Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [18]
Fifty years later the British magazine Aeroplane Monthly revealed that the Air Ministry in Britain had ordered a number of investigations into the DH86 in 1936. The Aeroplane Armament Experimental Establishment at Martlesham Heath took on the investigations after three fatal DH86 crashes in Europe. The first involved a DH86 owned by Qantas business partner Imperial Airways just three weeks after the Loina had smashed into the sea off Australia. That same year a British Airways DH86 was lost in Germany and two weeks after that another British Airways DH86 crashed during take-off at Gatwick outside London. It is not known whether the results of the British tests were ever conveyed to Australia, but they emphatically condemned the design of the plane. Handling trials showed that when the plane was flying between 177 kph and 193 kph, there was a long interval between the pilot moving the control wheel and the aileron responding. When it did respond, it was erratic and not in proportion to the pilot’s movements.
The British testers also confirmed the Australian findings that there was a marked twisting of the wing. The controls were not in harmony. Flying at up to 217 kph involved the plane moving bodily from side to side. When the centre of gravity was pushed to the back the plane rolled, dropping the outer wing, and became hard to control. The testers were so horrified they did not complete the airworthiness trials. Their report said: ‘Night landing trials were not considered advisable. The aeroplane was only satisfactory to fly in calm air and for the gentlest of manoeuvres. In bumpy weather and when executing normal manoeuvres for the class of aero plane, it becomes nearly unmanageable. It is recommended that the Certificates of Airworthiness … should be withdrawn pending remedial modification.’11
The manufacturer responded with a number of modifications, including an increased tailplane area and the addition of vertical endplates to the tail to counter the swing. It worked and the British planes were modified. Ten new planes were built, called the DH86B, and three of those flew a service between Sydney and New Guinea. None of the improvements were passed on to Qantas – if they had been and the planes modified, the final DH86 crash in 1942 need not have happened.
But if there was something the British needed to tell the Australians, there was something Qantas had been keeping under its flying hat too. In his book Air Crash, Macarthur Job produced a startling interview with Qantas Superintendent of Operations Lester Brain, conducted just before his death. Brain recounted how he went over to England to ferry the first DH86 out to Australia.
On arrival at Hatfield he found the only DH86 being tested had a single cockpit. Brain was horrified. Pilot fatigue on the three-and-a-half-day flight to Singapore made such an arrangement highly unsafe and he immediately made representations to Imperial’s managing director, G. Woods Humphery, about redesigning the nose to allow side-by-side controls for two pilots. Humphery was ‘a bit amazed’, but talked to de Havilland, who said it would cost 10 kph in lost speed, add to the aircraft’s weight and cause a six-to-eight-week delay. Brain cabled Fysh in Australia, who cabled back his rock solid support: ‘If that’s what Brain thinks, then that’s what we want and we’ll put up with the delay.’
It turned out that the two-pilot version was actually 8 kph faster because the longer new nose had better streamlining. Brain then picked up the remainder of the routine test flying of the plane. Initial testing had been done by de Havilland’s chief test pilot, Hubert Broad, who cleared the aircraft for commercial flight. Brain felt Broad, who had