Taking to the Skies by Jim Eames

Author:Jim Eames
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781743433447
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

There’s something about low flying

It was Lae, Papua New Guinea, early 1966. The telephone rings in the New Guinea Times Courier office. Brian Costello, local manager for Ansett-ANA, is on the line:

There’s a Royal Air Force Hastings coming in from Honiara in the Solomons with hydraulic problems. He’s in for an emergency landing. You better get down here.

Dusk is approaching as the vague outline of an aeroplane appears a long way to the south over Huon Gulf and gradually it takes the shape of a four-engine Hastings, a type based in the British Solomon Islands for transport duties. This aircraft, it turns out, is on its way back to England at the end of the crew posting and word from the captain is he may have problems with his undercarriage. He’s called for an emergency landing in case the gear doesn’t come down or collapses on landing.

Fire engines and an ambulance are standing by as he makes his final approach from over the water and onto the runway. Fortunately nothing untoward happens and the aircraft rolls to a stop and taxis to Lae airport’s hardstand parking area.

Ansett-ANA in Lae are charged with the handling of such itinerant aircraft, so Costello walks out to greet the crew as they climb out of the aircraft. He’s standing under the aircraft’s wing looking up as the captain, a flight lieutenant, comes around to join him.

‘What happened, skipper?’ Costello asks, a quizzical look on his face.

‘We had a bird strike and I think it may have fouled the hydraulics,’ is the reply.

Costello, known locally for his quick wit, can’t help himself as he keeps staring up at branches and small twigs protruding from the lower wing and engine nacelles.

‘Christ, were they still in the bloody trees?’

It hadn’t taken much to work out what had happened. The traditional low-flypast farewell had stayed a fraction too low for too long and cleaned up the tops of some trees at one end of Honiara’s airport. The result would be easily fixed, but presumably the flight lieutenant would have some explaining to do when he finally made it back to his squadron in the United Kingdom.

One couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sorrow for him, at least from a Papua New Guinea point of view. A low flypast farewell was nothing out of the ordinary in the years after the war and into the 1960s. Lae, for instance, was at the extreme end of the Australia–Papua New Guinea services for Ansett-ANA and Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) who had taken over the route from Qantas. Thus most days of the week Ansett and TAA would alternate overnight Lockheed Electra services from Sydney and Brisbane to Port Moresby and on to Lae, arriving at their termination point in the early morning.

To many in Lae the daily arrival was a little more than merely an airline flight. In a country where few roads existed and aviation was its lifeblood, the regular morning Electra was a link with the world beyond. It

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