by Jim Eames
Alan Terrell remembers climbing out of Beirut for Rome early one morning: ‘I was going through 32,000 feet when this bloody great Air Canada DC-8 appeared, cruising the other way at 35,000 feet. I know it was Air Canada as I could see the writing on the side!’
Terrell immediately reported the incident to air traffic control but heard no more. ‘Some idiot had made a mistake and he wasn’t going to tell us about it.’
Such ‘near misses’ have remained a constant threat through 707s and into the jumbo era as civil air corridors have juggled with military zones and even war zones. In fact, what might appear on the map to be a straightforward route between, say, London and the Middle East, can involve zigzagging around the military airspace of sovereign countries, some of them neighbours who don’t like each other much.
Qantas Captain Fred Phillips’s 747 hit the headlines back in 1977 in a near miss with a batch of German air force fighter jets while flying out of Frankfurt for Bahrain. Tangling with German fighters was hardly a new experience for Phillips, one of the airline’s most respected captains. As a master bomber with the RAF’s Pathfinder Force, Phillips completed 64 missions over Europe, ending the war with a DFC and Bar, and the French Croix de Guerre.
Phillip’s Boeing had reached 30,000 feet when air traffic control warned that a group of unidentified aircraft, believed to be military, had strayed out of their airspace and were approaching him head on. With the air traffic controller unable to communicate with the fighters, Phillips suffered anxious minutes as the controller gave him several more alerts that the aircraft were still closing on him, but there was nothing Phillips could do until he could see where they were coming from.
Suddenly, out of a clear, moonless night, Phillips saw three flashes go by, very close in the opposite direction. Recounting the experience in 2015 Phillips added: ‘All I could do was hang on and hope they’d miss.’
Phillips reported the near miss to Ground Control immediately. The incident made headlines in Australia the following day. Sydney’s Daily Mirror, in its renowned style, under a banner headline ‘Jumbo Buzzed’, had Phillips wrenching at the controls and diving his aircraft 10,000 feet to avoid a collision!
Other press reports quoted air traffic control admitting they couldn’t do much as they had no way of knowing what the fighters would do. They estimated that the nearest of the fighters passed within 700 metres of the Boeing, not a great margin at closing speeds around 1600 kilometres per hour.
The incident prompted European aviation authorities to express concern at the number of near misses in Europe’s crowded skies, although nothing much was heard from the military until some weeks later Phillips received a letter from the general in charge of the German Luftwaffe explaining ‘such risks were the price we have to pay for peace keeping in the Cold War.’
Fred Phillips was less than impressed. ‘That didn’t cut much ice with me, but at least it was my last brush with the Luftwaffe,’ he says with a smile.
But it wasn’t to be his last brush with his former allies, however.
In November 2015, at a ceremony at Sydney’s Hyde Park war memorial, the French government awarded Fred Phillips, now 91, with the Legion of Honour.
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But while any near miss is serious, the near mid-air collision of a Qantas Boeing 747 and a huge US Air Force C-5A transport over Thailand in 1990 can cause experienced former Qantas captains to take a deep breath when they think about it.
For Captain Geoff Westwood, in command of Qantas flight 10 from London to Singapore on 13 September 1990, it had been an uneventful trip. It was now dark, just after 7 p.m., and his Boeing was approaching Phuket in Thailand. Soon Westwood and his crew would begin their gradual descent into Singapore.
For business-class passenger Cris George, one of the 360 people on board, the last two hours of the flight had been something special. Commander of the air wing at Nowra Naval Air Station, south of Sydney, he was returning from talks in London prompted by growing concerns in the Middle East. Earlier that month Saddam Hussein’s forces had invaded Kuwait; France and the UK were announcing troop deployment to Saudi Arabia. All the signs were there that the United States was gearing up for war.
Although the previous days had seen George’s involvement in these critical international concerns, George was now thinking how he might be able to talk his way up front to get a firsthand look at the cockpit layout of Boeing’s latest -400 version. ‘Being an aviator myself I was always so impressed with Qantas, the height of professionalism,’ he says.
