by Jim Eames
One Qantas pilot remembers flying as a first officer with Marsh Burgess as captain out of London to New York. While Burgess had proved an exceptional pilot, he could be difficult in the cockpit of a 707. The first officer received two tongue-lashings even before they had left the ground at Heathrow; the navigator copped it shortly afterwards. By the time they reached New York, the flight engineer remained the only member of the crew who had escaped Burgess’s ire and wore a smug smile on his face as they approached the parking bay. Suddenly, to the rest of the crew’s delight, something tripped Burgess and the flight engineer joined the club as well.
When Burgess asked them to join him for drinks at the hotel that night they all declined, pleading they needed an early night. After Burgess repaired to his room, they all went out on the town without him.
Flying as a second officer was part of a steep learning curve; second officers spent hours in the air, hoping to have the captain pass on to them any morsel of wisdom to help with their flying. But much depended on the captain’s personality.
Early in his career, one very junior second officer remembers being excited when he was told he was rostered with Ken Meares, an experienced flight captain, on a trip to Hong Kong. Apart from the necessary operational comments, nothing was heard from Meares during the nine-hour trip until shortly before they began their approach into Hong Kong, when, out of the blue, Meares said, ‘Don’t put any charts on the glare shield as it reflects off the windscreen and makes it difficult to see any other traffic.’
‘I was mystified!’ the second officer recalled years later. ‘I had never placed anything on the glare shield but it appeared that this gem of wisdom was to be my total reward for flying with the Fleet Captain.’
Such instances aside, there can be no doubting the value gained from learning from captains who were very willing to pass on their experience. Some became characters largely because they left others in awe of their flying ability.
While based in Bermuda in the 1970s, Roger Carmichael often flew as a first officer with Tony Jennings as captain. ‘Tony was one of a few people in the airline who when they got into an aeroplane they strapped it onto their back. The rest of us strapped ourselves into it.’
London’s Heathrow was being lashed by a gusting 50 knot (90 kilometre per hour) cross-wind as their 707 approached to land one March morning, a wind so bad no other airlines were taking off or landing there. Carmichael, sitting in the right-hand seat, says by the time they were down to around a thousand feet, the wind was forcing the Boeing’s nose off at an alarming angle to the direction of the runway.
‘In fact I could look out my right side window straight at the runway,’ says Carmichael, so he offered: ‘Tony, if I was doing this landing I would be diverting to Prestwick.’
‘Son, that’s the reason I’m doing the landing,’ was Jennings’s reply.
‘I think all of Heathrow had come out that morning to see the aircraft crash but at the last moment he put his great boot down on the rudder pedal and straightened it out. It was magical flying,’ Carmichael says.
Other captains appear to have had difficulty when it came to mixing with crew outside flying hours. Although he had earned respect for his war record and status within the airline, some found Torchy Uren difficult to mix with. After landing in Honolulu on one occasion, Alan Terrell asked Torchy if he would like to join his crew and the cabin attendants in Terrell’s room for a drink after they signed off. Appearing surprised, Uren asked Terrell whether it was his normal practice to invite the cabin crew. When Terrell told him it was, Uren replied: ‘I find I have little in common with them.’
Others became known for their idiosyncrasies. Hughie Hemsworth had a high-pitched voice that often startled the traffic officer responsible for handing him the aircraft’s load sheet immediately before departure.
After a quick scan of the sheet Hemsworth would exclaim for all to hear: ‘Are you bastards trying to kill me?’
It might have been Hemsworth’s idea of a joke but marketing director George Howling remembers receiving a frantic call from the Singapore regional director, Bob Low, to tell him Hemsworth was delaying the departure of his 747 Singapore to Sydney flight because the chocolate frogs that were part of the crew meal had not been loaded. Howling, who had known Hemsworth since his London days in the late 1940s, was quickly on the phone to Singapore. ‘I pointed out he had a full flight and to delay it while catering went and found the chocolate frogs was not the wisest attitude to take. He reluctantly agreed and I promised the frogs would be available on future flights!’
