THE AUSTRALIAN NOV 6 2015
STEVE CREEDY
It was the “Bahrain Bomber” baby and it miraculously slept through one of the most harrowing incidents to affect a Qantas jet despite being wrenched from its mother’s arms and ending up under a pile of debris
In two minutes of terror on a Boeing 707 the plane approached, and possibly even reached, supersonic speeds as it hurtled towards the sea in a 19,000ft dive that took it well beyond the stresses it was supposed to bear.
The story is among a riveting collection of untold or forgotten stories gathered by author and former Qantas director of public affairs Jim Eames in his latest book, The Flying Kangaroo.
Eames, whose department played a role in getting Dustin Hoffman to insist “Qantas never crashes” in the award-winning movie Rain Man, turns up a *number of stories refuting the actor’s claim as well as highlighting how close the airline has come to disaster.
They include insider details of the fiery destruction of a Qantas Super Constellation that crashed on takeoff in Mauritius in 1960 as well as near miss between a Qantas Boeing 747 and a US Air Force CD-5A transport flying at the wrong altitude and with its transponder apparently turned off over Thailand in 1990.
The military plane came so close that its wash forced the *Qantas Jumbo into a 15 degree roll and the crew estimated it was no more than 50ft above them. The close call was made even more poignant by the fact the captain had selected an altimeter setting that was 75ft below that chosen by his first officer and had opted to use his settings for the flight management system
Had the FMS been programmed with the first officer’s settings, the two planes would have collided head-on.
But it is the account of the baby on the City of Canberra as it flew between Bangkok and Bahrain on a pitch-black night in February, 1969, that is one of the strangest stories.
The plane was lightly loaded with just 62 passengers, including Australian nuclear physicist Mark Oilphant, and was being flown by an experienced crew captained by Catalina war veteran Bill Nye. He was accompanied by first officer and former fighter pilot David Howells, second officer Ian Watkins and flight engineer Bob Hodges.
Although the B707’s technical log had a record of discrepancies between two of the plane’s three artificial horizons, it was deemed serviceable to depart Bangkok.
That discrepancy would *almost prove the flight’s undoing after Nye moved to correct what his artificial horizon told him was a 30 degree bank to the right and instead sent the plane tipping to the left as it cruised at 35,000ft.
Nye’s correction made the aircraft roll, become inverted and enter a spiral dive with its engines still running at cruising speed. It plummeted more than 19,000ft, approaching the speed of sound, before the crew managed to level out at 16,800ft. Then it began to porpoise wildly: climbing to 21,500ft and descending to 17,000ft before coming under full control.
The aircraft’s peak speed was measured at 885km/h, close to the speed of sound, but some Qantas experts believed it had actually broken the sound barrier during the dive.
They were also of the opinion the aircraft, which went back into service and was sold to a leasing company in 1977, probably would have broken up had it been fully loaded.
Unsurprisingly, there was chaos inside.
Howell had been resting and was forced to crawl along the floor fighting G-forces to get the cockpit while another senior steward, Ed Kirkland, had found himself pinned to the ceiling for a few *seconds before coming crashing down on Oliphant.
Cabin crew were forced to rip the jammed concertina door separating first and economy classes from its mounting and found themselves confronting a pile of bags, pillows, blankets, broken duty free bottles and other debris stacked against the forward part of the cabin.
Flight attendant Maureen Bushell recalled how everything thing in the cabin had “been just turned upside down’’, although the shocked passengers, many of whom were wearing seatbelts, were calmer than she expected.
A Royal Brunei policeman had hit the ceiling and was injured when he slammed into the seat-rest ashtray and a couple described how they saw their daughter floating about a metre above them.
Another passenger also described hitting the ceiling and “watching all the stuff floating around below’’.
But worst of all was a woman seated towards the back of the plane, desperate to find the baby she had been carrying in her arms.
“After a frantic search, the crew located the infant under a pile of debris at the front of economy,’’ the book says. “It had floated the length of the aircraft and when negative gravity had come off, descended to the floor, to be then covered with cabin trash. Miraculously, it had been fast asleep the whole time and was uninjured.’’
The Bahrain Bomber story, largely forgotten outside Qantas, joins richly told accounts of *colourful characters, political *intrigues and hushed-up operations. Among the latter was an *operation to smuggle out the *future princess Diana from Australia so quietly that even Eames was unaware of it.
It highlights the resourcefulness, ingenuity and sometimes acrimonious internal workings of the national carrier from its beginnings in Queensland through the war years to the merger with Australian Airlines and privatisation in the 1990s (the red tail-blue tail era).
Then there was s humour and a larrikinism that Eames noted would not be tolerated in today’s highly regulated, closely scrutinised environment.
These included the exploits of former RAAF transport pilot Ross Biddulph.
Biddulph’s legend was born flying a DH-84 Dragon from Kainantu to Lae in New Guinea. After realising he’d left his Craven A cigarettes in the back of the plane, Biddulph, desperate for a puff, decided he would set the aircraft on a level cruise and dart through the cabin to retrieve them.
“Apparently Dragons dislike people rapidly appearing behind the centre of gravity because the wretched plane reared up like a Wodehouse salmon and set course for Jupiter,” Biddulph wrote in a letter. “Almost immediately it stalled and, forgetting all about Jupiter, screamed straight down towards Nadzab (a PNG *village).
“Shortly afterwards I arrived in the flight deck area, spreadeagled against the instrument panel like a butterfly and covered in thousands of Craven As.’’
Worse for Biddulph was the fact that Qantas’s chief pilot in the region, Bill Forgan-Smith, was flying a DC-3 1000ft behind and above him.
The author uses archival material and tracked down people who were either part of stories he relates or knew those who were.
He also draws on his own experience in the airline as well as in New Guinea.
He nominates the tough training regimen at Avalon airport prior to the introduction of simulators near Geelong and the “Skippy Squadron’’ servicing Saigon during the Vietnam War as among his favourites.
The flights into Saigon were an extension of a rich heritage of wartime service by Qantas that included World War II, Korea and the 1950s Malayan Emergency
“Skippy Squadron, I always wanted to do that because it had been forgotten even in Qantas, ‘’ Eames told The Australian this week. “And when I started to talk to people like Alan Terrell and Norm Field, those blokes started to tell the stories about taking off from there in the middle of day — heavy, hot. And then I bounced to people like Les Hayward who was looking out the window and some Skyraiders were firing rockets off their wing tips.’’
Eames says the book should be read as a window on the colourful, significant and often humorous exploits of a company that was by no means perfect but carved out for itself a special place in Australian society.
“I wasn’t setting out to make comparisons with today,’’ he said. “That’s why I didn’t go much further than the red tail-blue tail thing because that’s up to somebody else to do in a later version.’’
The Flying Kangaroo, Jim Eames (Allen & Unwin), $29.99.