QF32 Read online

  As I got closer to the F-111 posting, I became worried that perhaps I was getting too old for this game; that I was not the fighter pilot type. I was starting to doubt I would last long at Amberley AFB. Although I wanted to accomplish my dream of flying F-111s, I was also thinking about leaving.

  Back in 1974 I had canvassed many aviation career options and I had applied to be a pilot for Qantas. Dad had also arranged me an interview with Peter Gibbes, the Chief Pilot of Ansett–ANA. At that time 30 per cent of Australian pilots were unemployed, so Peter recommended I spend 10 years in the Air Force and return to civil aviation when the market had recovered and was recruiting again.

  Peter Gibbes was an ex-ANA pilot, Dad’s friend and a rascal. One time his DC3 was cruising at 5000 feet when the hostess ‘Bubbles’ visited the flight deck to take drink orders. She noticed the window just beside each pilot. ‘What would happen if you opened those windows in flight?’ she asked. ‘We would both be immediately sucked out through the window,’ Peter replied tersely, angry that Bubbles had forgotten such basic safety ­information. Then when Bubbles went off to prepare the drinks, Peter opened his side window, engaged the autopilot and he and the first officer then unstrapped and moved back into the coat locker and closed the curtain. A minute later, Bubbles opened the door to the flight deck. The sound of the air roaring past the open window was only surpassed by her horror as she realised both pilots were missing and no one was flying the aircraft. Poor Bubbles dropped the tray of drinks and fainted.

  I began corresponding with Qantas in 1984 while I was posted in the Sinai. Like most pilots, I was canvassing my options to see what the big airlines would pay me to switch. Qantas had told me they would look at me when I was back flying fixed wings – rotary hours didn’t count. That was one of the reasons I’d happily put my hand up to fly any sortie against the Navy out of Nowra – to get my fixed-wing hours up again.

  Before I could get any employment commitments from Qantas, I was given one week’s notice to move to Amberley, Queensland, to start my F-111 conversion course. Stu McAlister’s mentoring and influence had finally paid off and the RAAF was about to spend at least 4 million dollars converting me to the F-111 (each F-111 flying hour cost more than $20,000 in 1984). I decided to honour Stuart’s commitment to me by completing at least one tour on F-111s.

  Coral and I were now very much ensconced with each other. We moved to Brisbane and signed a lease on an apartment for one year. Coral secured a job on day one, working with the director of the largest jeweller in Queensland.

  I was finally in Amberley at 6 Squadron. The first briefing, the Welcome Briefing, was at 8.00 am on Wednesday morning. Just twenty minutes into the one-hour brief I was called through to the commanding officer’s (CO) office. He sat me down and said in a clear, deliberate voice: ‘Dick, you’re off the course.’

  I was stunned. The CO told me they’d just lost two instructors to Qantas and so there were insufficient instructors to train everyone on the course. Since I was 28 years old, they were going to use the available instructors to train the younger guys.

  After eleven years in the waiting, my F-111 posting lasted just 20 minutes – the shortest posting in RAAF history. My navigator resigned on the spot. To make it worse, I had just told Qantas I would be at F-111s for three years, and I also had another six months left to serve in the Air Force. Not to mention the fact that Coral had shifted north to be with me. Everything was up in the air.

  I held my tongue and waited for offers. The RAAF postings division was shocked and offered me any posting to keep me happy. I told them I wanted VIP command on the B707 VIP jets. They said no because I didn’t have enough fixed-wing hours. So I replied, ‘Then give me Macchi jet instructor at Pearce, Western Australia.’

  Having missed out on the F-111s, I knew I had still successfully negotiated a privileged career: Academy, Caribous, Government House, Iroquois helicopters and now Macchis. I was a jack of all trades, but I had learned a lot and was wiser for the broad experience. Very few other officers were as fortunate as I was.

  So I was back at Central Flying School (CFS) in East Sale again, but this time for a four-month-long jet instructor’s course. The CFS staff was sympathetic to my plight so made it easy for me to apply for jobs in the airlines. I approached Qantas, TAA, Ansett and Cathay-Pacific. I also digested Handling the Big Jets by D.P. Davies – the ‘bible’ for large jet pilots and the text you’re expected to know backwards when the airlines interview you.