Though unknown to George at the time, Westwood himself had family roots in Nowra and, noticing George’s name and military attachment, sent a flight attendant to ask him if he’d like to come up for a look. ‘Would I ever. Clear a path,’ was George’s excited reply.
George was still there when the flight attendant came back and told him meals were being served and he had just sat down to eat when a violent vibration ran through the aircraft.
‘A short time later the first officer came out the cockpit door and his face was ashen,’ George says.
He had reason to be.
The Qantas Boeing was cruising in scattered cloud at 37,000 feet when suddenly, heading north and filling the cockpit windows, came the massive shape of another aircraft, its bow wave sending the Boeing on a 15 degree roll to the left.
It was all over in an instant. Although Westwood’s first instinct was to put the Boeing’s nose down, he had no time to react. Even if he had, the other aircraft would have taken the tail off his Boeing.
Westwood and his crew estimated the other aircraft had passed no more than 50 feet above them. For most of the passengers the near miss was merely a momentary bout of turbulence and only later would it become apparent just how fortunate those aboard the Boeing had been that night.
The Boeing 747’s flight management system allows for the aircraft’s autopilot to be engaged on either the captain’s or the first officer’s altimeter settings, and although the difference may be only a few feet, the aircraft will fly at the chosen system’s altitude. On this night’s flight, Westwood had selected his own system. Had he chosen the first officer’s system, the Boeing would have been flying 75 feet higher and although that was within the limits allowed for this type of aircraft, there is little doubt the two aircraft would have collided.
Renowned as a fairly cool character, Westwood pressed on to Singapore, debriefed the cabin crew on arrival, went off to dinner with some of his own crew, then went to bed early. In the middle of the night the realisation of how close they had been to disaster suddenly snapped him awake and, as he later recounted to his colleague Roger Carmichael: ‘I got up, went out and got smashed.’
Immediately word of the incident reached Sydney, disgusted with what appeared to be a serious air traffic control mistake that could have cost the lives of hundreds of passengers, Qantas’s air safety chief Ken Lewis started to investigate why the Galaxy had been there in the first place.
Lewis tracked down the commanding officer of the C-5A squadron in Hawaii, and gave him a piece of his mind over the phone. He was shocked at the response: ‘Well, there’s a war on you know.’
Lewis, never one to take a backward step when it came to prosecuting his case, responded: ‘I know that. I just didn’t realise we were the bloody enemy.’
The Americans later claimed they had tried to contact Thai air traffic control but received no response and came into Thai airspace at the wrong altitude. For their part Thai air traffic control confirmed they didn’t know the C5-A was there, but Lewis has his own theories about the incident.
With tensions rising in the Middle East, he remains convinced the US Air Force directed its aircraft not to use identification transponders when flying near Muslim states, particularly across Asia. Thus the Thais, even if they knew an aircraft was there somewhere, might have had no idea who he was or how close he might go to Qantas flight QF10.
No doubt prodded by Lewis’s sharp exchange with Hawaii, it wasn
’t long before two US lieutenant colonels arrived in his office from the US embassy in Canberra to discuss the incident, although—as the months went by and the US launched Operation Desert Storm—the Iraq War was then in full flight and interest in the issue had started to fade.
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Near misses aside, the jet age has provided other examples where Qantas has touched the edge of disaster either through mechanical, system or human failures.
On 4 June 1966, Stu Archbold and Norm Field were climbing out of Sydney for Brisbane when their Boeing 707 suddenly started to ‘porpoise’ into a series of violent up-and-down manoeuvres. Startled, Field turned to Archbold and asked him what he was doing.
‘It’s not me,’ was Archbold’s reply, taking his hands off the control column to prove it, and both pilots watched in amazement as the column continued to move forward and back on its own, the noise in the cockpit now reaching a crescendo from the effect of the airflow breaking away over the flight deck as the aircraft lurched through the sky.
‘I tried to send a “Mayday” call when I got my voice down to a shriek and told Alf Coyle the flight engineer to get the thrust off as the nose was coming up.’
