The Flying Kangaroo

by Jim Eames

  However, given that aircraft purchases by airlines can be complex arrangements, there is a counter argument suggesting that the probability of costly adjustments to special tax arrangements covering its purchase, added to the high book value of the aircraft at the time, made the decision to repair it still cheaper than writing it off.

  The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s final report eighteen months later was highly critical of many aspects of the accident—even well beyond the performance of the flight crew and the cabin crew—to deficiencies in training and operational procedures.

  Although Mick Ryan was offered a free trip for two anywhere on the Qantas network as compensation, he was still annoyed enough to pen a letter to James Strong outlining some of the shortcomings he’d witnessed. Two months later the former Qantas director of engineering received a three-page reply from Strong addressed to a Mr ‘William’ Ryan, apologising for the disruption to his travel plans and acknowledging there were ‘lessons to be learnt from every stage of the process’.

  ‘I suppose there’s not much you can say from a passenger point of view. You approach, you crash, you get out and consider you were lucky that the aircraft didn’t crash into the trees, rupture the fuel tanks and incinerate all of us,’ Ryan concludes over a decade later. But while he and others believed it had been Qantas’s lucky day, in the weeks and months that followed, the airline went to extreme lengths to move the mishap as far away from the public’s view as possible, creating severe tensions between the media and the airline that were tending to affect the airline’s image.

  The aviation writer for The Australian, Steve Creedy, says problems surfaced immediately after news of the crash reached Australia. ‘They [Qantas] wouldn’t even tell us where the passengers were staying so I rang a few hotels close to the airport and found some of them there.’ Creedy acknowledges that, with an accident inquiry pending, the airline certainly couldn’t be expected to detail too much about what may have happened. But, as only the bare minimum was offered, this led to the press continuing to fill the void with whatever facts they could find. In turn this led Strong at one stage to describe the media reporting as ‘outrageous.’ Throughout the process Strong appeared to take the whole issue personally, at once threatening Creedy that if he ran a particular angle of the story he would go on radio the next day and refute it.

  Creedy ran the story anyway. Strong didn’t follow through with his threat.

  Much of the debate between the two kept coming back to the description of an ‘incident’ rather than an ‘accident’ but, as the months went by, Creedy says it even became difficult to get any information as to where the aircraft was being repaired. So the media continued to look for it themselves and the story, much to Qantas’s chagrin, developed a life of its own, leading at one stage to the Sydney Morning Herald publishing a photograph of a Boeing 747 in a hangar in Xiamen, China, only to have to admit several days later it was the wrong aircraft!

  Finally, when repairs to the aircraft were completed, Strong himself flew back into Sydney on the Boeing with the aim of assuring the public it was now safe and back in Qantas’s service.

  Creedy believes that both Qantas and Strong learnt a valuable public relations lesson from the incident (or accident). In the interim, when the undercarriage of another Qantas jumbo collapsed through structural failure while on the ground at Rome, one of the airline’s most highly respected engineers, David Forsyth, provided the media with detailed explanations of what had occurred. Although the two incidents were radically different, Creedy adds: ‘The result was the Rome incident disappeared off the media agenda after a few days. Bangkok went on for two years.’

  CHANGING SKIES AHEAD

  One of the earliest signs appeared over the Atlantic Ocean on the night of 31 May 2009, when Air France flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. It took several years before the wreckage was located and an inquiry revealed what many in the aviation industry had been fearing for some years: that 225 people had died because of the failure of the pilots to control one of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft when part of its automated systems failed.

  As with most aircraft accidents, a sequence of events came together—weather, the absence from the flight deck of the aircraft’s captain in the vital first minutes of the disaster, along with lack of proper communication between the two remaining crew. But what would stun many in the industry was the sheer inability of the pilots to apply basic airmanship to overcome the crisis they found themselves in.

  In fact, they did the complete opposite. With faulty instrument readings telling them the aircraft was stalling, instead of lowering the nose to regain airspeed and recover, they consistently pulled back on the control column and the Airbus A-330 kept stalling, with fatal results. One can imagine the surprise when some of the older Qantas pilots learnt of the incident—pilots who had a simple recovery technique: set the thrust and the aircraft’s altitude and you know you must be flying, no matter what the airspeed indicator is telling you. It had been drummed into them from their earliest training days.

  Little more than two years later the Korean crew of an Asiana Boeing 777, approaching San Francisco airport in broad daylight, crashed short of the runway, killing three and injuring 180 of those on board, simply because the pilots were not able to approach and land visually. The subsequent investigation pointed to cultural influences where not only was the pilot ‘very concerned’ about having to land an aircraft without full automation but because other Asian pilots were able to do them ‘he could not say he could not do one’.

  The ethos on the Qantas flight deck, where every crew member was encouraged to speak up immediately—and even take control—if he considered a landing approach was not being executed properly has been probably best summed up by Roger Carmichael’s advice to any newly promoted captain or first officer: ‘Just keep thinking everyone in this cockpit is trying to kill you.’