Any close study of Qantas’s history leaves little doubt that the 707 era marked the emergence of many of the real characters, be they aircrew, traffic officers, cabin crew or those on the ground. While many have gone to that great landing ground in the sky, a select few still hold legendary status when old pilots gather, their efforts written into Qantas folklore. In fact, there are probably very few gatherings where Ross Biddulph’s name doesn’t come up.
Biddulph flew RAAF transport aircraft in the South-West Pacific before joining Qantas in 1948 and it was in the Qantas New Guinea years that his legend was born. One of his earliest escapades occurred while he was flying a DH-84 Dragon out of Kainantu for Lae one morning when he realised he’d left his tin of 50 Craven A cigarettes down the back of the aircraft.
Unknown to Biddulph, Qantas’s chief pilot in Papua New Guinea, Bill Forgan-Smith, was flying a DC-3 1000 feet behind and above him when Biddulph decided he was desperate for a cigarette. As there was no cargo or passengers, his idea was to quickly dart down the back, get the cigs and smartly return to the driver’s seat.
Years later, in a letter to his old mate Norm Field, Biddulph described what happened next:
Winding full nose down on the trim, and holding up straight and level with one hand I scrambled out of the seat and did a ‘Usain Bolt’ towards the after region. Apparently Dragons don’t like people rapidly appearing behind the centre of gravity because the wretched plane reared up like a Wodehouse salmon and set course for Jupiter. Almost immediately it stalled and, forgetting all about Jupiter, screamed straight down towards Nadzab.
Shortly after I arrived in the flight deck area, spreadeagled against the instrument panel like a butterfly and covered in thousands of Craven As.
Biddulph then describes how he gets the aircraft under control only to look out the window, ‘straight into the apoplectic face of Bill Forgan-Smith, ten metres away, flying in formation with me and trying not to stall as he eased the DC-3 past.’ Biddulph said the subsequent conversation in the chief pilot’s office was ‘fruity’.
As Biddulph worked his way through the Qantas pilot ranks via DC-4s, Constellations and finally 707s, even the achievement of reaching ‘Captain’ status provided the inevitable ‘Biddulph moment’. In those days, once a first officer had been selected for command level, he was paraded before director of flight operations Alan Wharton to be officially ‘knighted’.
Wharton, renowned for his dry sense of humour, later described greeting Biddulph when he arrived at his office with: ‘Christ, they’ve reached the bottom of the barrel this time.’
‘No, boss,’ replied Biddulph, ‘they just started a new barrel.’
The achievement of such rank didn’t seem to curtail Biddulph’s escapades, either in the air or on the ground. Having several days to spare during a lay-over in Rome he decided to take his whole crew to Napoli ‘to uplift some culture,’ as he later told Field. Becoming aware that a fabled collection of pornographic art could only be accessed by genuine researchers and academics, Biddulph left the bus outside the gallery in the persona of one ‘Professore Bindolpo’ travelling with his group of ‘studentees’.
Genuflecting and with clasped hands, they were duly accepted into the building by the abbot and all went well until the radio officer gave the game away when he made a lewd reference to a carved image of a soldier and a goat. They were promptly asked to leave.
Unfortunately t
he local BOAC representative in Rome filed a report on the incident and Biddulph once again found himself summoned before his chief pilot, this time in London, who opened the batting with ‘Do you know a Professor Bindolpo?’
‘I knew then I was dead,’ Biddulph later admitted.
But it was on the Kangaroo Route to London, where Qantas crews operated in close company with those of BOAC, that most of the Biddulph stories had their origins. These were the days when Qantas crews stayed at premises known as Speedbird Houses, BOAC-owned accommodation at night stops along the route.
Bringing some of the Mother Country’s best and brightest pilots down to size seems to have appealed to Biddulph’s colonial streak. When they discovered the British had erected a bar tent for their own exclusive use at Speedbird House in Karachi, Biddulph and Andy Young managed to collapse the guide ropes, leaving a bunch of BOAC pilots’ heads poking up through the roof.
On another occasion in Karachi a BOAC crew suddenly realised the waiter dressed in Arab robes and offering them camel steaks was our man Biddulph.