Gradually the aircraft began to stabilise and Field requested a return to Mascot via the coast. Neither he nor Archbold wanted the aircraft to be over a populated area if the phenomenon returned.
After reporting the incident to engineering they were given a replacement aircraft and they resumed the flight to Brisbane, then on to Honolulu, although not before Field had requested an inquiry into the incident. Field later regretted not insisting on an inquiry that same day as it was three weeks before he was interrogated by a small panel including two senior captains, Torchy Uren and Max Bamman, and representatives from Qantas engineering and Boeing.
As the questioning went on, Field soon became aware that two factors were working against him, the first being the fact that Stu Archbold was based in Melbourne, leaving Field on his own to face judgement. The second came when engineering announced they had erased the cockpit voice recorder in use on the 707 that day. Field knew its recording of his and Archbold’s conversations would presumably have settled the issue but now detected the panel was coming to the conclusion that the incident resulted from pilot error caused by Archbold and Field moving the control column in opposition to each other. Fortunately for Field, Max Bamman dissented and the subsequent investigation showed that balance panels installed in the aircraft’s horizontal stabilisers on the tail had malfunctioned, sending the aircraft into what was becoming known as a ‘Dutch roll’, a combination of yawing and rolling motions that could occur in swept wing aircraft. Although aircraft like the 707 had been fitted with yaw dampers to improve stability and techniques for recovery were part of pilot training, it needed correcting as soon as possible.
While Boeing had originally identified the problem during its early development of the 707, its consequences could be fatal. During an acceptance flight by Braniff Airlines over the Boeing plant at Seattle several years before Norm Field’s incident, poor recovery from a Dutch roll at low level resulted in three of the 707’s four engines being ripped off its wings before it crashed, killing all eight on board.
But while the investigation finally absolved Archbold and Field, they had experienced what became known in Qantas as the ‘blame game’, a belief among some aircrew that no matter what the real or contributory causes of an accident might be, the initial response by their more senior management and corporate colleagues was to blame the pilot. According to the aircrew it would be a recurring theme for many years and a retrospective view of some of the accidents and incidents experienced by the company makes one tend to believe they might have been right.
John Simler had firsthand experience of it when his DC-3 ended in a ditch after landing at Wau, Papua New Guinea in the 1950s. Simler had not been warned about water from a typical tropical downpour on the runway and his attempts to deal with the aircraft’s lack of traction had taken him into the ditch.
Once the Qantas safety inspector arrived at Wau to investigate it didn’t take Simler long to get the impression he was being blamed for landing too far down the strip, an accusation he vehemently denied. Adding to his woes was the fact that a Department of Civil Aviation plane carrying their own investigators had landed two hours after him, although Simler was able to point out by that time much of the airstrip had dried. ‘He landed at least a further hundred yards [metres] beyond my touchdown point without a problem.’
As he had predicted, the Qantas Board of Inquiry, which, says Simler, lacked anyone who had ever operated under Papua New Guinea conditions, found him responsible for the incident. He was demoted to first officer and ordered to once again take all the written examinations necessary to return to requalify as a captain. ‘Bill Taylor, as first officer, was criticised for not taking over control when the aircraft started to aquaplane—an absolutely ridiculous suggestion,’ Simler says with obvious cynicism.
But, as it turned out, the DCA did not accept the Qantas findings; their report stated the blame should not fall totally on Simler’s shoulders. Simler soon returned to captaincy, later transferring to Catalina flying boats. He was one of a small group of pilots chosen to remain in Papua New Guinea to train TAA crews after TAA took over the PNG Qantas operation there in 1960.
One of the more bizarre examples of the ‘blame game’ surrounded an incident that took Qantas’s impeccable safety record close to disaster over a little-known Middle Eastern town called Jiwani. Those close to the company’s operations in those days still wonder at the combination of luck and the Boeing 707’s incredible ability to survive stresses far beyond what it had been designed to withstand.
It became known as the ‘Bahrain bomber’ incident.