  Several more recent disasters—the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in May 2014 and the loss of an AirAsia Airbus A-320 with 162 people on board on a flight between Surabaya and Singapore in December 2014 are also causing concern throughout the industry, although for differing reasons.

  In the case of the mystery of what happened to MH370, and with the search concentrating on an area in the southern Indian Ocean, serious questions are being raised about an alleged lack of transparency shown by the Malaysian government and its authorities about what they knew of the aircraft’s possible flight path, information that would have been critical in concentrating the search in the days immediately after its disappearance.

  A report on the loss of AirAsia will be looking at the possibility of pilots once again being unable to compensate once a fully automated aircraft demanded they correct it themselves.

  Whatever the outcome of these tragedies, the industry is taking a good hard look at a training regime that may have led to an over-reliance on complex automation that, while reducing costs and certainly bringing generally safer skies, has, to a large extent, fallen short of making sure pilots retain the ability to fly their aircraft as their predecessors did in what were known as the ‘stick and rudder’ days.

  Then there are those cultural factors, particularly in Asia, where caste differences or respect for authority discourage any challenge that may cause a loss of face, bringing into play a dichotomy dangerously out of place in an aeroplane cockpit where it is absolutely essential that a crew member communicates concerns the instant he sees something might be wrong.

  It is Asia, too, that has seen an unprecedented surge in air travel in recent years, where rapidly growing national carriers are being joined by new start-up operators, and hundreds of new Airbus and Boeing aeroplanes are due to enter already crowded skies in the years ahead.

  Experienced pilots from some of the world’s leading airlines who have assisted some Asian carriers with their training have been watching these devel
opments with increasing alarm, although they are not surprised.

  One former Qantas check and training captain was particularly blunt in his assessment of the Asiana accident at San Francisco: ‘It’s just unbelievable. The aircraft was so nose high it was basically falling out of the sky and they probably had some difficulty seeing the runway. Yet no one was calling it or grabbing hold of the situation and saying “Hey, what’s going on here?”’

  As for aircraft stalling, as occurred with Air France and may have been a significant factor in AirAsia’s accident over the Java Sea, he points out that part of a pilot’s basic training traditionally related to stall recovery at low altitudes to avoid ground contact, with the idea of minimising height loss. Since both Air France and AirAsia aircraft were flying at over 35,000 feet, adequate altitude was available if the proper procedures were implemented. But here, other factors are involved: namely, the relationship of the weight of the aircraft and the thinness of the air at high altitudes.

  According to many experienced pilots much of this goes back to how technological advances have affected training.

  As aircraft like the 707 and the Douglas DC-8 were superseded and computerised flight simulators reached unprecedented levels of sophistication, the prohibitive cost of taking an aircraft the size of a Boeing 747 out of the fleet for training gradually became uneconomic.

  ‘Things had to change for many reasons,’ explains one former senior Qantas captain. ‘Safety and training had to be rationalised, particularly against a background where accidents were rare and profit margins were narrowing as competition increased dramatically. Simulators were the answer, nowadays able to dial up any contingency likely to confront a pilot in the air.’

  But somewhere along the way, as fully automatic training has matched fully automated aircraft, where a flight can be programmed from the airport of origin to the destination, often with only limited input en route by the pilots, the importance of manual flying has been degraded to the point where some members of the crew rarely normally actually ‘fly’ the aircraft.

  Since the Wright Brothers, part of flying has been the ability to land an aircraft using a visual approach to the airport, carried out when a pilot is able to see the airport, then, by looking out the window, eyeball himself onto the threshold of the active runway, similar to the way the Qantas crew did when they landed the Boeing 747 City of Canberra on its last flight to Albion Park’s short runway in 2015. There’s nothing terribly complicated about it but, as one old airman suggests, it does require judgement and training, along with the necessary manual skills of manipulating throttles and the control column, rather than sitting back and allowing the automatics to work it out for you. Light aircraft pilots do it every day when landing at airports around Australia and it was a critical part of that training on Boeing 707s during the days when Avalon functioned as a training base for Qantas. Many is the Qantas pilot under training to become a captain who suffered damaged eardrums from his instructor if he deviated from his angle of approach while landing at Avalon, all to emphasise the importance of low-level handling skills.

  While automation has improved economics, enhanced some safety aspects and lessened the workload for pilots of today, traditional ‘stick and rudder’ skills have in many cases been almost totally erased from the training agenda. Reports from Asia, where there is a limited general aviation industry for pilots to gain flying experience, indicate that some prospective pilots come from university or an air force and into the first officer’s seat on a commercial airliner with only several hundred hours flying experience, much of it in a simulator. And don’t get the impression that this is purely an Asian problem as some of the world’s leading airlines have pilots who are not confident of making a visual approach even into cities like Melbourne.

  Neither can the responsibility for this be restricted to the airlines. Some experts believe organisations like the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the International Air Transport Association have recognised the problem and are taking steps to drive the solution.

