Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [12]
The company now had a pressing financial problem. Half its capital was tied up in a new Avro triplane that McGinness and Baird travelled to Sydney to collect. The hope was that the five-seater triplane would help open up the passenger service between Winton and Longreach. Unfortunately McGinness sent a telegram that the plane’s undercarriage had been damaged during trials. He did not let on just how massively damaged the plane really was. It never saw service, ending up as a hen house in Sydney.
Meanwhile, Fysh was steadily recouping the cost of the BE2E with joyrides that even included one passenger shooting two turkeys from the observer’s seat at the front. Times were hard and they became even harder when McGinness, flying joyriding passengers in the Avro Dyak, was forced to land in sugar cane near Ingham. No one was injured in what was the airline’s first operational accident, but the aircraft was badly damaged and had to be taken to Sydney for repairs. That left the company with one operational plane and the ability to carry just one passenger at a time.
It became a battle to secure more private funding – there was none forthcoming from the government. Finally, in February 1922, the airline won the tender for the Charleville to Cloncurry mail service against strong opposition. The tender was based on the service being provided by two expensive giant Vickers Vulcan biplanes that could carry eight passengers. They were bigger than the Qantas team thought was necessary, but were favoured by the controller of civil aviation and thus the only real plane of choice. They were expensive, delayed by strikes and unsuited to hot Australian conditions. Plus, it was difficult to find a pilot to fly one of the planes because McMaster insisted they sign a pledge to abstain from drinking.
The delay in the supply of the Vickers aircraft was resolved with a loan from the government for an Armstrong Whitworth DH4. After a string of delays McGinness finally flew the inaugural Qantas service – carrying 108 letters from Charleville to Cloncurry. McGinness flew two more trips before leaving the company, finding the reality of timetables and alcoholic abstinence too constricting for his romantic nature.
He left the company in dire straits. The Vulcans were unsuitable and could not climb in the heat. Qantas found itself short of pilots willing to stay in the outback, and saddled with second-rate equipment. Crashes followed but the pilots and passengers walked away and the planes were repaired. Despite the hardship, only one of the 205 scheduled flights was missed in the first year of operation.
Qantas moved on, finally making a profit and looking at Brisbane as a key part of its plans to expand. Its Queensland route was a vital part of the air highway between England and the eastern states. But as the company expanded so did the chance for things to go wrong. On 24 March 1927 a DH9 flown by relatively new and inexperienced pilot A. D. Davidson stalled on approach to landing. The pilot and two passengers were killed. It was Qantas’s first fatal accident – but not its last.
Qantas briefly dabbled in manufacturing its own planes – DH50s made in its Longreach hangar from mostly imported parts. They were reliable but the saving to the company from building them rather than importing the same finished plane from England was just £50. The company was working commercially and in 1928 it also began one of the most romantic and practical chapters in Australian aviation history – a flying doctor service. The venture began as a one-year trial with the Reverend John Flynn, who pioneered the idea of an air ambulance to help people in the remote regions of the bush. The trial proved a remarkable success and led to the foundation of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
In the pioneering days airlines were making up the rules as they went along. Qantas put out a set of ‘Rules for the Observance of Pilots’ in November 1928 following another fatal crash. Pilot Charles