Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [16]
Our people were really beginning to learn something about that DH86 fin assembly and how to humour it, but it was certain that the design had been hurried and was not of the best. Modifications got over this as they had in other types, but the QEA board were very upset and contemplated putting in a big claim against the company. They were wisely dissuaded by Imperial Airways, who made the point that the fault was not entirely de Havilland’s. The DH86 was essentially a joint venture and Imperial and ourselves had pushed de Havilland unmercifully.5
The plane was given its airworthiness certificate and the airline began to run flights from Brisbane to Darwin and Singapore. The flights were trouble-free and the ban on passengers was lifted. Lady Louis Mountbatten and Major H. Phillips, en route to London, become Qantas’s first overseas paying passengers on 17 April 1935. Later DH86 passengers on the route would include playwright Noël Coward and Hollywood actors Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard.
Meanwhile, Holyman, having learned from the loss of the Miss Hobart, had ordered twin cockpit DH86 planes and announced plans to extend its routes from Tasmania to Melbourne through to Sydney. On the morning of the maiden flight, two silver DH86 planes left Essendon airport in Melbourne. The new Loila flew out to Sydney with four journalists on board for the inaugural journey. The Loina headed off to Launceston via Flinders Island on its regular morning run. Only one of the planes made it. When the Loila landed in Sydney the stunned crew were told the Loina had vanished. Another DH86 had gone missing. Holyman had scrambled an aircraft into the air to search for the Loina when it had not arrived in Launceston 45 minutes after it was due. The missing Miss Hobart was still raw in the minds of all the staff. The search plane reported wreckage floating almost ten kilometres out to sea from the Flinders Island landing strip. As the sea became rougher it washed ashore compelling evidence that the Loina, with two Sydney-bound passengers and two crew on board, had perished.
The wreckage included partially inflated life jackets, a pilot’s uniform coat, newspapers from the day before, a felt hat with a railway ticket in the brim and, crucially, a large piece of plywood cabin flooring from the rear of the plane. Investigators puzzled over this. Part of the flooring, which would have been just outside the toilet door, was charred. There were carpet fragments stuck around the charred area and indentations indicating that attempts had been made to stamp the fire out. Witnesses, discounted as unreliable at the time, described the plane suddenly lurching to the left and then tumbling out of the sky, turning upside down twice, and falling like a ‘tumbling pigeon’.6
Piecing the evidence together years later, former Civil Aviation Senior Inspector of Air Safety Macarthur Job surmised the likely events that caused the Loina to crash. The evidence, he wrote, suggested that ‘a discarded cigarette might have set the cabin carpet alight in this spot … When finally noticed towards the end of the flight, did two or more passengers rush down the aisle to try to stamp it out? If this happened unexpectedly as the crew were decreasing speed preparatory to their approach to land, the resulting combination of aft centre of gravity and low airspeed would have again duplicated the dangerous situation in which Brain found himself en route from Benghazi.’7
Unfortunately air-crash investigators knew nothing about Qantas operations chief Brain’s problems with the first DH86 that he delivered to Australia from London via Benghazi. Job himself uncovered that many decades later.