The Flying Kangaroo

by Jim Eames

  For Burns-Woods and Snelling, Christmas Day was occupied with gathering staff, assessing what they needed and trying to collect thoughts, at the same time wondering whether the rest of the world realised what had happened. In the middle of it all, Eric Johnston arrived to break the news that the naval headquarters he had offered as a sanctuary the night before had been evacuated as it began to collapse.

  Early next morning Burns-Woods’s concerns as to whether the rest of the world knew of their plight were answered in an emotional moment as he and some of his staff prepared to leave the Travelodge again for the airport. Suddenly, over the top of the Travelodge, loomed the underbelly of a Boeing 707. As it circled around low in the sky above them the red tail with the flying kangaroo came into view. ‘Some of us had tears in our eyes and the thrill of that moment remains with me today. We waved and cheered before jumping into the cars to drive as quickly as possible to the airport to meet it, hoping to hell it would be able to land.’

  The man at the controls of that Boeing just below the clouds, Captain John Brooks, was also hoping he would be able to land and his first sight of what was left of Darwin that morning hadn’t filled him with confidence. Boxing Day was already turning into a long day for Brooks, who had been called out by Qantas Operations and was on his way to the airport shortly after 3 a.m. for a pre-flight briefing. Not that there was much information to be briefed about, merely that little had been heard from Darwin and his instructions were to make his own assessment, land if he could and, if not, he had enough fuel on board to return to Sydney.

  Other Qantas people were gathering at Mascot, among them a medical team comprising two doctors, Harvey Dakin and Tommy Thompson, a nursing sister, six engineers and staff from personnel, line maintenance, general services and the airline’s traffic department. On the suggestion of the airline’s director of engineering and maintenance Ron Yates, Brooks’s Boeing would be one of only six in the company fitted with a single side-band (SSB) radio. It would subsequently prove invaluable in allowing direct contact between Darwin and Sydney to assess what was urgently needed. Also aboard were 8 tonnes of food, including baby food, drinks, ice and several thousand blankets.

  The Boeing was ready to leave by 4.30 a.m. but then bureaucracy intervened, and getting his aircraft airborne became a frustrating experience for Brooks, his first officer Bryan Griffin and flight engineer Norm King. Even after explaining it was an emergency flight with a medical team and emergency supplies on board, Mascot air traffic control refused an engine start-up on the grounds they were still inside the curfew period between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., forcing an exasperated Brooks to suggest they call the Minister for Transport and request a clearance. When told the minister would be asleep, Brooks suggested curtly: ‘Well, wake him up.’

  But, despite other efforts by Qantas operations, it was to no avail. Brooks and his crew sat cooling their heels until just before 6 a.m. when their start-up clearance came over the radio.

  Brooks says he will never forget the descent towards Darwin that Boxing Day morning, with no radio communication, no air traffic control and no idea what was ahead of him: ‘We were at about 30,000 feet [9000 m] when we started the descent and even though it was daylight, without any communications it was as if we were on the dark side of the moon.’

  At his briefing Brooks had been told there ‘might have been a problem with the cyclone’ but it was all pretty much guesswork—until he broke out of the cloud at around 8200 feet. ‘My first thought was: “Christ, it looks like it’s been hit by a nuclear device” as it was just flattened. Surely a cyclone couldn’t have done that?’

  Brooks took the Boeing out over the sea to lose altitude then flew over the town to have a closer look and it was at this point Burns-Woods and people spotted him. A false run low across the airport convinced Brooks the runway surface was clear so he climbed the Boeing back into the circuit and did a normal landing. Later, on the ground, Norm King discovered the runway had been littered with roofing nails. ‘How they didn’t pierce one of the tyres I’ll never know,’ he confessed years later.

