sixtiesrelic

This next day was to be pretty exciting. A visit to HARS and then a quick trip to Bankstown to meet a man I had gotten onto on the phone while I was in Melbourne. I have movies taken before the war in New Guinea and there is footage of an aeroplane he now owns that I thought he might be interested in. He was interested alright and teed up a meeting in the AOPA hangar at Bankstown where he has 'some aeroplanes' parked. I arrived at HARS after an interesting drive off the high country near Yass in lotsa fog, just before lunch, so had plenty of time before my next appointment to talk to the Catalina blokes and have a really good close examination of The Black Cat which was my reason for this visit. I was accompanied into the working hangar which is off to the left of the museum area... the Connie and DC-3s which visitors go into, are in a hangar off to the right. Once through the door, I noted the big silver DC-4 was parked towards the back of the hangar, with the dismantled Southern Cross replica stacked behind it against the back wall. The hangar is so large that at first glance the Fokker looked like a diminutive Tiger Moth or a box down the back of a normal hangar. A dark blue, Neptune was parked over on the east side and the Cat in the front by the open doors. There were a number of lighties being worked on and another grey Neptune was parked outside on the tarmac. The aeroplanes have teams who work on them. My guide was an old railway man, but his love of the Cat has him happy to do any task on her, menial or otherwise. We climbed aboard and again military hardware showed itself to be spartan. Green formers, longerons cables, electrical wiring and hydraulic lines are exposed for you to see the workings. On the far side of the entrance, which required some callisthenics to actually get through the hatchway, which is quite small and you have climbed up a ladder to get there, you are confronted with a great big wireless apparatus bolted onto the L shaped radio operator's desk. There is a Morse key stowed beside the set which isn’t far removed from the original crystal sets that kids built and listened to.. The bulkhead between the forward and the mid sections had a fuse box reminiscent of a battle ship or tram. It's a rather bulky affair for an aeroplane. There is definitely evidence that this is a ship that flies. On the bulkhead separating the captain from the entrance, is as well as the stowed dipstick, survival beacon and fire extinguisher a cupboard with bungs stencilled on it. The windows are round like portholes to add to the nautical feeling, as are the doorways through numerous bulkheads that you have to step over like you see in submarines and war ships. There is also the feeling of being in a tinnie. For an American aeroplane, the cockpit reminded me of something designed in England. The Poms didn't seem to give ant thought to the cockpit design. They just stuck things where ever they could fit them. The Cat looked a bit the same with fuel controls (MIXTURES and fuel cocks) behind the pilots' heads, electrical panel with switches and gauges behind the pilot's shoulders, throttles and pitch and feather buttons hanging from the ceiling, Starter switches, (There are quite a few for round engines), magneto switches were near the captain's knee on a separate panel sitting out in space six inches in front of the instrument panel. This hodge-podge could be because of this aeroplane’s history and the number of countries she was based in and the fact that she was converted to fire bombing. After checking the cockpit we went into the centre section and up some cup style steps riveted on the bulkhead into the flight engineers cubbyhole above the ceiling. He had his own instrument panel in the pylon beneath the wings. I specially wanted to see this as my father's old mate Doug Muir (Story about his earlier days in this section of The Aussie Aviator) had told me that he spent most of the flights across the Indian ocean in the double sunrise flights to Colombo up in this compartment. I imagined it to be claustrophobic stuck in such a confined space. It was surprising to find the station to be little different to sitting in a Tiger Moth, a Cub or a Citabria with no windscreen above the instrument panel. The windows beside me cut out any feeling of being closed in, even though my shoulders were close to the side of the space. I’d say the windows opened so the F E could poke hi head out and get a good view of the exterior of the aircraft after an attack. A comprehensive instrument panel minus the flight instruments other than an airspeed indicator attracted my interest and there were fuel cocks and a gang of electrical switches to make it look like any other instrument panel. It reminded me of what Lindberg looked at in the Spirit of St Louis and it wasn't all that startling. Maybe a VFR pilot might find it a little disconcerting having no forward view, but IFR blokes would feel at home. I had thought that it would be a deafening place in between the engines, but it is well behind them, so the noise would be quite reasonable with perhaps more wind noise than engine. The radio operator is probably the person who cops the most noise as he is in line with the props. Must have been a bit deafening during the incredibly long take off runs.

Agreed Student, but WHAT can you compare it with that people will jump at the chance to look in. Beech 18 is much smaller and how many of them are around for us to get a good look in? The three is bigger but sort of similar.

Some more photos added to the above.

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.

