The Flying Kangaroo

by Jim Eames

  Wild duly arrived at the corner with plenty of time to spare and, right on time, a Toyota emerged out of the traffic. ‘There’s the driver and another fellow in the front seat and I hop in beside Diana and her mother in the back seat. A Corona’s not that big a car and I can tell you it was a bit of a squeeze but everyone was having a chuckle about it all.’

  Frances Shand Kydd delighted in telling how they had avoided the press at Yass the previous day. Apparently, to distract a hovering helicopter, she had run outside, brandishing a broom towards the aircraft and the pilot had taken the hint and moved away, while Diana was smuggled into a car and out the back gate of the property. She had then spent the previous night at an apartment in Earl Street, Randwick.

  The relaxed laughter and stories continued until the rendezvous with the Crampton vehicle at the airport gate and, as they approached the terminal from the airside, Wild suggested they should say their goodbyes before he and Diana left to enter the terminal building. ‘There were kisses and hugs, more laughter, and we were into the lift and up to the government lounge.’ There the two remained chatting, until the departure of QF1, slightly delayed due to the strike.

  Once the aircraft departed, Wild was on the phone to the airline’s regional director in Singapore, John Ward, who was to meet the aircraft there. Ward had already taken the precaution of booking a seat for Diana on a British Airways flight in case Qantas cabin crew, who were still operating aircraft between Singapore to London, suddenly decided not to do so.

  With volunteer staff acting as cabin crew on the first sector of the future princess’s flight to Singapore, things were anything but normal. In-cabin service for Diana and other passengers was in the hands of ‘flight attendants’ ranging from accountants to ticket sales managers who had been given a rudimentary run-through on the safety procedures and how to operate the food and drink trolleys. Busy with their own problems, it took most of them some time to realise who the slim, attractive passenger in first class was.

  Dave Rubie, whose weekday job was sitting behind a desk in the airline’s corporate planning department, now found himself in the role of air chef. He had just managed to heat the meals to begin preparation for the meal service when the captain announced over the public address system that they were preparing to land in Port Moresby. ‘“Why Port Moresby?” I thought to myself. We’re supposed to be going to Singapore,’ Rubie later recalled. He hadn’t been told that, because the aircraft refuellers at Sydney were also on strike in support of the cabin crew, a stop was needed in Port Moresby to top up on fuel.

  ‘I had to put all the meals back in the oven.’

  Then, on arrival at Port Moresby, Rubie was given the job of looking after Diana in the Port Moresby terminal while the aircraft was refuelled. ‘I should point out that it was a rare experience to have to walk around making small talk with a future princess for 45 minutes in what could only be described as a wretched terminal building.’

  Once back on board Rubie resumed his air chef duties, which he admits were hardly up to the traditional Qantas standard. That soon became obvious, when he wheeled the meal trolley into first class and started to carve the beef.

  ‘One of the passengers immediately got up and suggested I might need a hand and started to carve the beef for me. Then another came over and dished out the vegetables.

  ‘They were great blokes and we proceeded to work as a trio serving all the first-class passengers,’ recalls Rubie, after all these years still unsure whether they recognised the hash he was making while carving the beef or they just wanted to help.

  John Ward had smoothed the way for Diana’s transit of Singapore and she was soon on her way towards London’s Heathrow, where regional director UK and Europe, Julian Hercus, had been briefed to slip her unseen into the country. Hercus was only too aware of the risks at his end. Heathrow, a labyrinth of corridors and narrow passageways, was notorious for its ‘spotters’—airport workers who, for a small fee, were quick to alert the press of any VIP trying to avoid exposure on arrival. To avoid detection, he planned to have one of his key airport staffers, Peter Izard, meet the aircraft at the terminal gate and go on board as soon as the door opened.

  ‘Peter had long experience with the airport’s handling procedures and if anyone could get her through unnoticed, he could,’ Hercus recalls.

