707 that firmly established the Australian airline’s pre-eminence when it came to aircraft choice.

  On one side, the British put forward the de Havilland Comet 2, successor to an earlier version whose reputation, after initial promise, had suffered a series of fatal blows. The Comet would eventually become the flagship of BOAC and other airlines, but by the mid-1950s the choice for Qantas came down to the jet offerings of Boeing’s 707 and Douglas Aircraft’s DC-8. Given Boeing’s history since, with aircraft like the 747, 767 and the 737, it’s hard to imagine now that ‘going Boeing’ in those days was something of a risk as, while the company had made a name for itself with military aircraft, its track record in civil airliners had rested on the double-deck Boeing Stratocruiser, which had been far from a resounding success.

  But soon the Boeing 707 began to cement its place among the minds of those in Qantas who were to make the final assessment. Captain Bert Ritchie, a future general manager who was leading the team, probably set the tone after flying the prototype aeroplane. ‘I was starry-eyed about it. I wouldn’t talk about anything else.’ There was one serious problem to overcome—how the version Boeing was producing could fit the key Qantas route to the United States. The American airline giants lining up on Boeing’s order books with far more dollars in their pockets were pressing Boeing to stretch the original version to better suit their domestic and intercontinental requirements. In one stroke, that redesign completely destroyed the passenger–range issue facing Qantas on the Pacific route.

  The problem itself went down in Qantas folklore as the ‘Nadi bump’, a very specific aviation phenomenon that related to the critical sector between Nadi (in Fiji
) and Honolulu (in Hawaii), a long over-water distance that, because of the relatively short 2100 metre runway at Nadi, made operating the larger, heavier aircraft out of the question. What Qantas wanted was a shorter version, still with good payload and range but with more powerful engines to get airborne out of Nadi.

  While Douglas was reluctant to alter its DC-8 from the version more appealing to the US market, in a decision that cemented a relationship that continued for decades to come, Boeing agreed to produce a special version by taking 3 metres out of the 707’s fuselage and equipping the Qantas aircraft with a more powerful military version of the Pratt & Whitney engines to give it acceptable payload and range capabilities that Qantas needed out of Nadi. Thus Qantas became the first non-US airline to operate the Boeing 707.

  Qantas finally ordered more than thirty 707s before moving on to the Boeing 747—the company’s first jumbo jet. With this second Boeing aircraft, once again the company’s technical and operational judgement in waiting for the longer-range version, proved an astute decision. Qantas was able to watch as recurring engine problems with the first 747 created nightmares for Boeing, the engine manufacturers and the earliest airline operators. In fact, while Qantas had been among the first to show interest when the 747 was still a ‘paper aeroplane’, even before a prototype had been built, the Australian airline’s first jumbo was number 147 off the Seattle assembly line and such was the input of Qantas’s team of representatives that aircraft 747-B Number 147 incorporated around 300 changes to the original specification for the 747, all designed to ensure the aircraft suited the way Qantas wanted to operate it. With a project cost of more than $160 million for its first four aircraft, the airline had to be sure it had things right.

  Even Boeing’s Joe Sutter, the ‘father’ of the 747 design, later described as ‘courageous’ the decision of a relatively small airline like Qantas to launch the 747 in its part of the world. ‘They knew what they wanted and were not shy about asking for it. We paid a lot of attention to Qantas.’