  Cathay told me I had too many rotary hours and to come back in a year. Qantas asked me what I loved about the RAAF and I said the training. They asked me what I hated, and I said the alcohol culture where it was considered macho to drink heavily in the evening and go flying first thing in the morning. (I lost a friend in a Mirage accident that occurred the day after an intoxicating Dining-In night. I think the accident was ­preventable.)

  Another incident involving booze that affected me deeply occurred in 1975, when I was in the first year of the Academy, I was taken for a tour of the RAAF base at Fairbairn in Canberra, and was having a drink at the officers’ mess bar with a flight lieutenant I had met that day. A steward approached this officer to inform him his wife was waiting in the car park and was enquiring when he would be leaving the bar; she’d been there since 6.00 pm and it was now past seven. This senior officer waved the steward away, saying, ‘Tell my wife I’ll leave here when it suits me – when I’ve finished drinking with my mates.’

  The Army had an unofficial motto: ‘If we wanted a soldier to have a wife, then we would have issued him with one!’ I didn’t think the RAAF environment was any more enlightened. I never wanted to be like that officer, so from that day forward I vowed never to marry while I was in the RAAF.

  Just one month before I graduated from the instructor course, Qantas offered me a job and I accepted. My marks were pretty good, so the commanding officer of CFS made me an extraordinary offer; he wanted me to complete the last month, graduate as an RAAF instructor, then join the CFS staff and teach the next jet instructor’s course for my last two months. It was a great honour to be recognised this way, but the RAAF tradition at that time was to punish pilots for resigning. The RAAF offered me a job in Canberra, answering phones, but the CO managed to negotiate a better deal. I’d stay at CFS and lecture in aerodynamics, and travel to the various Australian military bases looking for a suitable vintage aircraft that could be mounted at the East Sale gatehouse. I searched bases for Spitfires, DC3s, Meteors and Sabres, and ended up finding the ‘05’ Winjeel that’s still there today guarding the gate.

  After eleven years, ten locations, thousands of stories and numerous lifelong friends, my beloved RAAF career was over. Sadly, many of my friends didn’t make it. Chris Wylie, the dux of my year at the Academy, was killed in a Mirage mid-air crash; my friend Paul Carter died stalling – spinning in his Winjeel on base turn at Williamtown, just after I returned from the Sinai. Craig Mackelmann died in a Mirage just off the coast at Williamtown. Russell Page, my flatmate in Newcastle, died in a Macchi jet when pulling G – the wing snapped off and hit him in the head. Ross Fox, Rick Jeffreys – we lost four people from our seven-person Nelson Bay carpool. Coral knew many of them and was affected too. It was time for a change. I was happy to not only be starting a new career with Qantas, but to be going to a place where my friends and colleagues were definitely not going to die.

  And one week after resigning from the RAAF, I proposed to Coral.

  Wrapping up, my father says I was of more benefit to the RAAF after I resigned than while I was enlisted and I’d have to agree. I helped resolve two events that exposed short­comings in the military. The first was that I wrote articles for The Australian newspaper addressing the disparity between military and civil salaries and that the high military wastage rate was not in Australia’s interests. The damning numbers I published were never disputed, because they were true. The RAAF pilot salaries were increased dramatically a few months later. The second deficiency w
as researched and presented by my friend John Wasiliev in his financial magazine Australian Investor. John’s article exposed the illegality of the dreadful military pension scheme that existed at that time. A government senate enquiry was held and the pension was improved. I was the first in my Academy year to leave the RAAF and I did it with excitement, exactly five months over the six years of service I owed the RAAF.

  CHAPTER 8

  Steam Power

  Coral and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Glenmore Road, Paddington, in Sydney’s inner city. Coral got a job managing Joint Ventures for the Aus­tralian Petroleum Management Fund. Life was pretty simple then. I remember one night lying with Coral on the floor (we had no lounge furniture) watching flies land on the ceiling; how did they do it? Was it a loop or a barrel roll before touchdown?

