Anyone interested in reading of Air Nauru tales of yore may like to Google the book "Tall Tails of the South Pacific" which was published by
Self Publishing, Book Printing and Publishing Online - Lulu in 2009. Paul Phelan, the well known Australian aviation journalist, reviewed the book and an edited extract follows.
"Aviation’s storytellers have always been one of life’s finest gifts to those of us who never took the trouble to write it all down. Their product ranges from the hilarious aviation adventures recounted in Aero Club bars, to the output of raconteurs who’ve actually been there, seen it all, and (happily) preserved big chunks of it on paper.
Many a modern airline pilot’s career is launched before age 20. The pressure is on from Day One to build airline-related qualifications, and there’s little time to soak up the broader aviation environment or even to interface with its history and its myths.
That’s a shame because to know and understand aviation in our region as it is today, is to appreciate how it all came together. And quite a lot of today’s intricate safety awareness, systems and ethos were developed the hard way – learning by experience.
It’s therefore thanks to people like (Centaurus) who must have complied a mountain of detailed notes right throughout his colourful career, that today’s young pilots can reach back in time and appreciate the rich variety of events that shaped today’s more orderly aviation environment. There are plenty of people still in aviation who have similar backgrounds to him but very few have chosen to document it.
During those colourful years he flew Fokker F28s and early-model Boeing 737s around the Pacific in one of the world’s most challenging operational environments. Challenging because of the turbulent blend of long sectors, dodgy navaids, forecasts and communications, none-too-long runways, ad hoc management decisions and Melanesian office politics. At one South Pacific airline I once saw a comment on the crew room notice board: “Things are so confused here that people are going around stabbing one another in the chest!” Pilots who’ve been there will be familiar with that scenario, which is often more focused on tribal nepotism and internecine politics than on basic air safety tenets.
That kind of flying has always attracted pilots whose individualism led them away from the day-to-day grind of more conventional airline flying and they, along with their opposite numbers in engineering, have always been the cement that’s held most of the small Pacific states’ airlines together. The book is prolific in examples.
Tall Tails Of The South Pacific offers several attractions for the reader whose interest is the broader background to our aviation scene. It comprehensively brings together clear images of early postwar military, government, airline and general aviation in a single well-detailed canvas. The whole book – all the military and all the civil flying – is richly peppered with operational incident and events including close shaves and accidents, and also names, many of them well-known and some quite famous. Being written first-hand and with convincing detail, it draws humorous incidents entertainingly, and the related yarns help us to understand better what shaped Australasia’s 21st century aviation environment .
That environment continues to change almost daily according to corporate, industrial, regulatory and political pressures, and any young and aspiring pilot in these times will benefit from a deeper understanding of how the aviation industry reached its present condition – and of what needs to keep happening, to straighten the path ahead".