Seventy Years Ago Today An Ausssie Airliner Went Down. You've Not Heard Of It.

[sixtiesrelic]

Tuesday June 7 1942

 

No news on ADY

 

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.

 

When I went to the Temora museum I had a good look around the Hudson to get some idea of what it was like.

 

Large and high from the outside, but inside, a small aeroplane for passengers.

 

It is big enough for two seats per row with a narrow aisle down the middle. The main wing spar is a box that the pilots and front row passengers had to climb over.

 

Surprisingly, for the narrow body, the fourteen's cockpit isn't much smaller than the DC-3's, but then the Super Connie's cockpit that I looked at yesterday wasn't much wider than the DC-3 s either.

 

Trying to draw lines on a map that is sitting on your lap under the control column would have been cramped and a real challenge in a dark cockpit. Added to the difficulty would be the keeping of the navigation log AND radio log.

 

Look back at the radio log in the beginning of this story and imagine the continuous writing amongst having to send the messages in Morse code.

 

Would they have had a cheat sheet with most of the regular Q code groups on it for quick reference? There wasn't room for a nav bag to be put on the floor beside them, so there could be paperwork everywhere or in a pile on the pilot's lap.

 

Lighting... Even in the sixties, the idea of red light cockpit illumination was standard, so night vision was optimum. We would sit in a dark room for twenty minutes getting our eyes accustomed to the dark, before going out to do night circuits. The DC-3 had some special, dull fluorescent lights in the cockpit, so I imagine the Lockheeds did too. They caused the luminous paint that made up the instrument markings glow, and didn't cast much illumiunation even when the rheostat was turned up full.

 

The investigators sitting in their offices have a little sledge at Cameron for probably not keeping an accurate navigation log, he had been noted as not keeping them in the past. In the circumstances, I doubt any one would have been keeping accurate and neat logs.

 

I guess we'll see when they find the aircraqft

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 10

 

Nothing!

 

If you check back to the certificate of airworthiness image, you'll see the engineer who signed ADY off on the 21st April was Snow Schubert.

 

 

Snow you'll see from the photos was an engineer, doing the dirty jobs. He was also one of the first officers.

 

I knew him when I was a young child and I only ever thought he was a captain.

 

He left Guinea Airways with the exodus of about 1945 or 46 and went to ANA with Charles and others like Ray Christmas, Bill Small and Ken Steele; there could have been others as the list I have seen states where they they ended up.

 

Snow, when I knew him was flying with Qantas and he had been with BCPA which was handled by ANA, but Charles flew on a number of BCPA trips to America when he was in TAA, so there's a mystery to unravel.

 

I suppose all I'm getting at here is showing how in those pre-war and war times employees were multi skilled, qualified and tasked more than today in the Airlines.

 

However... there are many pilots flying for all the airlines who were multi tasked when they first started out in their early commercial pilot operations.

 

Tim J, who is now a Qantas pilot, mowed the lawn outside the terminal and was the toilet cleaner amongst other menial tasks when he worked his first job flying a single engined Cessna as he scrimped towards the magic five hundred hour mark.

 

He was most fortunate in having a room under the boss's house as part of the Princely pay package. He didn't have a car included, so was always on call for the crappy jobs.

 

When he left for a better job there were a couple of young hopefuls desperate to take his place.

 

Tim and co. didn't have a trade behind them like the young hopefuls way back then because they had to remain at school till they were eighteen, where as most boys left at fourteen to become apprentices. When they were through at say nineteen, they could pay for their flying lessons and were desirable to the flying companies because they doubled up as engineers.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Thursday, June 11 1942

 

IF ADY wasn't found we WOULD have heard about it. Hang in there.

 

Arthur Affleck is now looking at all the files and trying to calculate where ADY flew.

 

He has Mr Adam's calculations, but like the pilots, he doesn't agree that ADY was flying near Darwin.

 

There is the question of what tracking ADY did from the time Cameron decided he couldn't make Batchelor in daylight. He implied he was going to turn south to Katherine. I have a feeling he didn't. If it was me I may have decided, 'bugger Katherine I'm going to Darwin'.

 

Why?

 

If I go to Darwin, the Yanks can get transport to Batchelor, Gray and I can get to bed early and get some sleep. If I go back to Katherine, I'm going to have to get up in the pre-dawn, scoot to Batchelor then on to Darwin to pick up the day's work and probably be late in getting away on another full day's flying.