  Qantas pay scales were very low for entry-level pilots. I started on a second officer’s salary of $3657 per 56 days (with $266 overseas pay), and I trained at Mascot on Boeing 747 Classic aircraft. This was 1986, when Qantas was still solely international and the only airline in the world to fly Jumbos exclusively. Murray Warfield, a fellow ex-RAAF pilot who also joined my course, had three young children at the time and he qualified for social security payments to supplement his meagre income.

  There were four pilots on my 747 conversion course, but two of them left just before we started to join Cathay for a lot more money. Cathay called me about a year after that and offered me a job flying out of Hong Kong. I said, ‘Double my salary and we’ll talk.’ I’m glad they didn’t get back to me; I love Australia and I didn’t want to be tempted to move countries simply for the money. Qantas replaced the two Cathay-bound pilots and we moved on. We trained in simulators, learning the aircraft and all the possible failures that could befall them, which meant going over and over the standard operating pro­cedures (SOPs) and checklists.

  The early generation Jumbos produced up until the late 1980s were given the affable title ‘Classic’. These aircraft had no computer networks, so engineers were carried to manage the complex systems. The Classic Jumbo range comprised the early generation 100 and 200 series (with the short upperdeck bubble), and the 300 series (with the longer bubble). With hindsight, the 747 Classics were fairly simple ‘steam-driven’ aircraft, essentially like a Cessna except bigger, faster and with more thrust. They had very simple thrust control: long cables connected the thrust levers to each engine. You had four throttle levers in a row, and the aim was to carefully push them forward or pull them back in unison because the jet crabbed sideways if the levers were not aligned (the engines on one side would power up with more thrust than the engines on the other side).

  The pilot of any light jet aircraft would have felt at home in the Classic Jumbo’s cockpit. We had to manually compensate for the secondary effects of the controls (aileron, rudder). For example, when the ailerons are moved to roll the aircraft, the pilot must also pull back (move the elevators) to stop the nose dropping, and move the rudder pedals to stop the passengers slipping sideways in their seats – jobs done automatically these days.

  Qantas had an exciting international network in the 1980s, servicing destinations in five of the seven continents. There were a lot of airports to get used to. My favourite airports were Hong Kong (Kai Tak), Tahiti, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Paris and London.

  Kai Tak was one of the two most challenging airports I experienced in the Qantas network. When landing towards the south, pilots flew the infamous IGS dogleg approach as it avoided the 3300 foot–high mountains that prevented simpler straight-in approaches. The approach to runway 13 was a wonderful exercise in planning, using visual and instrument cues to fly, and crew support. It was even more challenging in conditions of poor visibility and strong crosswinds. We descended in cloud on the first part of the dogleg approach, aiming 47 degrees to the left of the airport. If we saw flashing strobes starting to appear through the cloud as we approached the minimum altitude, we could continue the approach visually and land (even though we couldn’t see the airport or the runway). Once we made the decision to continue, it was a bit like the goat track approach at Tapini – we had to keep descending, our only reference being the line of strobes as they led us into a right turn. At the end of the turn we would skim a few hundred feet over the tops of residential buildings while the locals nonchalantly hung their washing to dry on their roofs. The right turn finally finished as we passed 300-feet altitude with the runway straight in front of us. Here’s the catch. If there was a strong tailwind on the first leg of the approach it would become a crosswind from the right after we had turned through the 47-degree right turn onto finals. That final turn is made so low that we only had time to make one wing-down followed by a wing-up movement to align with the runway – only one turn so we had to be precise.

  A good co-pilot earns his pay on this approach. You could easily end up in a situation where it’s unsafe to continue to land. Wise pilots who blew the approach ‘went around’ and tried again. One unwise pilot who continued with an unstable approach, in 1993, ended up over-running the end of the runway and parking ignominiously in Hong Kong’s harbour.