  Once on the ground, Brooks found the airport deserted and without radio had no idea where to park the Boeing so he merely headed for a cleared section of the tarmac. Neither was there any ground power, which meant he would have the leave the number four engine running to provide power for the Boeing on the ground and to use it to start the other engines in the event they had to leave again. Later they would locate a ground power unit among the airport debris and were able to shut down the engine, but not before Brooks’s start-up dilemma resulted in a clash of wills between Burns-Woods and the man in charge of Darwin’s disaster relief, Major General Alan Stretton.

  While Brooks’s Boeing and its SSB radio maintained a contact point with Qantas’s Sydney head office, Burns-Woods raced back to town to announce the aircraft’s availability at a disaster meeting called by Stretton, but by the time he entered the room the meeting was in the middle of a discussion on re-erecting the town’s power lines. Realising time was critical with the engine still running on the 707 Burns-Woods put his hand up at the back of the room and started to explain there was an aircraft that could take anyone who was seriously ill out of Darwin.

  Appearing miffed at the interruption, Stretton responded: ‘When I’m ready to hear from Qantas I will let you know.’

  Undeterred Burns-Woods waited a few more minutes then stood up again: ‘I don’t want to be rude but the aircraft is currently idling on one engine because we have no serviceable ground-start equipment and as it cannot be refuelled it will have to leave very soon.’

  Once again Stretton shut him down, suggesting what was of interest to Qantas was not his concern. By now Burns-Woods, realising he was getting nowhere, bluntly announced that unless some action was taken the aircraft would have to leave with no one on it.

  That appeared to get Stretton’s attention: the meeting was adjourned and the Northern Territory medical service people began to nominate patients for evacuation. The two Qantas doctors would remain to assist.

  Doctors Dakin and Thompson soon found themselves attending to the injured at Casuarina High School, where thousands of refugees from Darwin’s northern suburbs had been sheltering since the cyclone. Despite the fact that they had been there for 24 hours without power, running water or toilets, Tommy Thompson was impressed by the ‘morale and orderliness’ that prevailed.

  ‘Maybe it was the relief at survival that produced a goodhumoured acceptance of the conditions. As one medical worker told me: “paradise was a corner to sleep in and a roof over your head.”’ Thompson later recalled how ingenuity fixed the toilet problem: the backs were ripped off several filing cabinets and they were stretched across a trench.

  While the two doctors treated the injured, Salvation Army and Red Cross men and women moved through families, keeping them fed, watered and as comfortable as possible. As the days wore on, Thompson would reveal a disappointment to which only a doctor could confess—there were no babies to deliver! ‘They are coming here with babies only a few hours old or just about to have them, but I’ve been out of luck,’ he explained to a Qantas colleague at the time. ‘The number we had, however, would make me think the whole of Darwin had been pregnant.’

  Extraordinary too there were no births on any of the subsequent flights out.

  While the two doctors had been threading their way through debris-strewn streets on their way into town to offer what medical assistance was needed, the Boeing was unloaded. Norm King noted that the most popular items on board were the 50 cans of WD40 for starting saturated equipment and cartons of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. ‘I’ve never seen so many men lighting so many cigarettes all at once,’ recalled King.

  Meanwhile, Snelling and other Qantas staff began arranging for the most urgent cases to gather at the airport until finally, with 266 on board, more than double the normal seating for his Boeing—including Robert Lindsay and his cabin crew, who had been helping the loading—Brooks took off
for Sydney.

  ‘People in seats had children lying across them, people were on the floor in the aisles, cabin crew were sitting on the floor in the galley. I sat on the knee of one of the nurses on the flight deck during the take-off,’ Lindsay says.

  As for Brooks: ‘I confess I didn’t want to know what it was like in the cabin as I thought the civil aviation people might come down on me for what I did.’

  Brooks’s flight marked the start of the Qantas involvement in the largest airlift in Australia’s history, when airlines, the RAAF and other aviation units evacuated more than 20,000 people out of the shattered city.

