sixtiesrelic Posted May 28, 2012 Author Posted May 28, 2012 Sorry gang, the internet doesn't want to work today... took hours to get on. May 28th 1942 31 days since last bombing… repair or rebuild? Are the Japs being stalled in New Guinea and the tide is turning? The papers say they cop a pasting each time they raid Port Moresby for the just the odd wounding of one of our side? Insurance company starting to work out out how to get out of paying?
siznaudin Posted May 28, 2012 Posted May 28, 2012 "The loss" ... not "missing" ... it looks to me as though in their minds it's been written off .
sixtiesrelic Posted May 29, 2012 Author Posted May 29, 2012 May 29th 1942 People wake in the night and start thinking. Questions go round and round inside their head. Was it a forced landing or a crash? Were they killed instantly or they lived? Were they badly injured and trapped in the wreckage or thrown out? Did it burn? It takes a surprisingly small quantity of fuel to produce an inferno. Did they drown in a lagoon or river… get eaten by crocodiles? Things that weren’t spoken out aloud, but most people involved, thought them privately. Did the aircraft ooze into the treetops and decelerate comfortably or did part of the aircraft come to a sudden halt against a thick tree trunk or ant nest. Ant nests are built to pretty substantial sizes. Many pioneers sawed them into large building blocks to make the walls of buildings. Anyone who has been to Betoota out Birdsville way may have seen the thickness of the pub walls… Ant nest. It’s a good material, as it is honeycombed with air pockets that give great insulation. I reckon whacking into a termite mound would make a serious dent in an aeroplane. It probably wouldn’t break off near the ground as the airways collapse like a shock absorber. Did the aircraft decelerate rapidly and come down onto a broken off tree trunk trunk or ant nest and get the belly ripped out. Think of the leg injuries … nasty. How would you be, with smashed up legs tangled in the wreckage. Can anyone who survives extricate you… no tools to cut you out. The pilots? First to cop it? The nose of Lockheeds wasn’t the aircraft’s strong point. How would the boys go if they were injured and the pilots dead? They have never been in this country before. (I thought for a long time that they were returning to Batchelor from the course but from Peter Dunn’s site and others, it looks like they were arriving from the east coast where they’d landed just weeks before). This was probably the first time they’d ever seen desert and top end country. They’d have no bush craft; no knowledge of ‘the natives’. What would they know of Australia? Even today we see the shocking lack of knowledge many Americans have of the rest of the world outside the great U S of A. and they have TV radio movies and internet that the people in the forties didn’t have. We’ve heard stories of Japanese motorbike tourists out in the backblocks, who have died of thirst beside waterholes and tanks, because they weren’t game to drink the muddy water. How fast did Cameron land? The stall speed would have been about fifty -five knots. How much above the stall did he approach? 1.3 times the stall speed, like we all do in a short field landing. Think how scarily slow that feels when you’re coming in… it doesn’t matter on the size of the aeroplane we all think it’s VERY slow. The Jumbo blokes reckon one hundred and sixty knots is as slow as they want to get down to… like fifty two knots is in a one seventy two is for its pilot. Airliners now do only short field landings… every landing! How about 1.1 times the stall speed, would you be game? The slower… the better chance you have when you start breaking trees. A stall speed of fifty- five is pretty slow. Convert it into kilometres per hour and think of the young road knights who collide with a pole or tree to-day. Their cars are a real mess… cut in half sometimes or wrapped right round the immovable object. Cars are made of steel. They’re made to be able to cop a fair impact. Aeroplanes aren’t! Where was the luggage stored ? http://hdl.handle.net/10070/11248 It wasn’t like today’s requirements for security. Imagine packs and rifles flying around the cabin in the darkness. People lay in bed in 1942 and thought some of these thoughts. They’d keep thinking them till they were told what happened by someone who had been there and knew for sure. Loved ones are always told, ‘He died peacefully’ Or ‘It was instant… he didn’t know a thing’ but there’s always the doubt, ‘Am I being saved terrible news?’ Lockheed fourteens were a treacherous little cow at slow speed. Nasty, vicious stallers. Lionel van Pragg, who was a champion speed way motorbike rider, was the chief pilot of Adastra after the war and he said that he would sack any pilot who approached at less than a hundred knots in a Lockheed 14. He didn’t trust them. The pre-war pilots knew their vices, so what did Cameron do, keep up the speed and really belt into the obstructions or take the chance of a wing drop while still above the treetops. He couldn’t just fly around and choose a nice large flat expanse… there are some, but they’re boggy. He didn’t have enough forward visibility to see much more than a hundred or so yards in front of him in the rain, so not too far past where he put her down was going to be completely unknown.
