Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [24]
Qantas chairman Fergus McMaster had suffered a heart attack in 1937 and, though nominally in charge, left much of the running of Qantas to Fysh. He was naturally anxious about the war and where it would leave his beloved company. By 1942, he could see opportunities that would allow Qantas ‘to see the war out on a profitable basis despite our losses of aircraft’.7 The airline was quoting on a cost-plus basis for its services. Fysh said one of the biggest problems was fixing the rate of profit for its flying and repair work. Qantas sought what Fysh considered ‘a most inadequate’ seven and a half per cent and finally settled for six per cent.
In 1939 the flying boat service was stopped for just six days before resuming its airmail runs to Singapore. In fact, rather than curtailing business operations in 1940, Qantas took a 23 per cent share in Tasman Empire Airways Ltd (TEAL) to fly two Shorts flying boats between Sydney and Auckland in New Zealand. Its partners were Imperial, which became the British government-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), the New Zealand government and Union Airways of New Zealand. It added another 2,170 kilometre long leg to the 20,816 kilometre route between Southampton and Sydney.
It was a fast-changing world and Qantas adapted rapidly to cope with it. Engineers stripped the luxury furnishings from the flying boats and installed long-range fuel tanks to run an extended service to Karachi. To avoid Italy, which had joined the war, BOAC then flew the mail on a ‘horse-shoe’ route to Cairo and then on to Durban, from where the mail went by ship to Britain. Qantas pilots also performed the third ever flight across the Pacific as its neutral pilots delivered 19 Consolidated Catalina flying boats from the US, which had not yet joined the war. Lester Brain, who had been restrained by Fysh from joining up at the outset of war, took the lead role in the operation. The airline then borrowed two of those Catalinas to fulfil the Australian government’s request to open up a service to Portuguese Timor. Throughout the war many Qantas staff performed incredibly heroic deeds and Fysh lobbied hard for his people to receive official recognition. Such was the importance of civil aviation in Australia during the war that Qantas had grown, with staff numbers increasing from 290 at the start to over 400 when Japan joined the conflict. At that point, everything changed.
When the Japanese bombed Singapore, Qantas Empire Airways immediately cut its stops at Bangkok and Penang, and Fysh was tasked with finding a withdrawal route that avoided the coast of Burma. The Singapore route was still operating but pilots reported it was becoming increasingly hazardous. When Singapore was under air attack, they landed in ‘funk holes’ in the quiet bays to the south and waited for the all-clear. The flying boats were shuttling refugees out to Batavia. It was dangerous work and on Friday 30 January 1942 Qantas Empire Airways suffered its first casualty of war.
Captain Aubrey Koch was flying with four crew and 13 passengers from Darwin to Surabaya to collect women and children refugees when they came under attack by Japanese Zero fighters. As they neared the shores of the island, Captain Koch described, in Qantas at War, hearing a distinctive rattling noise in the fuselage of the plane as the air was filled with bullets from an overhead attack. Captain Koch opened the throttle and dived down to the water, swerving and zigzagging to throw off the tracer bullets. Inside the cabin the bullets tore through the hull as the Qantas pilot took desperate evasive action. Koch was aiming for the beach 24 kilometres away, but he realised they were not going to make it. Two engines were on fire and the plane was losing speed. As he touched down, the badly holed hull caught