 

It's only a feeling and Bill Gray, who has studied the incident with me, doesn't agree... yet like me, HE'D be the sort of bloke to do just that.

 

The big question is, how could ADY possibly be east of Darwin at the first DF bearings given. They'd have needed a hell of a tailwind northbound, if they indeed turned south for a while.

 

Below are some of his calculations written on scrap paper. One page is on the back of an out of date aerodrome chart.

 

Have a look at it and see how most aerodromes were all over fields. Mercator chart... The chart at the beginning of the story is one.

 

Strip map... we have to cut ours up now to make one of those. I have one somewhere. It is folded conveniently in a concertina form and is on thin cardboard so an open air pilot didn't have it blow away when open like WAC charts sometimes do.

 

 

 

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 12

 

The boys of the Forty Ninth are settled in at Livingstone field and getting on with the war. The missing ten are put in the back of their minds most of the time. Sometimes when they're off duty and are 'having a couple' as the 'Ossies' call it, those guys come up in conversation.

 

Aussie pilots are bringing in hooch, mostly bottles of Scotch, for the boys... illegal of course. If the soldiers are lucky, they have befriended a reasonable pilot who isn't out to fleece the thirsty, by charging exorbitant prices … some did and funnily, Karma often got THEM.

 

There'd be raucous stories of what those missing guys had gotten up to or in the case of Private Wyatt Whiley, quieter memories of a gentle bloke's kindness to everybody.

 

 

From the National Library of Australia... a Hudson mail plane being unloaded at Batchelor. I don't know id the RAAF blokes were selling booze, but some of the civvies definitely were.

 

 

[siznaudin]

Re your Sunday June 7 post ... "An interesting man"! You don't have to be a dentist of Irish stock or to have some sort of a fixation with Pobjoy engines to be just "interesting'!

 

And I bet he has a wonderful sense of humour, too. You lucky so-and-so, Sixties ... looking forward to the next post.

 

Fifty two days...?

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 13

 

Bloody Nips! They were back today and hit all the repairs that have been going on for all these weeks. In some places we have to start all over again. That's number sixteen and the little bastards arrived eight minutes before lunch...hope they poke their eye out with their chopsticks and choke on their rice. Ours was full of sand when we got it!

 

 

Guinea Airways hangar.

 

Today we have no idea of the activity in Northern Territory in 1942. In the months this story unfolds there were the following based at just Batchelor

 

2nd Torpedo Maintenance Unit.

 

5 R C

 

7 R C

 

9 R C

 

7 / 49th Fighter Group.

 

2 Air ambulance Group.

 

12 Squadron G R/B

 

2 AAU detachment.

 

31 Squadron RAAF

 

27 Bomb Group USAAF

 

34 Squadron T/land (Ansons and DC-3s.

 

53 OBU.

 

Royal Netherlands Navy Wireless Telegraph station.

 

38 Bomber Group.

 

Unfortunately the meaning for the letters are at home and I didn't digest and remember them when finding out.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 14 Sunday

 

No news on ADY. It's a day of rest! Oh, Charlie has had his third day off in a row.

 

He has flown over fifty hours so far this month overseven days.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 15

 

This the third day in a row the bloody Nips have bombed Darwin. Are they preparing for an invasion? The weeks of no activity here, might have been preparation and transporting troops to somewhere close like Timor.

 

A bit about Charles while we wait to see what is coming.

 

He was pushed into the engineering game by old Mr Gray. He did it to his five sons.

 

Charlie was apprenticed to Coot Jorgansen engineers, as a fitter and turner.

 

WT was nine years older and was flying at this time. Charlie decided he wanted to fly too. While he was in his latter part of his apprenticeship, he rode his pushbike with his helmet and goggles wrapped up inside his leather jacket that was tied to the handlebars with string, from Pymble across the city to Mascot for a lesson. Some rich boys whose fathers were paying, ostentatiously wore their jackets and helmets in the tram and loudly talked about flying for everybody to hear. None of them ever got far in the aviation game. Charlie did.

 

Nothing much has changed. Many of the airline pilots you meet can tell you stories of hardship and struggle to get to where they got to.

 

Most of the heirachy in airlines got to where they are the hard way and would they not chose the fighter over the handed it all on a plate? They'll not admit it.

 

Charlie sped through his training, gaining his A licence (private) in thirty two and a half hours and his B (commercial) in one hundred and thirteen hours. There was night flying aerobatics and instrument flying involved in the training.