  Izard went straight to the passenger in the front row of first class.

  ‘Good morning Miss Reid,’ he announced, at which Diana, looked up, a surprised smile on her face: ‘Oh, are we still doing that?’

  Once into the terminal the pair headed for the VIP suite where Hercus was waiting.

  ‘Fortunately she had only hand luggage, so, while Peter remained to handle the paperwork, we headed towards our car,’ says Hercus, later estimating that they were driving out through the airport security gate within 15 minutes of QF1 docking at the terminal.

  ‘It must have been one of the fastest arrivals ever at Heathrow,’ he boasts.

  During the 45-minute drive through London’s early morning traffic to an address in Earl’s Court, Diana spent part of the time leaning forward on the back of the front seat, giggling occasionally as she recounted her journey from Bloomfield to London. ‘She also said she was extremely happy to be home and peppered me with questions about what had been happening in England while she had been away. She was a delightful person and told us how much she appreciated our efforts.’

  The saga might have been over for Diana on delivery to Earl’s Court but it wasn’t to be for Hercus. Within hours, officialdom at Heathrow had caught up on the lack of a customs declaration, a serious offence for an international airline, and a terse ‘please explain’ had arrived at the office of Qantas’s security chief, Reg Brothers. It also pointed out that Heathrow’s Alcock and Brown lounge ‘had also apparently been used for someone other than a head of state.’

  Peter Izard eventually smoothed the ruffled Heathrow administrative feathers and Wild was able to tell Keith Hamilton that ‘Operation Reid’ had been a success. Frances Shand Kydd arrived in London with the remainder of her daughter’s luggage and the following month Prince Charles and Diana announced their engagement.

  That July, after the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral, Brian Wild received a letter of appreciation from Buckingham Palace, an autographed photograph of the couple and a slice of their wedding cake. The letter and photograph take pride of place in the Wild’s Sydney home, although he admits the cake has long since passed its use-by date.

  A CHALLENGING BUSINESS

  22

  STRIKES AND FUEL … A LETHAL COMBINATION

  It wasn’t a new aircraft, just a shorter, faster and higher flying version of other Boeing 747s in the Qantas fleet, but its introduction into Qantas service in January 1981 would lead to one of the most bitter and divisive episodes in Qantas’s long history of industrial troubles.

  Purchased to operate into the short Wellington runway and meet the threat of a Pan American nonstop service across the Pacific to San Francisco, the 747SP (Special Performance) became the lightning rod for a strike that would bring to the surface a litany of grievances stretching back decades and pit the industrial muscle of the union movement against the Flying Kangaroo.

  It started innocently enough, over a cabin crew claim for allowances for increased workload and the number of their members required to man the SP. But, in the often-complicated world of industrial relations, it raised other crewing anomalies that had origins in the respective roles of male and female flight attendants. More significantly, it brought to the surface another issue that for years had been anathema to the union movement—Qantas’s use of staff labour in industrial disputes.

  The gender cabin crew anomaly had a relatively straightforward historical context. The early days of the Empire flying boats on the Australia–UK route had been an all-male steward affair. It was a physical role that involved tangling with heavy mooring lines in bouncing seas at places like
Singapore, Batavia and Darwin, and transporting passengers to and from the aircraft in boats.

  Not until Lockheed Constellations began flying on the route in 1948 were ‘hostesses’ introduced, largely at the suggestion of Mrs Fysh, the wife of the airline’s founder Hudson Fysh, who would subsequently take a personal role in the selection of the first successful candidates. Their addition was more about glamour than much else, requiring them ‘to be immaculately groomed and corseted at all times,’ a situation that continued to exist into the very early days of the Boeing 707s.

  But by the arrival of the 747s, the female flight attendants believed their role had changed. They might comprise only three of the fifteen crew on board, but they nonetheless considered themselves an integral part of the crew and had formed their own association, with close links to the pilot union. The fact that they were not members of the cabin crew union would have a significant bearing on the start of the industrial action that followed the introduction of the 747SP.