I went on to Melbourne from Kay's as I had an appointment with one of the blokes at the DCA museum. That was after Geoff and I had sat up talking till 1 AM and I needed to get some sleep.. The CARS museum is mainly about the radio equipment DCA used in communication and navigation as well as the DCA personnel, but in a small room there's a huge collection of photos and movie film and in another, shelves and shelves of historical DCA documentation. The guys who were there, were bubblingly, friendly and helpful … to prove it we left an hour after closing time. What made the visit special was the thrill they got when they looked at the DVDs of old stuff I thought they might be interested in. They are collecting any memorabilia people have to save it for future generations. The Moorabbin museum had a couple of really interesting 'old blokes' to talk to inside. I'm a sook for the cold, but I was chuffed to see the couple of blokes who had been outside working on aeroplanes come in at about two and say it was too cold and they were going home. I bought ten Aviation Historical society magazines there with great articles to read in the future. I left Melbourne at 6:20AM and found the darkness at 7AM a bit of a surprise... easy to forget that I live twelve minutes ahead of the eastern time zone and they are about the same behind, but their southern latitude makes winter sunrise much later. I had six hours driving to Temora with another appointment to make. I find that stopping around two hours and having three plus minutes to stand and walk around does wonders for my back. No back pain so far I need to add a bit to my GPS ETA doing that though. Sizanudin had told me to look up Andy. I had another contact to see, but he was away,so Andy took me I into the back hangar where all the work is done. There were two Spitfires in there, one with it's tail up having work done on it. A Ryan ST-M in one corner looked ready to go. I think they are definitely boy aeroplanes. They look like an adventurous kid, full of beans who always into mischief. They definitely look a sporty sort of aircraft all silver and polished with the open cockpits. Down the back stood the tall, khaki Hudson. Unlike her war time paint job, she's shiny... not an absolute gloss finish, but the overhead lights reflected off her. I climbed aboard and was hit by the austere, dark green, unlined interior. I flew enough DC-3 freighters to not be surprised at the formers and longerons, but it was sort of stark in there. There are two passenger seats forward of the main spar box that you need to step over. They were pretty plain compared with the airliner seats of the super Electra of that era. The cockpit is in military configuration... captain only with a seat on the F O side but no control column or flight instruments, not even a second ASI and altimeter that many aircraft have. There are engine and system instruments spilling over that side. Except for the cylinder head temp, each engine instrument had one needle in it, making it a full dashboard. Nearly all the instruments were old style, some with thick markings of luminous paint. The Sperry autopilot has the old style caging direction gyro and artificial horizon like the DC-3 and I found a Japanese wrecked reconnaissance twin at Alexishaven in New Guinea in the early seventies with exactly the same Sperry auto pilot in it... had Japanese writing on the placards though. I'm comparing the Hudson with the DC-3 as many people have gotten or will get the chance to see a Three close up at some time. The windscreen had an opening section in front of the pilot's face and the sliding side window. I never worked out why DC-3s and the Lockheeds had that front window's ability to be opened. If you did, the next hundred times you flew through rain, till the tropical heat melted the rubber seals to the metal, had you cold and wet from water getting into the cockpit and dripping on your legs. We opened them once in New Guinea when we had a load of very overheated pigs down the back and we needed ram air to blow the stink back down the cabin. The round sides of nose of the aeroplanes have a slight low pressure, which pulls the pong from the cabin past you and out the cracks and gaps. It was a cow if you flew with a smoker. The cockpit would be full of his smoke and if you open your sliding side window it streamed straight past your nose. I hated flying with Captain Trembles, he'd light the next off the but of the last one. Seven minutes each. I used to work out how many more the old bugger'd smoke before we shut down and I could get out. The cockpit was almost as wide as a DC-3s and the next day I was surprised to see the Super Connie's was not much wider either. Outside, the expanse of the tailplane was bigger than expected and the engines look big on the wing. Standing behind the wing you'll see the reailing edge is higher than a DC-3. You'd need to be pretty fit to jump up on it like many first officers did in the DC-3. The top of the wing seems high but that may be an optical illusion due to the aeroplane being shorter than the Three. Out near the tips are five fixed slots in the leading edge. Must be to reduce stalling at the outer wing. Four of the five were in front of the outer aileron and the furthest was close to the wing tip airflow. After an hour or so of checking the Hudson I had a quick look in the Museum and scooted east to cover as much distance towards Albion Park as I could in daylight. An evening in the Binalong hotel at thirty bucks a night for a really comfortable bed in a cozy room, next to the ladies bathroom and toilet was unbeatable. I was the only person staying so was told to use 'The Ladies" rather than walk down the hall to the other end of the floor. No coverage for the internet or laptop was the only drawback at Binalong.