Guest ozzie Posted May 29, 2012 Posted May 29, 2012 Hmm termite mounds. when i was jumping at Manbaloo near Katherine us southeners were told that if we had to land off the DZ and had to choose between hitting a big fat tree and a termite mound to take on the tree as it is softer. To true! Later when we drove a big old Dodge truck into the bush to pick up some jumpers that landed off i decided to just drive over a small one. Came to a very abrubt stop, left barely a mark on it and folded the thick bumber into a V. Lionel van Pragg. I knew his son Cliff very well. He was a early ultralight pioneer. I also saw Lionel race at the old Sydney Showground speedway many times. Great days. And what a man!
siznaudin Posted May 30, 2012 Posted May 30, 2012 Five weeks. Given all the things mentioned in Sixtie's last post, that's a very very long time to have survived.
sixtiesrelic Posted May 30, 2012 Author Posted May 30, 2012 May 30th 1942 Investigation committee of Mr Affleck and Mr Ellis is formed in Melbourne. Affleck knows both Cameron and W.T. Gray He was the first flying doctor pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria and later New Guinea. He is a good man to put onto the committee as he knows how pilots think. Below is the airways museum’s description of Arthur. http://www.airwaysmuseum.com/ Arthur H Affleck (1903- ) Arthur Affleck was born in Melbourne in 1903 and educated at Wesley College, in that city. At the age of 17 he joined the staff of the National Bank of Australiasia but, after two years' service, enlisted as a clerk in the Royal Australian Air Force. Six months later he was selected as one of three Civil Aviation Cadets from hundreds of applicants throughout Australia, was trained to Air Force 'Wings' and Commercial Pilot Licence standard. Given a discharge from the RAAF, Affleck commenced work as a commercial pilot with Jimmy Larkin's Australian Aerial Services Ltd. to operate the Melbourne-Hay route. Following a dispute with Larkin over the airworthiness of the A.N.E.C. III, Arthur Affleck obtained a job with Q.A.N.T.A.S in April 1927. He was the original pilot of the Flying Doctor service, based in Cloncurry, and later flew in New Guinea and Western Australia. Arthur Affleck joined the Civil Aviation Branch of the Defence Department in 1936 as a Flying Inspector. In 1941 he was sent to Port Moresby to organise the evacuation of women and children in the face of the Japanese advance and was later seconded to the RAAF. Post war, he played an important part in, and contributed much to, the safe development of the Australian civil aviation industry. In 1963, at the age of 60, he retired from the position of Regional Director of Civil Aviation for Papua New Guinea. (Photo: CAHS collection) Arthur Affleck's autobiography The Wandering Years was published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1964. I am reading the book at the present. If you spot it buy it and see what flying was like in the good old days. It is a very good read.
siznaudin Posted May 30, 2012 Posted May 30, 2012 A little more on Affleck here ... http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/affleck-arthur-herbert-9314
sixtiesrelic Posted May 31, 2012 Author Posted May 31, 2012 May 31st 1942 No sign of ADY End of the month… the bills arrived and need paying. The next few days could be a bit erratic here on the net, as I am driving to Aviatrix’s place to visit her. That will take till Sunday. Hopefully I’ll be at Moree Friday night and West Wyalong Saturday. I’m on a museum crawl for a fortnight, taking in Temora, Melbourne, HARS and Luskintyre and anything else that pops up. Sixties. Email from ‘Little Ann’… I also have some stuff about Mr. Affleck. The page from the Port Moresby newspaper, dated 15th October 1963 - that one I probably brought home to Sydney to show Mother because I'm pretty sure that's around the time I went up to PNG for a fortnight on holiday, my first holiday after joining Qantas in the Simulator Division in Nov 1962 as secretary to the Simulator Manager, Capt. Alan Furze. There were several senior captains at Qantas at the time who knew my dad. I probably brought it back from holiday (I spent the last couple of days in Port Moresby) because Mother knew Mr. Affleck. She worked for a dozen or more years for the Department of Civil Aviation at Mascot, in the Airworthiness section, and I'm pretty sure that she got the job because the guys knew her from New Guinea. (She bought herself an Olivetti typewriter and taught herself to type, so she could take that job - this was around 1951 or 1952.) Here is the story cut out of the newspaper page.