  I loved flying the Classic Jumbo. By the time I entered Qantas, the Classic had been in operation for almost eighteen years and Qantas was trying to get the final ounces of thrust from what was ageing engine technology. They injected 2400 kilograms of de-mineralised water into each engine during take-off to enable operations from hot, humid places, such as Cairns, with a full load. (The water reduced the internal engine temperatures, permitting more fuel to be introduced, and so more thrust. Steam also provided a thrust benefit.) The JT9 engines on the Classic could produce just 45,500 pounds of thrust (dry) and 47,000 pounds (wet) when the complicated water injection was used. These days, the new A380’s Trent 900 engine has been tested up to 93,000 pounds of thrust, though Qantas only pushes it to 72,000 pounds.

  The Classic Jumbo’s technology was leading edge for its time, but is now regarded as primitive. The auto-landing system was a humble mechanical device, incorporating lots of servos and actuators that delivered mediocre performance and reliability, and needed to be checked regularly. In the 200- and 300-series Jumbos, some of the automated systems and warnings were retrofitted. There were switches and warning lights for everything, but there were no computers to monitor them. We had to continually scan the panels for failures, and every twenty minutes the engineer would record about 50 engine and system para­meters in an A2-sized log book that would be returned to Sydney for plotting and analysis. There were no warning computers or electronic checklists, so even the simplest failures could take a long time to resolve. For example, in 1988, the leading edge slats failed to deploy when I was approaching to land at Melbourne airport. It took the three of us (two pilots and one engineer) 30 minutes to work through the emergency checklist – a ­procedure that would only take two pilots ten minutes today.

  The navigation systems were good for their time, but there was no GPS technology. We used Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) technology developed from the aerospace programs that used mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers. INSs were impressive back then; we could launch from Sydney, turn off all our radio aids and trust our navigation to three US$100,000 Litton INSs. Twelve hours later, as we approached Los Angeles airspace, we would be confident our position was accurate to within 72 kilometres (39 nautical miles). (GPS today would put us inside 3 metres – 23,000 times more accurate and at a fraction of the cost.)

  All pilots on the flight deck were busy when we flew from Asia to Europe. On a flight to London we’d pick one route from a selection of about twenty. The route would have about 200 waypoints – positions on the ground provided by countries to control where aircraft enter, transit and leave their airspace. We would expect to be intercepted by fighters if we diverted from our cleared route. Each waypoint’s position was defined by latitude and longitude references printed on our flight plan and navigation charts. Those 200 coordinates had to be input into the INS by a pi
lot on the flight deck – a slow, laborious job that is done automatically by data uplink these days. One by one, the support pilots would load successive (fifteen-character) coordinates into each of the INS’s nine waypoint slots; it was all the INS could handle. The INS was then coupled to the auto­pilot and the aircraft would track to the next waypoint. It was a simple system that needed constant attention. In the days before 9/11, we’d welcome some passengers into the flight deck and show them how it all worked.

  I remember one time over Russia in the middle of the night, I was entering my next sequence of nine coordinates into the machine and I must have been distracted because suddenly one of the waypoints was displayed to be 13,000 kilometres (7000 nautical miles) distant – the giveaway that I’d entered an incorrect character. The manual exercise of inputting these 135 characters, then methodically crosschecking the waypoints (by checking tracks and distances) sometimes occupied the entire focus of the support pilot. In Russia, where waypoints can be separated by one or two minutes, your efforts to pre-load the next nine INS waypoints would be in vain when the air traffic controller then cleared you to track from waypoint 1 direct to waypoint 9, and you’d have to go through your sequence and scrub out the ones now not needed then load new waypoints ahead again. It’s worth noting that the generation of flyers before us thought we had it easy; up to the 1960s navigators used sextants and slide-rules – they could plot by the stars if they had to.

  Radio communications were dreadful back then, nothing like the pleasant environment we share today. Very high frequency (VHF) radios are the preferred choice to deliver clear reception over short distances (up to 280 kilometres or 150 nautical miles). But last century many countries couldn’t provide a VHF infrastructure so we used high frequency (HF) radios to communicate with the controllers. HF communications suffer from two problems: quality and interference. The controller’s voice was often drowned out by the ‘hiss’ from noise and solar activity (flares) that charge up the Earth’s ionosphere, and our HF transmissions were being constantly over-­transmitted by multiple people.