  As the SP’s introduction approached, the manning of the aircraft became a critical issue, with the company claiming the number of crew required to operate the smaller version of the aircraft should be reduced from fifteen to twelve. Weeks of negotiations followed, culminating in a company threat to stand down any cabin crew member who refused duty and the cabin crew union accusing the company of ‘industrial blackmail’.

  By the end of January, with no progress being made in negotiations, the company began training the first of the staff volunteers it intended to use—a decision that triggered a serious escalation of the dispute.

  Watching closely from the wings was the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), which represented more than 5000 Qantas employees in Australia.

  The ACTU and Qantas had locked horns for years over the company’s use of staff labour as a strike-breaking instrument. From a union viewpoint at least, the method had been notoriously effective in keeping the airline flying, union representatives watching angrily as executives and management staff were quickly rostered out to airports to carry out a variety of tasks normally undertaken by union members, from preparing food in the catering centre to cleaning aircraft.

  On 5 February, the stewards placed bans on the operation of the SP, causing the cancellation of its first commercial service from Brisbane to Wellington. But the service operated the following day, crewed by twelve flight hostess association members, whose overseas branch did not consider themselves part of the dispute.

  The dispute escalated on 11 February when the ACTU imposed a ban on the SP for the use of staff labour, a ban mainly directed at pilots and flight engineers whom the unions claimed had carried out additional duties on board the aircraft.

  To avoid cancellation of the following day’s flight out of Brisbane for Wellington, the company had gathered twelve pilots and two flight engineers who would carry out the necessary emergency procedures, but Brisbane ground staff refused to push the SP back from its terminal parking bay, presenting the company with another dilemma.

  Unlike its predecessor the Boeing 707, the 747 ran the risk of serious engine damage if its reverse thrust was used to roll it back, but its captain, David Shrubb, managed to gain just enough rearward movement to turn the aircraft around. Passengers on the Wellington flight that day received no in-cabin service but at least they reached their destination.

  Over following days, when an attempt by Qantas to have the ACTU lift the bans failed, signs began to appear that the original crewing claim by the flight stewards that had led to the dispute was now secondary to the airline’s use of staff labour. The ACTU had bigger fish to fry.

  Then, in a provocative move in the early hours of 14 February, Qantas ordered union staff at Mascot to clean aircraft in accordance with health and quarantine requirements. When they refused, they were stood down and a mass walkout of staff of seventeen unions followed. At the same time Transport Workers Union members cut fuel supplies to all Qantas aircraft, a move that could be expected to ground the airline.

  The critical decision to escalate the dispute through a demand to clean the aircraft had originated from what would later become known as the ‘war room’, on the sixth floor of Qantas head office in Jamison Street, where the airline’s director of marketing, Trevor Haynes, and personnel director, Ken Appleton, had drawn together a team of seventeen executives from key areas of the company who met twice a day and often into the night.

  Haynes became known as the ‘man in the black hat’ for his determination to take the fight to the unions, repeatedly ordering airport managers to stand down any staff who refused to work. Appleton, more conservative and capable of compromise, oversaw the tactics involved in negotiations in the Arbitration Commission.

  By now, staff training of volunteers had begun in earnest, as the union bans gradually led to more and more Qantas jumbos grounded at Sydney and Melbourne. Staff training for this dispute presented a unique set of circumstances from other earlier disputes, which had largely involved strike-breaking activities on the ground at the airline’s catering centre, and for cleaning aircraft and unloading baggage.

  Replacing cabin crew on the aircraft themselves involved taking on far more serious operational tasks strictly related to civil aviation legislative requirements such as safety instruction, passenger evacuation and other procedures necessary in case of an emergency on board an aircraft.

