by Jim Eames
Yates’s reply was somewhat tongue in cheek: ‘I’m briefing our operations people that their future propagation efforts should be restricted to small shrubs. Hopeful you will soon cable that relief has been granted.’
Several weeks later Bradfield was able to advise Yates the deed had been done: ‘Native Australians cut down to size by the Greeks.’
Yates was so delighted with the revenue advantage gained he offered to donate 600 eucalypts to the Greek government as a token of his airline’s appreciation, a gesture the Greeks accepted for planting on the barren slopes of Mount Parnes, about an hour’s drive from the Greek capital.
Thus, in late October 1987 Bradfield, the Australian ambassador to Greece, Les Johnson and assorted Greek government officials gathered at Mount Parnes to complete the cycle of the Athens trees, only to be confronted by a vicious wind tearing across the hillside, prompting Bradfield to suggest the occasion be limited to a brief ceremony in the comfort of a tavern not far from the hillside.
‘In fact the wind was so bad it was difficult to hold your footing on the site and we felt it would be unfair to expose the government officials and almost 200 members of the Greek–Australia Association to the elements,’ Bradfield recalls. But the Greek contingent insisted that the job be done there and then, and each person chose a tree and set off to plant it on the hillside. ‘Some even came back for more and insisted their children plant one as well.’
A later photograph sent by Bradfield to Yates shows Bradfield and Ambassador Johnson, hair ruffled and their jackets almost torn off by the wind as the ceremonial holes were dug.
‘I can guarantee the series of toasts which followed at the taverna certainly made up for it,’ he confessed.
What he would also finally confess 30 years later was the trees they planted on Mount Parnes’s windswept hillside that windy afternoon weren’t the 600 seedlings Ron Yates had sent from Sydney. They had been quarantined on arrival by Greek Customs and had to be destroyed. Bradfield had to find his own eucalypts in Athens to keep the promise!
Bradfield later served as the airline’s director of freight, where he experienced firsthand the full range of oddities the business of air freight brings.
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Being appointed to run the air-freight side of Qantas was not something that executives went out of their way to achieve. Up until more recent times, it was largely regarded as merely a ‘top up’ appendage to the main passenger carrying role of the airline, almost a case of if there was any space left over after passengers and baggage were loaded, extra freight would be tossed on. Often freight’s low priority, particularly in the days of propeller-driven DC-4s and Constellations, created serious problems for Qantas station managers.
George Howling remembers being so unpopular with his most important commercial clients in Hong Kong that he committed a cardinal sin in the airline business—arranging the re-routing of a Qantas service without telling head office in Sydney he was doing it.
Howling’s problem was that so much Sydney-bound freight had piled up in the airline’s Hong Kong freight shed that he couldn’t even go to lunch without being subjected to a harangue from the colony’s top businessmen. It meant too that he was losing business to his main competition, Cathay.
Cathay’s advantage rested on the fact that a regular flight crew was assigned to operate its service to Australia, while Qantas chopped and changed its crews, many of whom were reluctant to carry beyond the bare minimum of freight on such a long-haul route.
Howling’s opportunity came when one of his old pilot mates, Phil Oakley, recognised his dilemma. Oakley suggested if his flight that night went via Manila then they could carry enough fuel for that short sector to enable them to throw on as much of the backlog as they could move. Then Oakley would simply refuel in Manila and continue on to Sydney.
So off went Oakley, informing Qantas Sydney after leaving Hong Kong that he needed to make an unscheduled ‘technical stop’ in the Philippines.
The freight problem solved, Howling was once again back in the good books with his valued clients but that hardly allayed his concerns that such a serious breach of company policy could get him in deep trouble. But the weeks went by and he heard nothing, until the customary note arrived on his desk advising of the coming summer schedules. He was delighted. The DC-4 would now call at Darwin on the way to Sydney, solving his freight problems.
The next day another note arrived, this one from his boss, Lew Ambrose, the airline’s line manager for the Far East. ‘Next time George, I suggest it would be better if you consult with head office before you do such things.’