siznaudin Posted May 31, 2012 Posted May 31, 2012 Sixties ... try to make yourself known to Andy Bishop at Temora (ask at the desk when you arrive) - tell him Geoff Chennells says "g'day" and let him know a bit about your background in PNG, etc. A great guy, and not only into aviation, but veteran cars as well. His dad is a retired 747 Captain, also into veteran cars. Here's Andy with the co-driver/navigator... Wish I could be there too, but the timing's off, unfortunately. Have a great - and safe - trip. [ATTACH=full]1246[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]18211[/ATTACH]
Guest aviatrix27 Posted May 31, 2012 Posted May 31, 2012 Looking forward to seeing you Sunday 60's. Will see what I can find for you to have a look at locally.
Guest DWB Posted May 31, 2012 Posted May 31, 2012 Sounds like great trip 60's. See you're planning to stop at Luskintyre. Just up the road (relatively) is Pay's Warbird Museum at Scone. Whilst not generally open to the public they are generally receptive to requests http://www.paysairservice.com.au/pays/detail/home.asp
sixtiesrelic Posted June 1, 2012 Author Posted June 1, 2012 June 1 seventy years ago no sign of ADY however in 2012 one sixtiesrelic is sitting in a motel room swearing. Fighting with the laptop and being madder'n hell because the entries he had ready to download over the next couple of days aren't in the two drives they were put on yesterday. Tomorrow, with more time, some re-writing will have to take place.
siznaudin Posted June 1, 2012 Posted June 1, 2012 Hang in there Sixties ... we're on your side! [ATTACH=full]1248[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]18213[/ATTACH]
sixtiesrelic Posted June 2, 2012 Author Posted June 2, 2012 June 2. Charlie's logbook shows longer than normal times on the legs between Alice or Katherine and Darwin which indicates they were still looking. Hilda and the girls are in Sydney with the family deciding what she will do. The chance that W.T. is alive is so remote that she is looking into finding a job. Even if he is alive, he won't be flying for a long time and no money is coming in. She will have to be the bread winner for the foreseeable future.
sixtiesrelic Posted June 2, 2012 Author Posted June 2, 2012 that is my first try at putting up a video clip.my laptop and dongle are giving me grief so I'm not sure if you are seeing what I hope you are. Yes siz THAT'S me in the cartoon!
sixtiesrelic Posted June 3, 2012 Author Posted June 3, 2012 June 3 I haven't found the documentation to show when the three hour search Nobby suggested, occurred. We don't know if it was a dedicated flight from Katherine or Darwin or a three hour addition tacked onto a normal flight. I don't know about now with the 'bugger you Jack' attitude that has crept into Oz, but back then, passengers would have left lots of greasy nose marks on the aircraft windows as they enthusiastically peered out, unblinkingly... in case they missed something, while there was an extra three hours tacked onto the flight. Most people I guess would like taking place in a search for a lost aircraft with twelve missing people. They'd be hoping THEY were the one who first spotted it. I don't know if Nobby crewed the flight or someone else was rostered for it. Nobby was the spokesman for one group of pilots who reckoned ADY was in one place, while a second group, with captain Bob Godsell as their spokesman, thought it may have taken another track. Neither reckoned the other mob was balmy; they came to different conclusions and agreed that they could easily be wrong. Find ADY was the goal. While we wait for the discovery, I'll introduce you to more of the people in the story. Nobby. I was given the following newspaper cutting by a friend who is a historian and was interested in the crash. It covers Nobby's history, however spoken history shows Nobby as a much liked and respected person 'who cared'. He was the pilot who drove around to Hilda's to check that she was OK and give her some sort of help as the face of the company. He was just one of the captains at the time. There was no HR in those days to send someone around to help or give counselling to any one needing it, even returned soldiers were expected to get back to work the first Monday they got back home. Pilots weren't highly paid as is evident in the fact that Hilda had to sell some of her husband's clothes to rake up the train fare to Sydney while her father-in-law was spending money staying in Darwin making a nuisance of himself. From stories 'Little Ann' and her older cousin tell, Hilda didn't forgive him for that. To give some idea of pay in those days, Captains of DC-3s on joining TAA in 1946 were paid five pounds a week. Go to TROVE and then newspapers on the net and look up the newspapers of 1942 to see what things cost in the adds and work out what five quid bought.