  As those in the ‘war room’ dictated the day-to-day efforts to keep the unions off balance, calls went out to all corporate branches to immediately release volunteers for training in emergency procedures. One of Appleton’s personnel staff, John Picken, began organising sessions for the volunteers to undertake at the airline’s Emergency Training Centre at Mascot. Much to Picken’s relief, there was no shortage of volunteers, each of them directed to arrive at the airport equipped with ‘passport, togs and towels’, the latter because their emergency training was likely to see them immersed in the training sector’s pool!

  Customer relations director, Jim Bradfield, who oversaw much of the training itself, later admitted it was hardly sophisticated.

  ‘We would get them in overnight after they finished work and it was basically safety training as we didn’t worry too much about the way they served the meals. We had a meal galley cart to show them how it opened and shut and fortunately the food had been trimmed down anyway, to box lunches in some cases.

  ‘To meet the DCA [Department of Civil Aviation] requirements we concentrated on the safety briefing and the life jacket drill, along with ditching in the company’s emergency training pool.’

  Volunteers were then issued with a Qantas cap and a badge that said ‘I’m your cabin crew’ and were sent off on their rostered flights. As it turned out, staff labour experiences in the cabin crew role provided some of the dispute’s rare moments of levity—Dave Rubie’s two first-class passengers feeling obliged to help him carve the beef in first class on the future Princess Diana’s London flight being one example. On another flight, the company’s chief financial officer, Larry Olsen, forgot to lock the wheels on his bar service trolley, only to see it career off down the aisle when the aircraft climbed suddenly.

  The dispute itself soon became notable for several of its more bizarre elements, the first of which became known as the ‘spitting incident’. It effectively drove an irreversible wedge between the company pilots and flight engineers, and the striking cabin crew. Reacting to suggestions of ‘tampering’ with food on board, pilots insisted on specially prepared meals, particularly after one cabin crew member supposedly threatened to feed them ‘pan-wiped steak,’ the identity of the ‘pan’ leaving little to the imagination.

  Two weeks into the strike, and aware that an SP aircraft carrying a crew of the strike-breaking female flight attendants was returning from Fiji, word went out that a group of cabin crew was gathering at the airport to meet it.

  In an effort to avoid any confrontation between the female flight attendants and the striking cabin crew as the women exited
the terminal through the arrivals hall, the company had arranged transport to meet the aircraft at its terminal gate. Meanwhile, Qantas Captain Les Hayward acted as a decoy, positioning himself conspicuously in the arrivals hall as if to meet the in-bound crew.

  When the cabin crew team realised they had been duped, they turned on Hayward and a scuffle ensued. Hayward later told the Arbitration Commission he was spat upon, and ‘roughed up a bit’. Television news footage of part of the incident was presented at the Commission. Two cabin crew were be sacked by the company, although their dismissal would later be commuted to suspensions while their case was heard by the Commission. Only one would be re-employed by the company.

  Probably one of the unusual aspects of the dispute was the decision of the several hundred cabin crew operating overseas at the time of the strike to continue flying. Their decision, which would be a key factor in keeping the airline in the air, was based on the realisation that once they arrived back into Australia they would be asked by the company to continue working and, on their refusal, would be stood down.

  Another reason was a financial one and had its origins in an earlier, and equally bitter, dispute in 1966 between the company and its pilots. When negotiations for a new pilots’ award broke down and pilots walked off aircraft around the world, the company immediately withdrew any financial support for accommodation and travel, leaving most of them to find their way home at their own expense. Cabin crew members working overseas had no intention of suffering a similar fate. Thus they continued to crew aircraft back and forth along the Kangaroo Route between the UK, Europe and Singapore, between Honolulu and mainland USA and other last ports of call before Australia.

  Their decision was something of a lifesaver for the company, leaving its main challenge one of providing volunteer staff to man aircraft only to these first ports of call outside Australia. Had the overseas crews decided to join the strike, there is little doubt the airline’s whole fleet would have been grounded.