There’s also the story of the cold winter’s day at Speedbird House at Heathrow when the British pilots had their chairs strategically positioned around the fireplace, blocking the Qantas pilots from the warmth. A short time later Biddulph appeared dressed in the uniform of the cleaning staff. Carrying a bucket and shovel, he proceeded to pile the fire’s contents into the bucket and set it up in the room next door for his own crew.
Not only BOAC pilots were at risk. During one stopover in Cairo, Biddulph noticed all the drivers of an approaching camel train were asleep. Waiting until they reached him, he slipped across to the lead camel, grasped its bridle rope and turned the animal around, watching with glee as the whole of the train followed it off in the opposite direction.
On other occasions, while the crew stood on the pavement somewhere in the world waiting for transport to their hotel, he would announce: ‘Anyone who can’t tap dance is a poofter.’
It’s hard to conjure the image of a present-day Qantas crew, dressed in flight uniforms, going through a dance routine outside one of today’s international terminals!
Sadly, Biddulph’s career with Qantas ended at a relatively early age when he landed his Boeing at Perth. It appears that although the runway was fully serviceable, the final paintwork had not been applied at the threshold and a management pilot travelling as passenger reported Biddulph for ‘landing short’. Never a large fan of officialdom, Biddulph refused to accept the landing was anything other than safe and, after telling the company what it could do with some of its rules and regulations, resigned.
Unlike the salary levels of today, pilots in the Constellation and early 707 days weren’t all that well paid and even captains like Ted Harding occasionally supplemented their income from other sources. In Harding’s case he had part-ownership of a fruit-and-vegetable barrow at Manly wharf.
On one occasion on his way home after a trip away, Harding arrived at the wharf to find his barrow man having difficulty handling all the customers waiting to be served. So Harding, still in uniform, spent the next hour or so helping out.
When director of flight operations Alan Wharton heard about it, he called Harding to his office: ‘Ted, I believe you were seen working in your Qantas uniform on a barrow at Manly wharf.’
When Harding confessed, Wharton continued, ‘I’m afraid that’s not a good image for a Qantas captain. I’ll tell you what, either you give the barrow up or you can leave Qantas.’
Quick as a flash Harding replied, ‘Can I have a week to think about it?’
With today’s senior Qantas A-380 captains reputedly on salaries exceeding $500,000 a year, Wharton’s anecdote today has an odd ring to it!
Adelaide-born Harding had joined the RAAF in 1941 and flew 78 missions on Hudson bombers in the South-West Pacific. His squadron suffered heavy losses, with 70 per cent of their officers killed and half their aircraft lost to the enemy or in crashes. Their attacks on enemy shipping, aerodromes, troops and installations earned his squadron a Presidential Unit Citation from Franklin Roosevelt for ‘outstanding performance of duty in action’.
Harding joined Qantas in 1945 and, after the introduction of the 707, became a training instructor at Avalon where several of his pupils would later remember him as ‘tough, but fair’. Rumours persist that during his time at Avalon Harding achieved what few others have—barrel-rolling a Boeing 707 over Corio Bay, off Geelong.
Barrel-rolling a large commercial airliner like the 707 wasn’t recommended for obvious reasons, but experienced pilots can confirm it could be done quite safely, with little stress on the aeroplane, if the aircraft was properly set up and the manoeuvre was executed the right way. Boeing’s chief test pilot Tex Johnston was the first to achieve it when he barrel-rolled the very first production 707 over Puget Sound, Seattle in 1954, much to the dismay of his boss, Boeing Chairman Bill Allen.
Allen had gathered senior airline executives from all over the United States aboard the Boeing yacht, hoping to impress them into buying their aeroplane of the future with a traditional Tex Johnston low fly-past over the Sound. But Johnston, without prewarning Allen, arrived overhead and executed two barrel rolls in front of the awestruck group.
When Allen later berated Johnston for putting the whole of Boeing’s future at risk, Johnston insisted it proved just how good the aircraft was. Although Johnston’s effort was recorded for posterity by a spectacular photo of the Boeing engines above the wing while it was upside down, there are apparently no such records of Harding’s performance. It’s just as well. If the story’s true, it probably would have cost him his job.
