My first job in aviation in '75 was to sit right seat on a Burnett Airways Trislander in Brisbane, because the rumour at the time was they couldn't make an autopilot work on the thing and the only way they could fly it IFR was to put a second bod on board who had at least a radio operators licence. I was actually over qualified as I also had a Private Pilots Licence.
I actually spent most of my time in flight trying to sync the engines by method (1) - fiddling with the blue pitch levers or method (2 - by using my fingernail to align the didlly little rpm indications so that at least the numbers were all the same.
We also went hi-tech in Burnett Airways and provided "inflight entertainment" (to alleviate the mind numbing engine noise) with a car cartridge player (clunky sort of cassette player) and it was my job to change the tapes over in flight and to make sure no one nicked off with the headsets at each turn around. Apart from removing the numerous sick bags...
Apart from using the wings to hang bits on like engines and undercart, for Bn-2 and BN-3 alike, the main purpose, according to another rumour, was to transmit the noise and vibration from the engines to the wings, which in turn caused the air molecules to vibrate apart and thereby cause a lower pressure which created lift for the purpose of flying. That is why the designer(s) didn't bother with aerodynamic refinements like dihedral on the wings.
They were dangerous too. Many the time I banged my head on the balance thing that hung off the ailerons and one day, shortly after landing and doing a casual walk around, I managed to get a 4th degree burn by draping my arm over the machine gun sized pitot tube that hung from the lower wing surface and which was still being heated because"someone" forgot to turn the pitot heater switch off.
It was also very possible, due to a tendency to be afflicted with carby ice, to have the engines stop at inopportune times. This was very tricky on take-off and we had a light to tell us if the fin engine had stopped vibrating the hell out of the fin structure and a nice Morris Minor type rear vision mirror attached to the windscreen post to provide backup confirmation. I can remember someone taking off from Hervey Bay one winter's morning and carrying out a full runway length "inspection" because the rear donk thought it a touch too cold and quit.
One other memory was taking off from Brisbane early one morning during an airline strike with a load of Courier Mail Newspapers and using all almost all off runway 22 to become airborne. We later discovered after a protracted climb, that the manifest of papers had been presented to us in a new fangled thing called kilograms and so we had about 2.2 times more on board then we had originally planned on.
I later flew the Islander and loved it - especially since it involved flying young females to Great Keppel island to "Get Wrecked" as the TAA advertising slogan put it. By the look of many that took the return trip after a week or so on the island, many achieved just that ......
And so to a few (rather poor quality) photos...