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.

yeah I wasdriving hard letting the GPS take me where it wanted. Won't put anything up tomorrow as I'll be on my last leg home. Next installment Friday.

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.

My first port of call for the trip was Aviatrix's place. That took two and a half days of fairly hard driving. I went through a lot of NSW country towns and all I can describe about them is 50 KPH mark on the speedo... (gawd isn't it hard to keep that slow after 110 KPH) and the tail lights of the vehicles in front. It rained most of the way... light stuff which blotted out the visibility. I shot past the Canberra on a pole near Amberley and a Vampire on another somewhere else and thought, “I should stop and take a photo”, but I was suffering from get-there-itis, but just out of Narrabri, I hit the anchors and ran back in the light rain to get some footage of a beaut complete Neptune parked by a fence of a bloke who collected military equipment. The Neppie looked original, with props on the engines and aerials still attached. I took the piccies for my mate Curley who was crew in them back in the olden days and has a soft spot for the poor, added to, overloaded brutes they became. Funny how the marine reconnaissance aircraft just kept getting bits added to them so they landed up grossly over the design weight. They fixed that in the Neppies by bolting a couple of Jet engines under the wings to help get them airborne. I decided not to force myself along too much on day two and stopped at a cheap motel. It was worth what I paid … only one of the three lights worked and the radiator bar had been busted but the reverse cycle aircon valiantly warmed the room, making as much noise as a hovering helicopter. I turned her off when I went to bed. Lotta big trucks pass that motel all through the night. I did stop in Wagga to get a photo of a Vampire on a pole there I got to Aviatrix's at lunch time and we warmed up on hot home made soup which stuck nicely to the sides. I had been pulling up and buying Chico rolls to eat on the way as lunch so far. Kaye and Geoff live three thousand feet above sea level on the edge of the Victorian Alps. They have a magnificent, rapidly changing vista to look out on and sometimes the clouds would roll past below the house and a biggie would fog us in. The blue ridges, stacked one behind the other, go on and on, higher to the east, with cloud sometimes hugging the slopes and in other places, resting on the valley floors. Geoff and I had some interesting comparisons of our boarding school life not so far away from each other in the same years. They were both well known schools. I was in a virtual prison compared to his conditions. The second day Kay drove me around the district to see the strip they keep their aeroplane at and the former one, much closer to their place. Man there's mountains all around those strips. We went for an hour's drive up to, maybe go for a fly in her Cheeta, but the weather was low cloud with the odd drizzle patch sagging out, it was cold and the light wasn't too good at the late afternoon hour. The battery was in the workshop being charged, so that was the cruncher. We'll go for a fly some other time. There were more Grummans parked out on the field than I think I've seen before. The engineer there is a Grumman man that the owners trust. We discovered that his uncle and my father flew together in the 727 so they probably got through enough beer together to float a Catalena.

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.

I intended to visit Luskintyre on a Saturday 'when there's plenty of activity' and continue north into the twenty somethings latitude where the weather is warmer. There is plenty to see here and a formation of Tiger Moths is planned to fly over the funeral service of an old instructor on Tuesday. That is quite a filming opportunity not to be missed so I 'll stay a few days. I'd stayed a couple of days at Aviatrix and her husband's place in the Victorian Alps, visited the CARS (The Airways Museum) and The Australian Aviation Museum (Moorabbin) in Melbourne, Temora where I was allowed to have a long examination of the Hudson, HARS where I got over an hour checking out the Catalina and most exciting of all, I rang Roy, who I looked up in the civil register to find his name and then found his phone number on the net. He is an aircraft owner I am interested in and I wanted to ask if he'd like a copy of my uncle's colour movies he took in New Guinea before the war, which have footage of his Klem Swallow. I could drop the DVD into him, as I was going to pass very close to his place on the drive from HARS to Luskintyre. Roy had seen photos (a frame from the movie) I put on a site on the net of the aeroplane and wanted to find me to see the movie. He mentioned I might be interested in a couple of others of his collection. I didn't know anything about this collection and was flabbergasted at what he had. He's got eight of the buggers. Two are sort of common (Tiger Moth and Stearman) and the rest are either one offs or one of only two in the country. He thought I should stay the night as his place and he could take me to his bit of a strip at Wiseman's Ferry where four are located. Aeroplanes I'd heard about, but never actually seen, touched and smelt. One, I'd watched the Challinors of Mothcare at Murwillumbah rebuild in the seventies. The next day a dream came true when we went to his airfield in the Hunter valley and I climbed inside a Fox Moth to see what my father had experienced in New Guinea after proving he was safe in a Gipsy Moth for six months and was awarded the great big four passenger Fox. When the day warmed up a bit and I could get out from under my sleeping bag cocoon, I mooched around the hangars, got sunburnt and talked to a couple who arrived and opened a hangar and with time, found out that he was world champ aerobatic pilot on two occasions, once... way back and the second time over twenty years later when he was invited to take part in some memorial year's comp. They were being kind and letting one of the old blokes do a spot. He went and beat all the young blokes who reckoned he'd been over the hill for years. NEVER underestimate what YOU perceive to be just a silly old bugger! He has a funny little German biplane he brought over from South Africa with him. He used to do air shows with a wing walker in that. It's not put together at the moment. He has rebuilt a Tiger Moth to the exact state the first one arrived in Australia with it's rego and all the 34 differences that it had to the common (nowadays) Aussie built ones. His wife was flying the Tiger, so I asked if I could blue tack and tape my 'spy cameras' to the exterior to get interesting angles to add to the footage I was taking with two cameras on the ground. They liked the idea and I got the raw footage to make a really interesting small movie where there are views from the ground, out the left side (stuck to a flying stay) looking at the pilot and wing, from the tail plane forwards and one up on the front dashboard looking back at the pilot and where she's been. You fly a Tiger from the rear cockpit so you don't have just a head, out of focus cause it's so close when there's someone in the front. Willy weather on the net got it right. Monday we had rain... all day. The strip is very wet and the chances of flying tomorrow is poor. I can relay what I did last week in more detail.