 

He did a few charters and joy flights in Leopard and Puss Moths and got a job through WT with Guinea Airways at a total of one hundred and thirty four hours, starting in Lae then after a month or two later being based in Wau.

 

 

After six months of learning the ropes and showing that he could fly in the difficult operations of New Guinea, he was given the great big four passenger Fox Moth which is a fat Tiger Moth, the body being the only thing different to the Tiger. He had a couple of small mishaps which were regarded as negligible in New Guinea operations. The first was clobbering a bulldog that had a habit of scaring hell out of pilots by wandering out of the long grass on the side of Wau as aircraft were taking off and landing.

 

Charles was on the short take-off run in the Gipsy when out ambles Bully who gets cleaned up by the undercarriage.

 

Charlie avoided hooting off the side of the strip and going into the creek by dragging her off the ground and then flew to Lae where he did an interesting landing without breaking the aeroplane.

 

After some hours of replacing the badly bent undercarriage and being congratulated on 'killing that mongrel of a thing at last', he flew back to Wau and on landing almost collected Bully again, ‘and the bastard wasn't even limping'.

 

The second was the putting the Fox on her nose in the long grass at Bulolo.

 

Charles finally worked his way up the ranks to become the next in line to go into the Ford Tri-motor.

 

He got two training flights which are in red ink... a colour he used on milestones like getting his A and B licences when a terrible thing happened.

 

A loud mouthed American had arrived in New Guinea with millions of hours on Fords and according to him, he was going to be a real boon to the company.

 

He went off in a Ford to show 'em how it was done and landed up crashing it.

 

They were down an operating Ford while the recovery and repairs took place, so were overstaffed with Ford pilots. Charlie went back on the Fox Moth.

 

He didn't like that Yank and there were many during the war who didn't endear themselves to the Aussie courier pilots (who had thousands of hours) with their brash bragging about their few hundred.

 

One flight in the Fox, just before he was evacuated because the Japs were coming, was done with eleven people aboard. Lots of kids and two mothers from a mission.

 

I've heard someone else claimed to have done it, but Charles told me he had done a flight with eleven.

 

In Adelaide he was a first officer in both the Lockheed ten and its big brother the fourteen. There was no flying only one type. He occasionally flew the Fox Moth the first year.

 

His elevation to Captain wasn't the modern way. He was away on an overnight somewhere when his captain fell ill. He was told to fly the aircraft the next day by himself.

 

 

Perhaps like DC-3 pilots with Papuan Airlines in the sixties, the GAL first officers flew their leg from the left hand seat, so it was no big deal for him to fly the aeroplane alone.

 

Charles joined the exodus at the end of the war from Guinea Airways to Australian National Airways, even doing a few flights in the DC-2, He missed out on flying the DC-5 because he joined TAA as the chief of the DC-4 fleet.

 

He was promoted to Senior Regional Captain of the northern region and became very popular with the population of the inland by insisting that they should be serviced by DC-3s rather than the Dragon and Drovers that management felt was good enough.

 

In 1955 he was promoted to chief pilot and did that job till 1962 when overwork drained him and he suffered from hay fever so badly that he was on an hour's breathing pure oxygen mixed with aromatic drugs, for seven months. The doctors told him to get away from Melbourne where the rye-grass that affected him flowered or he would die.

 

He demoted himself to a line pilot to do this and was replaced by two pilots to do his job. They had another two added to their team to get the work done. It was the time when the jet age arrived in domestic airlines.

 

Charlie was happy being a check and training captain for the rest of his career and retired in 1975 with twenty five thousand hours. Others had more, but then he was behind a desk for fifteen years , so didn’t do much flying then.

 

He did a bit of light aircraft flying with friends but decided to give it away after flying an Auster with his mate Pat.

 

Pat was reading the Sunday newspapers as Charlie flew. Pat looked up from his reading and spluttered, “Where did THEY come from!”

 

“Who?”

 

“All these bloody parachutes!”

 

“Shiiit!”

 

Charlie died in 1992 from drinking too much beer and rum which he was famous for.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Wednesday June 17

 

 

No sighting of ADY. How long does it take to find a crashed aeroplane?

 

You can see from yesterday’s instalment that aircraft were going down in droves. I wonder how many of those were circled by Guinea Airways, ANA, Qantas and Ansett pilots as they flew past wondering if ’THIS is ADY’.

 

 

All the pilots knew each other back then and they would be on the lookout, much the same as people flying over the Barrington Tops still look for VH- MDX, a Cessna 210 that disappeared in 1981.

