Whilst I had been away those four years there had been some changes. Where previously the aircraft had been predominately British registered with a couple of Chinese ones the position was now reversed. They had bought several aircraft including two brand new ones. We now had variety on the outside and also in the inside. The first two they had bought, 7951 and 2, had metric instruments, so the altimeters were in metres and the airspeed in kilometres/hour. Metric height was easy, the Chinese, as do the Russians and French, use metric flight levels and it was quite pleasant with your ASI reading 250 instead of 135. I had only known system pressures and temperatures in Pumas to be metric but one was in lbs/sqin and horrifically high numbers they were too.
The days of pumping 2,500lbs of fuel in it and going anywhere had gone. There were several new platforms, some extensions of the old fields but others further out. They had already surveyed an area close to the 200 mile territorial limit and the disputes were starting into who owned which island or sandbar in the South China Sea.
China had the advantage of having 3,000 years of recorded history so some admiral would have landed on some island, slammed the Emperor’s standard in the ground and claimed it for China; at the same time he would have wrote it down. He may well have been chased of by the natives the next day but they didn’t, or couldn’t, write it down so China had the only record as to who possessed it at that time. I know from my contacts there that there are zillions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of gas in that sea. They just need the political settlements to start producing it.
I was only going to be able to work there for six months before the dreaded 65 point came up. The company did not have any spare pilots to send to China, that’s why I was there. They had filled some positions with pilots from their Australian operation. One of these was a training captain and also a Australian CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) examiner. Talking about my impending doom he suggested I get an Australian licence because they did not have an age limit for public transport. He pointed out that Qantas pilots who have to stop flying 747s around the world because of the ICAO limit end up flying 737s between Sydney and Melbourne so that they can pay their alimony and children’s university fees.
I thought that there might be a limit on the age that you could apply for a licence but apparently there wasn’t. Retirees had started flying and progressed up to commercial flying with no problem. The only limit was that after your 80th birthday your medical had to be done in Canberra. I thought about it but it wasn’t highly optimistic.
I had my fourth retirement party in the roof garden of Macawley’s, an Irish bar in Shekou. It was the day before Chinese New Year and already the barrage of enormous fireworks had started. There weren’t any speeches; you couldn’t hear yourself think so it was with a heavy heart that I got on the ferry to Chek Lap Kok and the 747 back to the UK.
I had been back about a month and there was this nagging thought about getting an Australian licence. On an impulse I flew back to China to do a bit of research. We established that there were no bars to getting an Oz ATPL(H) as long as I passed the exams. CPL Law, ATPL Law and IREX, the instrument written test. The other problem was China. Would they accept an over sixty five, remembering ICAO, and endorse his licence. The question was put to CAAC and they came back with an affirmative.
There was a smoking trail of shoe leather to the ferry as I went to Hong Kong International, climbed into a Cathy 747 and punched off to Perth.