‘So I got out of it, although they’d known all along,’ says Howling.
‘I don’t think many people in this airline ever re-routed an aircraft off their own bat.’
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Aside from Howling’s accumulated freight dilemma and Fred Fox safely dropping chooks out of his Catalina flying boat to a patrol station in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s by wrapping them in newspaper, there are endless tales of the challenges associated with the air cargo business, most of the more bizarre ones involving the carriage of animals, birds, reptiles, panthers and even whales.
Domestic pet stories abound. There’s the one about the cat that arrived in at the Sydney cargo terminal for dispatch to the owner in New Zealand. When the cargo officer went to prepare the necessary paperwork for the shipment, to his horror he noticed the cat was dead. Thinking quickly he rounded up a similar tabby, one of the several that always frequented the cargo shed, and off it went to Auckland.
When the owner arrived at Qantas cargo in Auckland to collect it she shocked the cargo man with ‘That’s not my cat.’
‘How do you know it’s not your cat?’ responded the cargo man, pointing to her name on the paperwork and hoping to retrieve something from what was looking like an embarrassing situation for the airline.
‘My cat was dead. I was bringing it home to bury it.’
Dog stories dominate too, led by the Qantas traffic officer in Darwin who decided to give a half-dozen pedigree dogs some exercise during their stopover on the way to Singapore. It wasn’t long after the war and the dogs were destined to replace some of the animals that had been lost during the Japanese occupation. Unfortunately for the traffic officer, the exceedingly grateful dogs disappeared through the airport fence never to be seen again. So, using similar initiative to his Sydney colleague’s dead cat ‘solution’, the Darwin man and his mates rounded up every stray dog they could find and sent them on their way. What happened on their arrival in Singapore is not recorded but, as the story goes, this was the main reason most of the dogs in post-war Singapore weren’t quite pedigree.
Sometimes it was the pet owners who had the Qantas cargo staff scratching their heads, although Bill Easton, who worked in Qantas cargo for many years, says they often provided some lighthearted relief.
Some cat owners were so attached to their animals they would ask if they could ‘accompany them out to the aircraft just to say goodbye,’ unfortunately having to be told such a farewell gesture was not permitted across a busy airport tarmac.
Easton remembers a woman ringing one evening to ask if she could speak to her dog, which was being held in quarantine. She called so many times with such insistence that the cargo officer, realising the dog was fairly small, finally brought it to the phone in its cage and propped the phone alongside it, while the woman made soothing noises to the animal.
Cargo staff occasionally took the opportunity to generate their own lighter moments and pranks were not unusual. When the Port Moresby cargo staff tried to load a dog destined for Lae onto a single-engine Otter aircraft, they found the wooden box it was packed in wouldn’t fit through the door into the Otter’s cargo hold. Keen to make the most of such a unique opportunity, they dismantled the box, reassembled it in the hold, then placed the dog in the box and off went the Otter across the Owen Stanley Ranges to Lae where the cargo people in Lae found they couldn’t get the box o
ut no matter what they tried. Finally calling Port Moresby for help, they were met with peals of laughter over the phone.
Occasionally antics would backfire. Easton remembers when an extremely intelligent cockatoo with a very impressive repertoire was forced into an extended stay at Sydney cargo and the staff tired of its constant chattering. Every time it started they would tell it to ‘@#&% off ’.
When the owner eventually collected his bird and had to limit its public appearances, Qantas was confronted with serious legal ramifications.
George Howling’s bird experience was also embarrassing. Howling was working in Sydney cargo in his early days in Qantas when well-known zoological administrator and philanthropist Sir Edward Hallstrom sent along an exotic parrot for shipping to a zoo in London. Somehow or other the bird got out of the cage and headed towards the high ceiling in the cargo office. Despite frantic attempts by Howling and his offsider to retrieve it, the parrot finally flew out the office door and into Bridge Street.