 

Those who look, hope they might see a flash of wrong colour for the jungle (Anything that has lawyer cane growing everywhere to hook you, is jungle in my opinion).

 

Perhaps a huge old branch will snap and drag some of the vine ridden canopy down to expose some of MDX.

 

 

ADY wasn’t in jungle which makes it all the more puzzling as to why it is not standing out.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Captain Chaseling’s report to DCA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[siznaudin]

Am I misinterpreting, or is this a "dump" on Cameron? I'm off now, to Google "Bellini-Tozi" radio location: never 'eard of it, Guv'nor.

 

Edit: aha! Bellini-Tosi ... read all about it here. http://www.airwaysmuseum.com/B-T%20MFDF%201.htm

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

When I first read it and started stitching the photos together I named the pages GAL's Scathing letter 1, 2. etc. I didn't like it either

 

More on that tonight.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

19 June

 

A few thoughts on Chaseling’s letter.

 

Now there's an interesting thing. Even though there was sort of evidence that ADY wasn't flying over Darwin at all with the weak radio reception on HF and VHF, the sightings by two people the queries about how much rain Darwin was experiencing. Chaseling is really belting Cameron in this company investigation.

 

Were they mates or was there friction?

 

Is it company policy to get the heat off the company operations.

 

GAL had suffered a number of frontline aircraft crashes over the past few years, perhaps DCA was looking at them and Chaseling was trying to put the blame away from them.

 

In 1983 Ansett was at the inquest into a Beech King Air crash at Sydney.

 

Controllers and other pilots were there too. At one stage the inquest discovered that an Ansett Boeing 727 had been told to go round as it landed ... to make way for the staggering, stricken Beech to get down anywhere on the airport.

 

The 727 pilot refused to go round and things were starting to look bad for him at the hearing when it knocked off for lunch, part of the way through this line of thought.

 

An Ansett manager spoke to the captain as they left the building and said that if he was blamed, the company wouldn't be doing anything to help him... it wouldn't look good for the company image, so ‘he would be on his own’ … thrown to the wolves.

 

When they resumed, the question was asked why he hadn't gone around as 'commanded'.

 

He said they had touched down and the automatic speed brakes had deployed and the operations manual states that aircraft aren't to try to take off again.

 

The ops manual was produced and it was noted the instruction to not attempt a takeoff in this configuration was in bold type and the captain had done the correct thing. He was no longer of interest to the inquest.

 

Ansett pilots knew they would be sacrificed if ever it suited the company image.

 

Looks like Gordon got the same stabbing.

 

I find the idea of trying Cloncurry and Groote’s bearings interesting. Cloncurry is around seven hundred miles from Darwin and Groote three hundred and fifty.

 

Would you rely on bearings from so far away?

 

Using a reasonable inaccuracy of five degrees you have forty five mile by a sixty mile oval of probability you’d be in.

 

 

Groote’s bearings would be almost the same as Darwin’s as they were reasonably lined up on the track Darwin gave. The difference is twenty seven degrees between the two places from Darwin. We are told that bearings crossing less than forty five degrees are not particularly accurate for position fixing, yet here armchair theorists reckon twenty seven degrees should have been utilized.

 

Those pilots were totally stuffed.

 

The investigators wanted to know Cameron’s flying hours for the last ninety or so days at the beginning of their investigation… THEY knew!

 

Cameron was being told of his bearings in a very sure tone … remembering that the information came through three people as Eric Chaseling mentions in his report. The last would have no doubts when he sent the message.

 

Do you think they were going to put four Mercator charts on the cabin floor and get the boys to hold them steady while Gray drew a bearing line from Cloncurry? … they wouldn’t fit in the aisle.

 

 

I have another type of chart from those days that looks like it covers four Mercator chart areas, but it looks like they may have needed two together to cover CCY to DN and DID they carry one with them or were they more a planning chart back at base?

 

I also have another Mercator chart that fits beside Darwin’s. IT is 1: 1.3 million compared with Darwin’s 1 in a million.

 

 

That could cause some problems at night to tired pilots who are used to ten miles being twenty millimetres.

 

Most of you pilots can look at a WAC chart and guess a distance because your eye gages eighteen millimetres at ten miles.

 

OK we have terminal charts en-route charts and RNCs etc but we become accustomed to the chart we use the most.

 

I‘ve often wondered why Cloncurry or Groote didn’t try relaying for Darwin when it is obvious from the request to send each LETTER four times that ADY was experiencing almost impossible difficulties.