Your house was so cozy Kay. Know what you mean Al. I flew over many interesting places in Indonesia and a few years ago when I'd made dozens of friends from Indonesia at work, they said, "Come up and we'll show you around. I went and satisfied my craving for adventure and knowing what it was I'd seen and wondered about. Climbed inside two bubbling, sulphur belching volcanoes, went out to an island that is all houses... the biggest slab of houseless land was the small school sports field. I have one thing to say to the dreamers... DO IT, there'll be many surprises. As I said at the beginning thhis is a trip report. We tend to think aeroplane trip, but as Aye said it's the dream we all have to go off and see the things we read about for ourselves.

I'm drowsily awakening on day ten and pull the sleeping bag and doona right up over my head and just have my nose out. I hate the cold. I've been cold for a week now. Feet warming at around three in the afternoon … I remember why I swore, back in the sixties, that I'd never live south of Brisbane again, after five years of boarding school in the mountains of Victoria. I've driven as far south as Melbourne and am half of the way back home. The thread is titled, 'Trip Reports'! Ok, I've not bought a ticket for a flight somewhere, BUT this is a fortnight's trip to air museums and aerodromes to see and talk to interesting people and moan in ecstasy at marvellous historic aeroplanes. I'm by myself... no wife to stand patiently waiting, so I get to feel the guilts and reckon I better head off, even though I could stay hours more. I'll get up soon, because there is more adventure afoot today. I'm in the aerodrome bunk house. This is as close to heaven as I'm going to get for quite a while yet. I have the bunkhouse to myself. No fibro shack this... this is a well finished building with fancy plasterwork on the ceiling! There are three large bedrooms with double bunks. Beds and dining room for a dozen. The main hall has a kitchen with more gadgets than any of our homes. There's a bar, a piano, a billiard table, a large lounge area down the other end with a beaut big fireplace with a TV beside it. The Video/ DVD recorder sits ready to play the hundreds of tapes and disks on aeroplanes and aviation. I could stay a fortnight and not watch them all even at twenty four hours a day. The ten foot high by eight foot wide solid timber book case (I checked a chip in it... no chipboard here... she's old and solid wood) is full of books and magazines on flying. A couple of months reading there. There's Australian Aviation from the nineties, FlyPast from the eighties Rag and Tube from the seventies to Aeroplane from the forties. The walls... they're loaded with large photos of aeroplanes and characters who flew 'em and made an impact on us lesser mortals. There's a five foot by three foot frame with the maps photos and extracts from the ERSA the blokes used on a Tiger Moth trip from Luskintyre to Launceston and back in VH-AQJ, which was Launie Areo Club's first trainer, for the club's jubilee celebrations. Out the windows are hangars, gable markers, painted white tyres, lots of mown grass fields and at eight AM fog down in the hollows. This is Luskintyre; the home of the Tiger Moth and I'm going to stay a couple of days to soak in the ambiance. Those who love aeroplanes and hangars and the people who hang around them know what I'm feeling. Rugged up writing stories before the fire was lit To be continued...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.