When Howling broke the news to his boss, he was abruptly told the penalty. ‘You ring and tell Sir Edward yourself.’
Hallstrom was far from pleased, leaving Howling to suspect that the missing bird might have been the reason he was sent to work at the airport soon after and his offsider was sent to New Guinea!
Certainly among Qantas people the most notorious cargo flights were the monkey charters to Australia from the Asian subcontinent during the manufacture of the Salk vaccine. The aeroplanes used were DC-4s and Lockheed Constellation freighters and those who flew them still shudder at the memory of hundreds of monkeys, often in cages containing six to ten each, stacked into the aircraft for the long haul to Australia.
Pilots and the animals’ handlers were issued with special blue overalls for the flights and a trip to the toilet at the rear of the aircraft meant running the gauntlet down an aisle between screaming monkeys, throwing everything from food to faeces at the hapless crew. The loadmaster was the worst affected, as feeding them meant he received the onslaught from every direction. On arrival in Sydney the blue overalls would be burnt and the complete aircraft cleaned and fumigated.
Bruce Smith confesses that, as the last flight engineer ever employed by Qantas, his late recruitment and low seniority meant he was often the first chosen when it came to the dreaded monkey charters.
Smith did three trips, out of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Calcutta. ‘The stench was horrific,’ he recalls. On some in-cabin configurations, they loaded the monkeys in the rear half of the Constellation where they could be separated from the five-man crew up the front by a bulkhead.
‘The smell was so bad we used to use rolls of masking tape to seal off the bulkhead. Anyone who removed it was under pain of death from the rest of us.’
Sadly, beyond a few photographs, little remains of the monkey charters in the Qantas archives, although the documents that are there support Bruce Smith’s belief it was not for the faint-hearted. One is a hand-written recollection by flight traffic officer Bill Colbert of a DC-4 charter out of Dhaka in the 1950s, pointing out the discomfort of having more than a thousand monkeys on board an aircraft that not only lacked pressurisation but also had to fly no higher than 7000 feet to avoid the risk of the animals freezing to death.
The combination of turbulence at low altitude and the stench in the cabin after four or five hours hardly bears thinking about. Added to Colbert’s woes were engine problems that forced them to divert to the Royal Air Force base at Butterworth in Malaya, where the RAF officer on duty denied his request to provide hangar space for the monkeys out of the intense heat, suggesting he place their cages under a row of newly planted metre-high trees at the edge of the airfield.
After a spare engine arrived from Singapore, they continued on to Darwin and Sydney, where Colbert learnt later that the aircraft’s captain had been disciplined for his handling of the engine problem. Colbert was unimpressed, having taken pains to note the diligence of the crew in quickly loading the aircraft in Dhaka to avoid a curfew limitation that would have forced an overnight stop and therefore saving both Qantas and CSL additional costs.
‘But I have learned, especially in the employ of Qantas, that somewhere along the line someone must be made the scapegoat,’ says Colbert. Not all the monkey charters were to Australia. Graham Crowther, as a second officer on Constellations, remembers crewing one flight to London in the 1960s.
Crowther still expresses his amazement at the ability of the animal handlers to suffer the stench: ‘even nonchalantly eating their sandwiches in this environment.’ But at least the monkeys were small and in cages. For Crowther, an elephant he once carried was an entirely different matter.
Although special reinforced wooden cages were designed to keep the animal in check, Crowther says at one stage of the flight the elephant looked like breaking out of its box.
‘He might have been a baby but he was still well grown and was lying on his side and pressing so hard against the side of his crate the wood was buckling.
‘Although we carried stun guns, something of the weight of an elephant loose in the cabin would have had disastrous consequences for control of the aeroplane.’
Carrying horses to the United States and across the Tasman to New Zealand in the 707 days was big business for Qantas, although it too had its moments. In the event a distressed animal was considered a danger to the aircraft, crews were issued with what was known in company parlance as a ‘humane killer’, actually a .38 calibre pistol with a flared barrel.
