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Old 18th Dec 2020, 13:00
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Centaurus
 
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Australia
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And the RAAF "Spotlight" magazine, rather than accident investigation is "I learned about flying from that" tales


Nowadays, Spotlight is all flashy graphic design and bright colours. It's called 'progress.' In mid 1969 I was posted to RAAF DFS at Depair Canberra and among other jobs wrote Spotlight magazine and Crash Critiques which were sent to all RAAF bases. It was mostly text with occasional black and white photos to illustrate a story. Crash Critiques consisted of around 25 pages and centred around the nitty gritty of the accident. No such thing as graphic design and no special qualifications were needed to be the editor. We were GD Officers - GD meaning General Duties. Jack of all trades - Master of none, comes to mind.

I joined DCA Head Office at 188 Queen Street Melbourne in October 1969 and was alloted a tiny windowless office and told to sit there and swot Air Navigation Orders unless called upon to record Minutes of the occasional meeting. Soul destroying stuff and I bitterly regretted leaving the RAAF. I then discovered that DCA had a huge reference library a few floors up from my level. There I found an absolute goldmine of flight safety publications from all over the world including military publications. "US Navy Approach" magazine, USAF Military Air Command Flyer (MAC Flyer), RAF Air Clues, as well as hundreds of popular aviation magazines such as USA Air Facts Journal, and Flight International. Add to that were rows upon rows of aviation books.

Many of the magazines were multiple copies which I quietly liberated and snuck out of the library with the odd magazine hidden under my coat. Today.these magazines are in digital form by subscription. I had them free at 188 Queen St. In 1976 I joined Air Nauru and took these magazines with me and gave them to our crew room in the Nauru Menen Hotel next to Anabare Bay where a lone Chinaman could be seen each day perched on a pole with his fishing rod and the sea swirling around him at high tide.

From these magazines I would steal articles and reproduce them into an Air Nauru Flight Safety Monthly bulletin. One of the magazines in the DCA library was a Briish Airways Flight safety monthly bulletin. In those days BA had Boeing 737-200 aircraft and with so many of them there was a vast pond of incidents which could prove useful for Air Nauru 737 and 727 crews. Accordingly I contacted the editor of the BA magazine and offered to send him copies of our Air Nauru flight safety magazine in exchange for his magazine. I omitted to mention our flight safety magazine was a five page roneo copy that I threw together when on the island.

Soon after I began to receive the monthly summary of BA incidents sent to my personal post office box at Nauru. This information from British Airways flight safety department proved invaluable to our flight crews. After all Air Nauru had only five Boeings and very few incidents compared to BA with a hundred or more and thus a wide range of incidents. In the meantime during my regular week off back in Melbourne I would drop into DCA Head Office at 188 Queen Steet on a weekend when there was no staff around and say hello to the duty security guard whom I knew from my earlier times as an Airways Surveyor on the 5th floor of DCA HQ. He thought I was still with DCA because he would let me in the front door when I told him I was visiting the main technical library. I brought an empty brief case with me.

Once in the now silent library I would quickly visit the flight safety section and nick spare copies of the latest magazines from UK, USA, Canada, NZ and South Africa as well as the military stuff from these countries. Leaving the building with a bulging briefcase and a wave to the security man I would hop on a No 59 tram for my home near Essendon. These magazines would be borne to Nauru in my navigation bag to be distributed to our Air Nauru pilots via the crew room in the Menen Hotel. Who knows, maybe this was why Air Nauru was such a safe airline as there was enough flight safety reading material to last for years.

All good things must come to an end and that happened on the occasion a new security guard was on duty at 188 Queen Street when I turned up on a Sunday morning. I explained my presence and he accepted my story with some reluctance and let me into the building. I had been in the library for half an hour when I heard someone open the library door. I hid behind a pillar until I heard whoever it was go away. It could have been the security guard or even someone who worked in the library. Either way the game would have been up if they saw my bulging briefcase. I scuttled down the back stairs rather than take the lift and let myself out of the building without being seen.

When I told my wife about this she forbade me from ever taking such a foolish risk again. I saw her point of view and that was the end of the story. I rationalised by saying I only took spare copies and no one would notice. That little racket went on for several months before I realised the risks were too high of being caught in the act.

The years passed and when I left Air Nauru for a flying job in England in 1988 there were no takers among the pilots of Air Nauru to run the Air Nauru flight safety bulletin. I wrote to my friend in the flight safety department of British Airways to cancel my "subscription" to his magazine and thanked him sincerely for his kindness in sending the BA flight safety bulletin to this remote atoll in the Central Pacific and I would buy him a beer when I got to England. We met later at his office in Heathrow and I told him how much Air Nauru crews appreciated his generosity in sending his BA safety bulletin all the way from England especially as our own flight safety 'magazine" in exchange was nothing but a few pages on roneo paper.

That was when he showed me all our Air Nauru flight safety bulletins stacked neatly on a shelf in the Briish Airways flight safety library. It left me a bit teary, I must say.

Last edited by Centaurus; 18th Dec 2020 at 13:27.
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