siznaudin Posted June 3, 2012 Posted June 3, 2012 Nobby Buckley & Max Fatchen: now there we have a couple of legends...
sixtiesrelic Posted June 4, 2012 Author Posted June 4, 2012 June 4 We must be winning the war. Still no bombings of Darwin. Nothing to report on any sightings. Corbett, Johnstone and Affleck have had conferences covering how the investigation should run. It isn't like previous ones because of the number of powerful entities involved. The military ones have to have it pointed out that THEY are not in charge... DCA is. The people at the top of those departments are OK, but there are little people way down the chain of command who don't like some civvy telling them what to do and who have high opinions of their importance. The next person we look at is Eric Chaseling, the operations manager of GAL. I can't make my mind up if I would have liked him or not. Respect ...yes. He had 'been there and done that'. He has a very singular stance, that once spotted, makes it easy to identify him in old photos. He often stood very straight, feet together, pointing forward rather than out at forty five degrees and had his arms folded. I've seen him standing like that for photos in New Guinea and at Forest. He looks sort of 'prim'... maybe he didn't like his photo being taken because it was a waste of time, but there is something there that would make me be careful around him rather than my flippant self. He died much too young which is a great pity for Australian Aviation as he was a mover and shaker and would have contributed to the safe running of aviation. I have found many clippings about him for you to see his history. I checked in the War Memorial archives to see if he was an airman in the Great War. He wasn't. He was hospitalised, which makes me wonder if he had been gassed, because the explanation that his test flying in the USA hastened his early death doesn't quite ring true as the only contributing factor. I would liked to have met him as I would Affleck.
siznaudin Posted June 4, 2012 Posted June 4, 2012 Here's the man ... and yes - gassed he was, apparently. [ATTACH]1252[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]18216[/ATTACH]
sixtiesrelic Posted June 5, 2012 Author Posted June 5, 2012 June 5 The ADY pilots... I have found little about Gordon Cameron but there is a wealth of information from the Gray clan on W.T. He was a keen photographer and has left us a marvellous legacy of images of pre-war flying in New Guinea. He was so keen that he had a second refrigerator, exclusively for his film, photographic paper and chemicals. Not even the beer could be stored in that fridge. He also wrote on the back of his photos. Old Mr Gray did too. It is a great habit to have as we forget little things and people's names with time AND succeeding generations thank them for the habit as they have some idea of what the photo is about. Example:- There is a photo of Wau strip with a couple of aeroplanes in the distance. On the left foreground is a forty-four gallon drum ans on the right a native sitting next to a box or something. On the back is the explanation... He took the 'signal board' and native operator. It was white one side and green on the other. When the strip was safe for an approaching aircraft to land, the green side of the board faced downhill to signal the pilot he could come on in. Once an aircraft started rolling on Wau it either got airborne or crashed into one of the creeks that ran down each side of the steep strip. There was no aborting a takeoff at Wau. This photo is the only one most of us have seen of 'the board' that we have heard of... Only because W.T wrote it on the back. The next thing that we can thank him for is his getting into the cutting edge of 16 mm colour movie photography. A couple of people in New Guinea got into movie cameras, W.T. was one and we have an hour of footage that illustrates all the marvellous history that we only read about in books like James Sinclair's Wings of Gold. Imagining some of that spectacular adventure that is no longer allowed, is one thing … seeing it is far better. Colour film was expensive, so W.T was sparing in his holding down the trigger. Most clips are only three to seven seconds as he poked the camera our the side when he saw something interesting. Hilda used to show the girls and family the movies that had been spliced and put on eight inch reels so the original three inchers weren't having to be changed at the end of their five minute run. The trouble was, it was just a bunch of unrelated scenes that made no sense to the viewer. I got a hold of a video of the original films that are now in the Commonwealth Film Archives awaiting digitalized copying, and put the bits into some sense