His name was Mick Carratti. He owned and operated earth-moving machinery all over WA. He hated flying, but having acquired ( err . . kicked the insolvent owner off) a farm at Yuma, inland from Geralton, one that had a clapped out C182 in the shed, decided to use it for the business. VH-TSH (how can you ever forget your phonenumber when only knee high, or the rego of the family car?) flown for Carratti first off by one Bill Anguin. One day the hard living, hard drinking Bill had a little 'hearty' . Hence that first magical vacancy so ready to be filled by a novice eastern stater who'd never done a X/C beyond a slice of New South contained by Canberra Wagga and Coota.
No interview just Mick on the blower . . "Ah . . listen son, you be ready at Guildford (Perth Airport, just down the road from Caratti's plant) at daylight see. My mechanic's got the day's work written out on a sheet of paper. Take him up to Meeka with his tools. Then to King Bay (Dampier). Go to Hedland for the night. Our man there will tell you where to go next day. Pay's 20 pound a week and if you don't like that then there's every day eager boys on to me for a job who'll do it for less, even. Goodnight." Luigi's tools weighed more than an empty 182, or nearly.
And so it went on for a whole year. Hair breadth 'scapes into marginal paddocks or dirt roads anywhere between Kununurra and Esperance.. Characters every day you could base a Joseph Conrad or Hemingway type novel on. But the most outstanding character who had an early impact in shaping a young student pilot's approach to life and the game was
a returned Second World War veteran, Frederick Christopher Braund, rest his restless soul.
Chris went to Tocumwal in 1956 with 300 pounds in his pocket and did a deal with a sergeant there who was in charge of the hundreds of planes being cut up.
Ever disregarding of rules and protocol, once the deal had been transacted,
Chris checked the Mustang he'd just bought over, hopped in and flew away. He did not elaborate as to where he initially flew to and parked his new acquisition before getting the necessary approvals to register her. Suffice to say she went
on the register with his initials VH-FCB. He eventually sold FCB to an
RAAF Korean war vet, Jack McDonald. Chris told the story of how not long after that sale he was waiting at Orange in the East-West Airlines F27 he was flying when Jack landed in the Mustang and pulled up nearby. Chris went over to say
g'day and asked Jack if he could have one last quick circuit. Jack acquiesced,
so Chris hopped in and did just that, to the amusement of the airline agent and the passengers waiting to board the Friendship.
That very same Mustang was in a mid-air at an airshow in England a couple of years ago. The owner/pilot bailed out at low level and survived.
As a youngster, growing up in Canberra, I developed, like so many others, a passion for all things aeronautical. Whenever one of dad’s friends was around, talking about air force exploits or describing seeing some famous arrival from overseas, such as Charles Kingsford Smith, I hung on every word. My bicycle was only useful to get out to the airport where I found wonderful work cleaning the oily bellies of aero club planes in return for credit towards the day when I could start taking flying lessons. Sometimes, when I wagged school, I’d score a trip down to Bankstown or over to some NSW country town such as Cootamundra, the pilot often passing the controls over for a while. Magic!
Once a year the aero club hosted an airshow. The one staged in April 1959 particularly stands out. The first visiting plane to come in was a gleaming former RAAF fighter, the Mustang, privately owned by a certain airline pilot from Tamworth. He emerged from the cockpit, a tall, lean bloke, more like James Stewart than James Stewart. His routine for the show, to the crowd’s delight, was a series of loops and rolls performed with consummate smoothness and grace.. Little could I know then that I’d get to know this man rather well. Our friendship lasted 32 years, until his death in 1998.
Chris, native of Griffith, NSW, left school early and went down to the Hawkesbury Agricultural College. But he had little heart for farming. It was flying and the draw of Mascot that proved irresistible. When war broke out he enlisted in the RAAF, learned to fly and served in North Africa and the Pacific. After the war he flew DC3s and Fokker Friendships on airline services, also doing a stint in Tasmania cloud-seeding. Despite the passage of years and the passing of Chris, whenever certain fliers from the fifties and sixties gather today, more often than not Chris’s name comes up and folk fall about recalling the peculiarly lateral humour that sustained Chris and amused others all his flying life.
There was a radio jingle for a brand of flour that went “Sydney Flour is our flour. We use it every day. For scones and cakes that mother bakes, we say it is OKAY.” Well Chris had his version which he’d sing on first contact with Sydney Tower on his way in from Tamworth of a morning. “Sydney Tower is our tower, we call you every day. This is Echo Whisky Alpha, over Broken Bay.” And he’d get away with it, time after time. When on final approach to Mascot one day and waiting for a landing clearance the tower told him “Continue approach - couple of dogs crossing the runway”. Now this was at a time when the phonetic alphabet had just undergone an international revision and for instance A- Able became A -Alpha and D- Dog became D- Delta, so what could the mercurial Chris reply with but “Don’t you mean a couple of Deltas?” ?
On leaving school I went down to Sydney to the old flying boat base at Rose Bay, becoming an apprentice there. One night over on Lord Howe Island one of our Short Sandringhams was blown off it’s mooring and damaged beyond repair. Back then the communication networks were not what they are today. The only workable radio link to Lord Howe the next day was poor and calls between the Flight Service Unit in Sydney and the one over on the island were difficult to read as messages about the half sunken flying boat were relayed back and forth. One of our skippers at Rose Bay later told me how hard it was to copy anything. It so happened that at the time Chris was flying somewhere out in the back blocks of NSW, trying to raise Sydney Flight Service with a routine call, but due to the stream of calls “Lord Howe this is Sydney” and “Sydney this is Lord Howe”, having little joy. Finally Chris got a few words in edgeways, as it were, emphasised by the slight stammer that was another of his trademarks, “L-Lord Howe I wish you’d sh-shut up!”
Chris eventually quit his job in Tamworth and seeking warmer climes moved to Cairns were he flew DC3s for the pioneer firm Bush Pilots Airways and on occasions filled in for pilots on leave from the Royal Flying Doctor Service. When he finally metaphorically hung up his cap and his goggles he found a place to live in Terrigal on the NSW central coast, near to his family and his adored granddaughter Erin. (“M-my p-pride of Erin”). I only saw him once in those twilight years, staying the night and hearing many stories of a full and fulfilling flying life till dawn’s early light flushed the sky: the sky where his spirit most times dwelled. A week later Chris’s son Murray rang to say that his dad had just passed on to “the great holding pattern in the sky.” If there is an airmen’s Valhalla, I imagine Chris breasting a bar saying “A b-beer b-barman. P-put it where you like. Th-there’s no im-p-pediment in my reach.”
