Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [20]
I hopped into my seat and got the machine under control. By this time we had lost two or three thousand feet – it was plain that the directional problem was greater in a tail heavy aeroplane. I turned to Price and asked what happened. He said the controls must have carried away – they weren’t working.
They seemed normal now, but there was a sliding panel in the bottom of the cabin door for dropping mail bags at outback places, so I sent Pink back to look through it to check the tail bracing wires were all intact. He reported that no wires were broken. Price still argued there was something wrong, but I believed he had let the aeroplane get a little nose up and it had got away from him.16
They landed at Mersa Matruh without further drama. But Brain later recalled: ‘I remember this incident particularly because the second aeroplane followed about three weeks later, flown by my old friend Prendergast. After leaving Longreach for Brisbane on a lovely fine morning, his DH86 was observed to be flying along and then go into a flat spin. They were all killed.’17
Brain was in Brisbane when he heard of the tragedy and immediately jumped into a Puss Moth with Arthur Baird and flew eight hours to get there. As he was looking over the wreckage, a local man described what had happened. Brain thought quietly to himself: ‘It nearly happened to me.’
Half an hour out of Benghazi, a few minutes out of Longreach! On each occasion a beautiful fine day, and in each case the same crew disposition and same cargo loading. I think the cause of the crash was identical to the problem we encountered – directional instability increased by tail heaviness, and the first officer distracted by having to keep a radio schedule.
I believe this proved beyond doubt that the aeroplane was dangerously unstable directionally. While it could be flown safely provided pilots thoroughly understood the features of the aeroplane, what it needed was more fin area. This was done on the DH86B which, in addition to the central fin and rudder, had two vertical fins, one at each tip of the tailplane. I never flew the DH86B but Captain Dick Man and others who flew them on the New Guinea run told me they never had any trouble.18
Brain knew there was a problem with the DH86. He never raised the alarm and, even after his friend Captain Prendergast died, Brain stayed silent. Job, the seasoned air-crash investigator, asks why Brain would not reveal the stability problems at the time. Why did he insist his delivery flight had been trouble free? Why did he offer no reason for the second DH86 going into a flat spin at Longreach? Job provides his own answer. ‘Brain no doubt had his reasons – there was much at stake for him personally, for Qantas, for Australia’s new venture as an international airline operator. For him, as he saw it, as indeed for Fysh, the DH86 “had to be right.”’19
‘THERE WAS PRACTICALLY no warning. I heard the sirens and the roar of the Japanese planes almost simultaneously,’ said Qantas captain Aubrey Koch. He was lying in a hospital bed in Darwin, recuperating after being shot down three weeks before. ‘Three [bombs] landed very close. The walls shook and pieces of the ceiling fell in. One of the bombs had hit a wing of the hospital … After the first wave of bombers had passed I decided to make for the beach. I could only just walk … Some of the Jap machines were diving low and machine-gunning buildings. I could hear the crunch of bombs in other parts of the town. The machines were sweeping over ships in the harbour.’1
On 19 February 1942, the Japanese commander who ordered the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nagumo, despatched 188 aircraft into the bright, sunny sky. The fighters,