Harding helped introduce the 747 into Qantas service and retired in 1975, reputedly always willing to joke how he was once the only person who could sell Qantas founder Hudson Fysh a pound of peas at the Manly barrow in the morning then fly him to Singapore that night.
Stories about Hugh Birch have also reached legendary status in the Qantas lexicon. Much decorated during World War II, Birch held the honour of taking part in the first air-to-air combat between two flying boats near Gibraltar. Birch’s Sunderland managed to get a few shots away at a Dornier, which replied in kind, blowing part of the hull out of Birch’s flying boat.
After the war, Birch pioneered many of Qantas’s Pacific routes flying Catalina aircraft before joining the company’s management ranks. Perhaps his most famous story involved him and his co-pilot Mick Mather, both renowned for their party tricks throughout the islands, and hinged on Mather’s ability to place a billiard ball in his mouth. That was until one night in Noumea when, bets having been taken, Mather repeated the performance, only to find he and Birch hadn’t realised that French billiard balls were larger than the normal variety. A doctor had to break Mather’s jaw to get the billiard ball out and the telex to Qantas Sydney next morning explaining the reason for the delay of that day’s service has also become part of Qantas folklore.
Stu Archbold was no less a legend. His worldwide network of celebrity acquaintances stretched from the Shah of Iran to High Court judges and even the cream of Australia’s horseracing fraternity.
Right from his earliest RAAF flying training days, Archbold was in the public eye, running into a fence and smashing his Tiger Moth’s propeller at Yarrawonga during a cross-country navigation exercise. The prop replaced, he took off immediately on the next stage of the exercise to Corowa but ran out of daylight and buzzed the town often enough for locals to organise a dozen cars to light the aerodrome runway so he could land.
Archbold’s wartime superior officers expressed some doubts about his future but he was to prove them wrong, winning acclaim flying Kittyhawk fighters in the Western Desert and the Italian campaign, during which he undertook dangerous experimental work developing Hawker Hurricanes into rocket-firing fighters for ground attacks.
First flying for Australian National Airways after the war, Archbold joined Qantas in 1959 and, by the time he retired in 1975, he had become one of t
he best-known Qantas pilots of his era, largely due to his extensive range of international contacts. Peter Raven, who first flew with him in 707s on the Kangaroo Route to London in 1967, says it was not unusual to have the Australian High Commissioner’s Rolls Royce waiting to pick up Archbold from Heathrow on arrival and a Buckingham Palace garden party invitation waiting at the hotel.
Raven recalls, during one slip in London, Archbold rang him in his room and asked him if he wanted to go to the races. When Raven agreed, Archbold told him: ‘Well, hurry up, Scobie and I are downstairs in the car.’
‘So off to the races we went in Scobie Breasley’s car and though I knew nothing about horses I backed the Australian jockeys riding that day and won,’ Raven says.
During a stopover in Teheran in the 1960s, Archbold and his crew were playing at a bowling rink when the shah arrived with a group of minders and took over an alley nearby. Raven says it wasn’t long before Archbold had introduced himself to the shah and was providing his Highness with a few tips on the sport. ‘After that Stu would often be invited into the royal presence whenever we went through,’ says Raven.
Much of Archbold’s networking was done in the air and those who flew with him remember the most ‘open’ cockpit they ever experienced, with an endless stream of visitors, many of them VIPs, invited onto the flight deck. Archbold was often used by Qantas for publicity purposes and was a natural choice to captain the first Boeing 707 into Melbourne for the opening of Tullamarine airport in 1970.
Retiring with 22,000 hours in his logbook, Archbold continued consulting for sections of the aviation industry, only to lose his life while acting as a technical aviation adviser during filming of a glider operation at Bacchus Marsh in Victoria in May 1980. He was the passenger in a Janus glider when something went wrong with the towing sequence, resulting in the glider diving vertically into the ground, killing instantly Archbold and his companion.