10
TWO MINUTES OF TERROR OVER THE MIDDLE EAST
As the Qantas Boeing 707 City of Canberra slid through a pitch-black sky over the Arabian Sea on the night of 21 February 1969, en route to Bahrain, everything appeared normal. The passengers who had reboarded at Bangkok had been served their supper, the heavy meal carts had been tucked away and John ‘Buddha’ Greene and his cabin crew had dimmed the cabin lights to allow the passengers to sleep as his own crew began to take turns at their rest breaks.
That there were only 62 passengers on board, one of whom just happened to be Australia’s renowned nuclear physicist Sir Mark Oliphant, had not only made the Bangkok-to-Bahrain sector of the flight to London relatively easy for Greene’s crew but meant the Boeing itself was very lightly loaded, a factor that, in the minutes ahead, would help determine whether they lived or died.
Those flying the Boeing were an experienced crew. The aircraft’s captain, Bill Nye, had flown Catalina flying boats in the Royal Australian Air Force during the war and had accumulated thousands of hours in command. On this London pattern, Nye’s first officer David Howells was on the second stage of his command training before himself qualifying for his own captaincy.
As is the captain’s prerogative, Nye decided who would command each particular sector and had given Howells the first—out of Sydney to Perth the previous day. Nye then elected to fly the second sector from Perth to Singapore. Howells was given the short Singapore-to-Bangkok flight for training and had also handled the take-off from Bangkok earlier that night.
David Howells was already an experienced airman, graduating as a pilot in the Royal Australian Navy in 1954. He had flown piston-engine fighters off aircraft carriers HMAS Sydney and Melbourne until the demise of the Fleet Air Arm. Since joining Qantas in 1960, he had flown Lockheed Electras throughout the Far East and across the Tasman to New Zealand. Second officer Ian Watkins and flight engineer Bob Hodges made up the rest of the crew.
As was normal procedure, before departing Bangkok, Bob Hodges had inspected the aircraft’s technical log, which notes any previous history of defects and, although there had been earlier notations of comparison warnings between the artificial horizons for the captain and first
officer, the aircraft was, for all practical purposes, serviceable. There are actually three artificial horizons on Boeing 707s, instruments that show the Boeing’s flight attitude at any given time, vital in determining whether the aircraft is flying straight and level through cloud or at night. There are two in the centre of the instrument panel in front of both the captain and the first officer, plus a third on the central console between the two pilots.
Now, near midnight local time and cruising at 35,000 feet, the Boeing had passed overhead Karachi and was heading towards a navigation beacon at the coastal town of Jiwani, near the Pakistan–Iran border. Like the cabin crew, the pilots were also rotating their rest breaks in the crew rest area back in the cabin near the galley. Nye had been the first to go, to be replaced by Howells who was dozing in the bunk when he felt the aircraft start to turn to the left. Initially such a turn would be of no concern to Howells, assuming it would probably mean they were altering course slightly to avoid some bad weather ahead.
But when the aircraft’s turn increased, Howells began to think perhaps the weather had deteriorated in Bahrain and they might be diverting to Karachi to take on more fuel. It was a thought that only lasted a few seconds as the aircraft kept turning to the left and he heard the cockpit speed-warning bell begin to ring, a warning that the aircraft was exceeding its legal maximum speed.
There are numerous cockpit alarms to warn pilots of problems but the speed-warning bell is one they never want to hear. It means the aircraft is approaching a speed at which it is likely to suffer serious structural damage. Realising he had to get to the cockpit quickly Howells tried to climb out of the bunk but ended up sprawled on the galley floor and unable to get to his feet due to the gravitational forces created by the Boeing, now spiralling downwards and almost on its back.
Unable to rise, Howells began crawling along the carpet, at one stage climbing over senior steward Ed Kirkland and flight hostess Maureen Culey who were also pinned to the floor and trying to get up. By now the noise was deafening, with the warning bell ringing incessantly and the screech of the airflow rushing over the groaning aircraft mingling with the screams coming from the passenger cabin.