of order so the girls could follow a flight from place to place. If you look carefully, you will see the low wing of a single engine Junkers and a few scenes later the high wing of a Ford Trimotor on one flight. He took the movies over two years and I had only that to work with. I recognised places and was able to string the scenes together into a semblance of order. The real thrill for viewers who followed those pioneers up there to fly was the recognition of places they'd been and how they changed or stayed the same, seeing the daily lives of the pioneers that we'd read about. Most pilots who flew into the highlands marvelled at the clean start of one of the engines on a G 31 (whopping big three engined corrugated shed with wings). A native is seen up on the wing madly winding a handle, poked into the cowl of the starboard engine, to get the impulse starter whirling and the pilot then hitting the starter of a seven cylinder big round engine and catching it first time. Watch a DC-3 or similar engined aeroplane starting to understand this appreciation of a master pilot...AND it was at five thousand feet too. Another film shows a native standing on a forty-four gallon drum winding the starter of a Ford Trimotor at Kila- kila strip in Moresby. That strip is all houses now. There are other movie film collections from that time that are being discussed on the net that I will be finding when I have time. We need to identify and explain what is happening while there are people around who can. The longest clip W.T. took was fourteen seconds. The film jumped off the sprocket as it ran through the camera so we see a surrealistic, foggy, perhaps negative black scene. It looks at first like it might be taken circling something in between stratus layers. I watched it and tried to make head or tail of it for a year or more. I read books to try and ascertain what aircraft had gone down in those years that he may have been circling. Later, when I bought a film making program and converted the VHS format to digital, I was able to view the footage, frame by frame and low and behold after watching about two hundred and fifty frames, the last three, as the shutter closed, turned out to be clearish colour images of an aeroplane in the water. There was a barge beside it and the wings were off it. I recognised it as the Dh-66 that forced landed in the water on the Salamaua isthmus. I rang Doug Muir (story below in History and nostalgia) and he said, “That was me pulling her to bits. She stopped on the rocks and hardly got any damage. I got her out and we were rebuilding her, till we found the glue in the main spars had let go when they were soaked from the salt water over many days, so we scrapped her”. SO... because W.T. Took the movie we now have a fuzzy colour photo of the aeroplane in the water that got a passing mention in Wings of Gold. Been out having Vietnamese dinner with my daughter, so I'll post the photos tomorrow
siznaudin Posted June 5, 2012 Posted June 5, 2012 "...whopping big three engined corrugated shed with wings." Beautiful! [ATTACH=full]1255[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]18218[/ATTACH]
sixtiesrelic Posted June 6, 2012 Author Posted June 6, 2012 June 6 Some of W.T's images. I don't have many with me. The first of the Ford and the Klemm swallow are at Mt Hagen. The Klemm lived for many years at Port MacQuarrie and was occasionally flown by a gaunt tall octogenarian. I am going to visit it's owner in a couple of days and have a look at her and others of his interesting aeroplane collection. This is one of the three images they have of W.T.... he was always behind the camera.
siznaudin Posted June 7, 2012 Posted June 7, 2012 forty eight days and counting. anyone calculating odds?
sixtiesrelic Posted June 8, 2012 Author Posted June 8, 2012 Sunday June 7 1942 No news on ADY Sorry not to post last night, but that was how it was in 1942 wasn't it Thursday June 7th 2012... I froze at Binalong with no signal bars on my Telstra internet in the car, even parked on top of a hill about five kilometres from town... went back to the hotel I was staying in for a warming rum or two. I need to spend time on the net getting some things for the next instalment. I will be in range of Telstra towers tomorrow. I went to the Temora museum yesterday and had a good look around the Hudson to get some idea of what it was like. More about it when I settle down and can write more. I went to crawl around inside the Catelena at Hars and am at an interesting man'shome tonight. He has many interesting historical aeroplanes like the Rapide Compter Swift Fox mothe to mention a few, so I don't have time to do any writing.
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