  For those handling the situation on the ground, it was a case of making do with what you had or could scrounge. More ingenuity came to the fore when it came to providing departing refugees with food without the availability of power. Snelling and his staff gathered all the barramundi from the airline’s shattered catering centre, turned two large filing cabinets on their back, strung a sheet of arc mesh between them and lit a fire underneath. Every passenger was issued with a freshly cooked barramundi fillet once on board.

  Over the coming days Qantas alone lifted 5000 evacuees. One Boeing 747 carried 673 people, a world record. In-bound 707s and 747s from Sydney flew in relief teams and 63 tonnes of emergency supplies and equipment, including several motorbikes to help Snelling and his team navigate the piles of debris across the roads. Qantas facilities at Sydney and other centres were used as clearing houses to process evacuees, arrange accommodation or move them on to other areas free of charge on scheduled services, while providing ground handling for a succession of RAAF aircraft arriving in Sydney from Darwin.

  Sixty-six people had died as Tracy flattened Darwin and, despite their personal trauma, Burns-Woods, Snelling and other local Qantas staff, quickly supplemented by others flown in on the Qantas emergency flights, stayed the distance while the airlift continued.

  Snelling has fond memories of how Qantas looked after its people afterwards. ‘If they didn’t want to stay in Darwin, they were offered relocation to any Qantas office in Australia.’ But, like others in Darwin at the time, Snelling still harbours deep resentment over the way the Federal Police moved in, presumably to prevent looting or other misdemeanours.

  The Burns-Woods and Snelling families had taken an offer of rooms in the Travelodge while they went about organising the airlift on the ground, only to be arbitrarily thrown out when Federal Police arrived. Like other decisions made at the time by Major General Alan Stretton, the man sent to Darwin to oversee the immediate aftermath, Snelling regarded it as an overreaction. ‘You needed to consider people had nothing but what they stood up in and were pretty well trying to survive.’

  And when Stretton announced a ban on any celebrations for New Year’s Eve, concerned any such functions would get out of hand, Burns-Woods suggested they’d all worked non-stop for days under appalling conditions and ignored the order.

  Still, there were occasional ‘good news’ stories. The only Qantas staffer injured during the cyclone, Eric Palisa, had been sent south with a dislocated shoulder and severe cuts. Eric’s house had been demolished and he had had to leave without finding any trace of his blue cattle dog pup, which he assumed had died in the wreckage. Even if it had survived, orders issued by Stretton for any stray dogs to be shot on sight threatened a limited future. Several days later Burns-Woods and cabin services man Mike Field were looking at the remains of Palisa’s house when they heard a whine. Out from under a collapsed wall crawled the pup, alive and well. Its only problem was a tick, removed back at the Qantas office. Two days later the pup flew out to join Eric in Melbourne.

  Ironically, few in Darwin knew that only a few weeks before Tracy hit, Qantas head office had ordered Burns-Woods to close down Darwin as a Qantas base as the airline’s own movements through there were minimal and its major role had been the servicing of other international airlines passing through. He had not relished the task of breaking the news to the staff.

  In the end, Cyclone Tracy did it for him.

  SAFETY IS NO ACCIDENT

  7

  TRAINING AT THE BAY OF PIGS

  Motorists driving along the highway between Melbourne and Geelong in the 1960s and 1970s often would be treated to an unforgettable sight as a Qantas Boeing 707 appeared at low level out of the north and began to weave erratically from side to side as it approached to land at Avalon airfield. At the last moment it would flare and briefly touch down, then the engines would roar as the throttles were opened and the Boeing would once again climb away to the south towards Corio Bay, to return a few minutes later to repeat the performance. For those who stopped along the roadside to watch, it was an impromptu air show, made all the more spectacular because it was all done at low level and the whole flight pattern was within eyesight of those on the ground.

  Avalon has a special meaning for many former Qantas aircrew and, when mention is made of it, several things immediately spring to mind. The first is the role it played in establishing Qantas’s much-admired safety record; the second is the belief that the Boeing 707, perhaps more so than any other aircraft, is the one most identified as forging the Qantas we know today. The 707 not only transitioned the airline into the jet age, but was also the representative of an era of tough, professional airmen who were passing on their hard-won skills, both at training sessions and while flying the line, to the flight crews of the future.

