Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [10]
On my right were the buildings and pithead structure of a coal mine, with a sloping bushy hillside alongside. I promptly put the BE2E down on the hillside, careered uphill through the bushes, and came to a halt alongside a miner’s cottage. As Baird and I climbed out after our ordeal we were met by a miner’s wife who asked us in for a cup of tea while we waited for the clouds to clear, and to make a decision as to whether we could get off. The clouds broke, a few bushes were cleared, and starting off downhill we careered ahead and then into the air, skimming by inches a group of telephone wires – which still loom up in my memory.2
In his book Air Crash, respected air-safety expert Macarthur Job said: ‘The situation in which Hudson Fysh found himself on that first flight was a classic setting for a fatal accident. It is not exaggerating to say that essentially the same circumstances have since claimed the lives of countless inexperienced light aircraft pilots – and still do so even today. Had that small valley not been directly below where Fysh lost control of the BE2E in cloud – or indeed, had the aircraft failed to clear those telephone wires on his subsequent takeoff – the history of Australia’s airlines could have been very different!’3
At the end of World War One, two young airmen had come back to Australia with big ideas. They were inspired by the Commonwealth government’s offer of a £10,000 prize ‘for the first successful flight to Australia from Great Britain of a machine manned by Australians’. Aviation was in the air. The pair’s dreams of competing for the money died along with their sponsor, the wealthy New South Wales grazier Sir Samuel McCaughey. Instead, they were hired by the Defence Department to survey a possible route and landing grounds for the race contestants between Longreach in western Queensland and Darwin in the Northern Territory. Back in their Australian Flying Corps uniforms, Fysh said he and McGinness generated the same amount of comment on the street as spacemen in ‘full space rig-out’. Together with driver and handyman George Gorham, they set out on a 1,354 mile cross-country odyssey in a Model T Ford. McGinness was inspired by the huge spaces between the unconnected rail-heads of Charleville, Longreach, Winton and Cloncurry. Cut off for parts of the year by heavy rains, the route seemed a problem tailor-made for solving by airplane. In fact the route was so tough that they advised the Defence Department to send competitors inland across the Barkly Tableland. Afterwards they were ordered to prepare landing grounds – Fysh in Darwin and McGinness in Cloncurry.
It was in Cloncurry that McGinness met another man who would be crucial to the establishment of Qantas – Fergus McMaster. The youthful aviator was about to drive a young lady out for a picnic on a Sunday afternoon when he saw McMaster, chairman of the Anti Cattle Duffing Organisation, wearily walking up the sunbaked street. McGinness knew exactly who he was. He stopped to find out that McMaster had snapped the front stub-axle of his car attempting to cross the Cloncurry River. In his personal papers, uncovered by the author John Gunn for the book The Defeat of Distance, McMaster described how the young airmen impressed him: ‘I did not know McGinness very well and was surprised when he said he would make arrangements for his friend to attend the picnic with someone else, and that he would give me a hand to fix up my car.’ The garages were all closed. ‘If there was a door that it was possible to open, or a sheet of iron that could be removed to give access to a garage well, he was in. I was so impressed with the help and alertness of McGinness – and so grateful for his assistance – that the ground was prepared for my ready help when he and Hudson Fysh later submitted their ideas to me in Brisbane.’4
On the other side of the world, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines had been registered with backing from Her