  AN AIRLINE FULL OF CHARACTERS

  12

  LIFE WAS NEVER DULL

  The aviation industry has changed to such an extent that it’s difficult to imagine some of the characters who worked in Qantas in years past ever holding down a job at the airline today. Most would not take offence if you suggested they would find it hard to reconcile themselves with either the advances in technology or perhaps the pressures of doing business in an increasingly competitive world. Broadly speaking too, in aviation and most other industries, the days of the characters have passed because the very traits that made them such colourful people would no longer be tolerated in an environment of shareholder interests and 24-hour media scrutiny. But, even though they may be gone, the airline industry owes much to them. They were people of the times who provided that spark that further illuminated an industry that, along with its dangerous side, already had an inherent romantic appeal.

  They were a mix of personalities: some painfully formal, others irreverent, some natural practical jokers. The contrasts appear stark. One could hardly imagine those iconic captains of airline’s formative days, men like Russell Tapp, Lester Brain or Bill Crowther, steeped as they were in the business of flying, encouraging a humorous atmosphere in the flight deck. Rex Senior, who flew with them on the wartime Catalina Double Sunrise service between Perth and Colombo during the war noted there was always a very ‘naval’ overlay when it came to crew status, probably a hangover from the Empire flying boat days pre-war. Thus the captain was known only as ‘Captain’ or ‘Skipper’, never by his first name, while the first officer was only ever referred to as ‘Mr’ by the captain.

  Much of the change to a less-formal atmosphere can be pinpointed to the years immediately after the end of the war in 1945 as former wartime pilots joined the ranks, men who had faced death every night for months in the air over Europe or flew against the Japanese in the South-West Pacific. While a few carried their consciousness of rank into civil aviation, still others knew how to let their hair down out of working hours or spear pomposity with a sharp retort, although often it depended on where they were flying at the time.

  Papua New Guinea certainly provided a unique training ground in the late 1940s and 1950s, when pilots, traffic officers, engineers or ground staff were all tossed together in cramped living quarters with few modern facilities, but few stood on ceremony when off duty.

  Gordon Power’s account of the exchange between Captain Geoff Piggott and his roommate, newly minted first officer Alan Ross, later to become a senior check captain, doesn’t surprise. Part of the household roster in the pilots’ accommodation at Lae was the requirement to defrost the refrigerator, so when Piggott arrived home one evening to find there was water all over the kitchen floor, he confronted Ross. ‘Well, what are you going to do about it, Alan?’ inquired an irate Piggott.

  ‘I think I’ll drill a few holes in the floor and let it all drain out,’ was the reply.

  In a hardship posting where living conditions were anything but normal, reports of such exchanges had an almost ‘domestic’ family-like flavour to them, further demonstrated by pilots visiting major centres down on the mainland often taking time to shop for essentials for some of the Qantas families serving on remote stations. One captain even agreed to shop for a bra for the wife of a station manager while taking a DC-3 south for maintenance. Bill Forgan-Smith was known to make an occasional unscheduled diversion to Madang to deliver delayed mail to staff, tossing the mail out the window then roaring off into the Highlands again to resume his flying schedule for the day.

  Thanks to such characters, life was never dull. Some remember the company man in Lae, part of whose responsibility was to organise the laundry. Since he had well-trained local staff to ease his load, he tended to spend a great deal of his free time at Ma Stewart’s notorious Hotel Cecil, occasionally ending the day’s drinking session with a dip in the Cecil’s pool until one evening, in one of his m
ore exuberant moments, he dived in, only to find Ma Stewart had drained most of the water out for maintenance. With his departure to Australia for treatment, Qantas Lae had to find a new manager for the laundry.

  Others were credited with showing more initiative, such as the traffic officer in Madang who became known as the ‘Black Trader’. Traffic officers in those days earned little money, so the idea was to supplement their incomes any way they could, particularly when Burns Philp were in the process of organising ‘boi’ charters to Rabaul for twelve months’ work on their plantations.

  Thus, when a Highland native would arrive in Madang with a bag of coins to purchase a ticket to visit a relative or ‘wontok’ in Rabaul, our man would deliver him to Burns Philp on the back of the Qantas truck where he would join the other natives heading off on the charter, soon finding himself in Rabaul working a twelve months’ contract but with ample time to keep in touch with his ‘wontoks’. Not that one should get the wrong idea here. A year’s pay with accommodation and all meals provided was usually a welcome relief from the daily grind at home in the Highlands. Meantime our man pocketed £16 as a ‘facilitation fee’.

  Beyond Papua New Guinea, even crews flying the long-haul Constellations and, later, Boeing 707 services around the world placed their own stamp on a side of the company rarely referred to in its own records.

  Unlike the international air routes of today, where crew slips at various ports are measured by hours rather than days, the crew of a Constellation freighter might spend more than twenty days in each other’s company before returning home to Sydney. Since much depended on the personality of the captain, old hands will tell you trips of such duration could either be a highly enjoyable experience or an interminable hell.