  But Avalon was hardly a home away from home for those whose very flying future depended on how they got through their training there. It was more like a battle of survival. While those spectators standing below them on the roadside enjoyed the nonstop spectacle, several of those in the cockpit might be looking at their very future as a Qantas pilot.

  Basically, Avalon was there because hands-on flying training on a big jet was all there was. The sophisticated simulators at the Qantas Jet Base in Sydney, where pilots would be able to call up a computer image of any major airport in the world, were still some years away. Thus, during periods of heavy training demand, 707s would be based at Avalon for weeks at a time as second officers, first officers and captains undertook licence renewals or promotions through the various stages of their careers. Time actually spent at Avalon varied. In the case of a second officer’s licence renewal, it could mean a flight down from Sydney in the morning and return the same afternoon.

  In fact, a brief circuit at Avalon was often the only time a second officer had the opportunity to take off or land a 707, as his normal role was one of monitoring what was happening on the flight deck and standing in for the flight engineer while he took a break. Even then his Avalon exposure was brief, often just a quick take-off, a short time in the air, then a letdown and landing. He could be out of the seat within 30 minutes.

  But the transition from second officer to first officer and into the cockpit’s right-hand seat was a quantum leap and could mean a four- or five-day stint at Avalon, depending on how many were due for promotion. For first officers undergoing training for captaincy particularly, those days at Avalon were demanding, with much of the time spent flying around the circuit area specifically designed to test their ability to handle the aircraft at low level and in poor weather conditions. While flying conditions in Australia might have been relatively benign as far as weather was concerned, approaching Frankfurt or London in mid-winter was a different story altogether. The trainee’s hours in the air would not end until the training captain was convinced he could handle the worst weather conditions Europe could throw at him.

  It was a structured process, starting with a briefing about the characteristics of flying a swept wing jet aircraft, its handling peculiarities at low level and the performance differences between piston engines and jets. The jets, after all, were a new breed to master, particularly when it came to engines and aerodynamics. In the old Constellations, if power was needed to retain a safe airspeed, the airflow swept over the wings by the propellers provided almost instant lift as the speed increased. The jet
engine, slung underneath and blasting its airflow away behind the wings, took longer to ‘spool up’ and increase the aircraft’s speed, a critical consideration when flying at low level.

  Not that this was new to all of those who were being checked at Avalon for the first time. Some had already accumulated hundreds of hours flying jets with the RAAF or the Fleet Air Arm, so for them the emphasis on the piston/jet comparison by training captains who had grown up on propeller-driven aircraft would often be received with a degree of cynicism. ‘While the word “dinosaur” might spring to mind, no one was game enough to say it out loud,’ recalls one former military pilot.

  The briefing was followed by a walk-around ground inspection of the 707 before take-off, all designed as part of a learning curve. Once in the cockpit, however, the serious business began.

  First officers undertaking command training often had another first officer as a ‘crash mate’, hardly the most flattering term for the colleague who was undergoing a similar test. If your ‘crash mate’ was the first chosen to occupy the right-hand seat alongside the training captain, you sat behind them in the ‘jump’ seat until your own turn came in the right-hand seat.

  To suggest the cockpit might be filled with tension would be something of an understatement as these were the days when remaining a permanent second or first officer for the rest of your career was certainly a possibility. Most first officers from Avalon times will admit to a high degree of nervousness when it came to their turn at the controls, always conscious that ‘big brother’ captain, while limiting you to low altitude, was assessing every move you made.

  As the emphasis was on approach and landing, all flying was at low level and even in clear skies if the trainee bumped above 600 feet he was likely to be met with a shout: ‘Too high. Too high. We’re in cloud,’ all designed to force you into a situation where you had to make the right decisions in approaching to land.