Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [28]
The Qantas Empire Airways Catalinas completed 271 of these long, dangerous crossings without the loss of a plane or life before the flights ended two weeks before the defeat of Japan in July 1945. However, Qantas continued to lose planes before then. On 18 January 1944 the Clifton, which had just returned from work with the RAAF, bounced, stalled and sank while landing at Rose Bay. Then, on 11 October 1944, the Empire flying boat Coolangatta, with Qantas hero Captain Brain in command, also stalled on landing at Rose Bay. The plane was lost and a passenger killed. Captain Brain survived. Years later, in 1968, Fysh reflected: ‘This resulted in a further tightening of our Operations organisation in an attempt to put a stop to our dreadful run of accidents. In looking back I hope that all this pain, and experience, and groping for a better organisation has had some helpful part in the formation of the splendid operational organisation with which the present-day QEA is blessed.’19
ON 25 AUGUST 1960 Qantas Captain E. W. Ditton taxied the Lockheed Super Constellation onto the start of Runway 13 at Plaisance airport in Mauritius and opened the throttles to 35 inches of manifold pressure. The four supercharged 18-cylinder engines roared, spinning the propellers as the plane carrying 12 crew began to accelerate along the runway. The 38 passengers sitting behind in luxury were looking forward to the elegant cabin service and fully reclining seats after their stopover en route from Johannesburg to Sydney. Outside, the raindrops on the windows began to be pushed horizontally as the plane picked up speed. On the flight deck the first officer, S. D. Patrick, took over the duplicate throttles and pushed the plane to 112 knots – 207 kph. But instead of acknowledging take-off moments later, the flight engineer shouted: ‘Failure number three!’1
Captain Ditton slammed off the power, braked hard and threw the engines into maximum reverse thrust. The giant plane with its 59,850 kilogram weight was not stopping. The captain applied maximum braking as the flight engineer feathered troubled engine number three and then shut it off. The Super Constellation slipped along the wet concrete runway and, still travelling at 75 kph with the engines howling at maximum reverse thrust, overshot the end. It ploughed through the grass safety strip, bumped over an embankment and plummeted, nose down, into a rocky gully 100 metres from the end of the runway. The port wing-tip tank burst on impact and a fire began, inflamed by aviation fuel pouring onto the ground from other ruptured tanks. Thick black acrid smoke rose into the air.
The tower controller immediately despatched fire trucks towards the stricken plane. They were overtaken by the Qantas Mauritius base staff, former navigator Jim Cowan and engineers D. J. Kennedy and R. P. Barrett, who had seen the plane get into trouble from the balcony of the terminal building and raced downstairs to hurtle towards it in the company car. The aircraft was fully laden with fuel and the wing tanks, with extra fuel pods on the wing tips, were ablaze. Captain Ditton came into the cabin where the passengers were badly shaken up but not injured. ‘All out,’ he commanded.2 Pandemonium ensued. Children screamed, doors jammed and the crew dashed back to help. There were no emergency slides. Passengers and crew had a three-metre jump onto rocks.
When the ground crew arrived they found the crew struggling with a large lady who had broken her ankle jumping from the emergency exit at the rear of the plane. Scrub was burning around her. Cowan immediately helped to move her while the two engineers fearlessly climbed back into the blazing fuselage and ran the full length of it to make sure no one was left on board. A threatening rumble reverberated through the stricken Constellation. Although