 

Were they on different frequencies?

 

Chaseling was thorough and many improvements would come from his observations and questions.

 

He helped make Australia a safe place to fly.

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Sat 20 June 1942

 

 

Unfortunately when I photographed the pages I sometimes was a bit quick and the camera didn’t fully auto focus. I couldn’t tell from the small screen on the camera. Page 2 was too out of focus but you get the idea of Mr Adam the Supervising Engineer of the Chief Electrical Engineer’s Branch’s opinion in this report to DCA.

 

 

 

 

[siznaudin]

Two months - fifty six days. Writeoff.

 

I've just gone back to page one and re-read the events of the day.

 

It must be nice to work in a ground-bound office, eh?

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 21

 

Adam’s letter

 

 

I think thes was the console for the DF .... nice and complicated huh.

 

Adams was a technician. He had his apparatus checked for accuracy and it was operating correctly for the various tests.

 

IT worked, but the conditions the night ADY went missing weren't able to be simulated, so he had no reason to believe that ADY didn't just ignore the bearings.

 

He probably knew Cameron's attitude to the bearings he was often given... he asked them to check the sense on a few occasions as did many other pilots.

 

The equipment was complicated and a certain amount of educated guessing was required to give a bearing.

 

Naturally Adams can see no problem with the equipment or operators, so has to look at the other input… the pilot. He was the failing.

 

What really glares in Adam's letter is the similarity to Chaseling's letter especially the conclusions … word perfect!.

 

They certainly look like they composed them together and as Sizanudin mentioned, Cameron gets the blame, seeing as the chances are next to none that he's alive and can defend himself..

 

 

[Coop]

Sixties,

 

I've seen the remains of what I believe to be the DF station at Forrest, on the S side of the rail line. It's a concrete blockhouse with wire mesh attached to the ground over a large area around the outside (?ground plane?) and what appear to be a ring of posts at the extremities of the mesh. I have seen one picture showing this ring of posts. Was this a HF DF station using large aerial loops to give a stronger signal? Or just an earlier more primitive system?

 

Still following the story. Reckon they're dead....

 

Coop

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

MONDAY 22 JUNE 1942

 

 

 

Long wait, but there it is!

 

 

[Guest DWB]

Amazing!

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

Oh! there's MORE!

 

 

[Guest DWB]

I hope so..........

 

 

[Coop]

Cripes, didn't mean to be so prophetic....

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 23

 

 

Did Guinea Airways ring the families today or did they wait for more news.

 

Did the occupants die on impact or were they trapped? Yesterday’s telegram wasn’t specific.

 

There are lots of questions that are going to be asked.

 

Guinea Airways won’t know any more than DCA till more news comes through.

 

 

 

 

[sixtiesrelic]

June 24

 

 

The object of this exercise was to feel the uncertainty and length of the wait for news of ADY. From now on I will compress the slow grinding of the wheels of the gathering of evidence to the report which came out on October 28th.

 

The team of site investigators arrive today to begin their work.

 

Constable Doyle of the NT police was charged with guarding the wreckage till the approved Department of Civil Aviation officers arrived to take charge of it.

 

Doyle turned back US army people four miles away from the wreck who were en -route to take charge of their dead.

 

They were stopped from touching anything before the investigators could note the position of components of the crash.

 

Before the DCA blokes got there, a RAAF salvage officer arrived and informed Doyle HE was authorised to take over the wreckage.

 

A uniform and self confident air convinced Doyle that his duties were no longer required and departed.

 

I guess camping in the bush for a couple of nights with ADY wasn’t exactly something Doyle enjoyed.

 

The salvage officer didn’t endear himself to Guinea Airways or DCA because he certainly interfered with the evidence, collecting personal effects, dog tags etc then got stuck into the wing with an axe and cold chisel looking for the mail locker and souveniring the aircraft’s ‘name plate’.

 

There was no locker I the wing and it was no longer useful because of the damage he inflicted to the main spar.

 

 

Souveniring may be a wrong word as he actually asked Nobby Buckley if he wanted it. Nobby said yes. Somehow it was nailed up on the wall of the Pine creek hotel for many years and is now in the safe hands of a historian.

 

I have a colour photo of it somewhere in an old computer. It wasn’t too pristine… it had been in a crash after all.

 

Tomorrowthe1942 photos mentioned in the telegram above.

 

 

[siznaudin]

Well done, that RAAF officer with the axe ... not!