‘The idea was to allow you to despatch it by holding the horse by the head and doing the deed without shooting yourself or putting a hole through the fuselage,’ explains Bill Easton. ‘“There’s something wrong with this picture,” we used to mutter to ourselves!’
Along with lucrative animal carriage, some other cargoes had a value all of their own—like gold, for instance. Crowther once operated a Constellation charter into Jakarta in the 1960s, without being told what their cargo was to be. After landing he was surprised to see trucks arrive with hundreds of bars of gold to be loaded aboard.
‘All the seats had been removed and the cabin floor stressed for the task, and, once on board, they covered the entire floor of the aircraft.’
The whole operation was conducted amidst high security in the middle of the night and it was around 2 a.m. when they finally took off for Singapore and the final destination, London. As they climbed away into the night out of Jakarta, he still remembers the captain commenting: ‘Okay, chaps, where do you think we should quietly set course for? Peking perhaps?’
Crowther later learnt that the uplift had been part of what became known as the Green Hilton Agreement, signed by President John Kennedy and Indonesia’s Sukarno in November 1963, in which thousands of tonnes of gold imported from Asia to the West was to be used as backing for the US Department of Treasury. Kennedy was shot three days after the signing of the agreement and ownership of the gold is still the subject of legal actions and conspiracy theories, some even linking the gold to the death of the president.
George Howling also had a brush with security problems relating to gold while running the Hong Kong office in the 1950s.
Gold was a common item on Qantas DC-4s operating between Sydney and Hong Kong in those days, whole boxes of it destined for transhipping onto Catalina flying boats to Macau and into China. Its value made it a dangerous business and shortly before Howling had arrived to take up his Hong Kong posting, gunmen had attempted to hijack another airline’s Catalina en route to Macau. When a gunfight broke out, the Catalina crashed, killing all on board.
Security was heavy on the gold’s arrival at Kai Tak airport, where the American chief of the trading company, flanked by security guards arrived at the airport in his Rolls Royce to oversee the transhipment.
The gold flights had been operating for some weeks when Qantas head of security Gordon ‘Flashlight’ Fraser took Howling aside during a visit to Sydney and told him he was concerned about the security of th
e gold even while it was on its way to Hong Kong.
‘What do they do with the DC-4 during the night stop at Labuan?’ asked Fraser.
‘They put an armed guard over it,’ replied Howling.
‘Is it near the ocean?’
‘Yes,’ answered Howling, who could now see where Fraser was coming from.
Borneo’s Labuan in the 1950s was about as primitive an overnight stop as you could get. It had a wartime airstrip and one twenty-room hotel, so to cater for the 40 people on a DC-4 stopover they’d built a jungle-like structure of bamboo and rattan as an attachment, with camp beds and a canvas bucket beside each bed to wash in. ‘The civilian passengers went into the hotel and the poor bloody soldiers going up to Korea ended up in the attachment, but when we had a full load of civilian passenger they went in there as well,’ says Howling.
Fraser’s problem though, wasn’t the security of the passengers, but the gold. Fraser got even more nervous when Howling told him the load was not checked before the aircraft left for Hong Kong the next morning.
‘I better come up there and have a look. Smart people in a boat could soon work this out,’ said Fraser.
Several weeks later Howling joined Fraser in Labuan and the pair made a surprise visit to the airport early in the morning to check out the security, only to find the guard sound asleep against the DC-4’s wheels, his .303 rifle lying beside him.
Quietly they pushed the steps up the aircraft and climbed into the cabin where they could access the hold by pulling up a section of the floor. Despite its weight, they managed to lift one of the boxes of gold into the cabin and slide it under a passenger seat, then left without waking the guard.
On arrival at Kai Tak next day pandemonium broke out when the American with the Rolls Royce discovered a box was missing, until Fraser explained what they had done and that they needed to do something about it.
Not long after, Constellations replaced the DC-4s, over-flying Labuan on their way to Hong Kong.