Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [0]
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The Men Who Killed Qantas
ePub ISBN 9781864715316
A William Heinemann book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by William Heinemann in 2009
This revised edition published in 2011
Copyright © Matthew Benns 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Benns, Matthew.
The men who killed Qantas.
ISBN 978 1 74275 037 8 (pbk).
Qantas Airways – History.
Aircraft accidents – Australia.
Airlines – Management.
Aeronautics – Safety measures.
387.706594
Cover photograph courtesy of Getty Images
Cover design by Natalie Winter
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Matthew Benns
Title Page
Copyright
Imprint Page
Dedication
Epigraph
QF1 Cut-price touchdown
QF2 Early emergency
QF3 Cover-up
QF4 Qantas at war
QF5 The big lie
QF6 Extortion
QF7 Project Suzie
QF8 Angel and demon
QF9 Toxic air
QF10 Jetstar
QF11 Freight cartel
QF12 Mental
QF13 Airline for scandal
QF14 Explosion
QF15 Turbulent times
QF16 Annus horribilis
QF17 Another one bites the dust
Photo Gallery
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index of Searchable Terms
This book is dedicated to the tireless Qantas staff
and crew, who work so professionally to keep
passengers and planes safe.
‘Qantas never crashes’
Rain Man
‘He was wrong’
Macarthur Job, air-crash investigator
THE QANTAS BOEING 747-438 aircraft had begun its descent from 35,000 feet and was still 70 kilometres from Bangkok’s Don Muang airport when the captain pointed out the buildup of cumulonimbus cloud ahead. His comment would later be one of many picked up on the cockpit voice recorder and examined by investigators as they pieced together what went wrong on Qantas Flight 1 on 23 September 1999.
The flight crew of QF1, with 391 passengers on board, had transferred to the Bangkok Approach frequency and had been told there was heavy rain at the airport. At the plane’s controls, the first officer suggested to the captain they could hold off to the south if the rain looked bad during the approach. Well-respected Qantas training officer Captain Jack Fried reassured him that four kilometres of visibility was fine and that it was ‘just a shower’.1
But it wasn’t. At Bangkok a torrential thunderstorm had reduced visibility to 1,500 metres and sluiced the ungrooved runway with a potentially fatal sheen