Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [31]
Buying the Constellation fleet, and thus securing the competitive edge of the organisation by equipping it with the same planes bought by rival airlines, was the last major deal Qantas did as a private concern. Shortly afterwards, the Australian government took over the UK shareholding in Qantas Empire Airways and then the private Australian shareholding. McMaster, in increasingly poor health, resigned as chairman but remained on the board. Fysh took over as executive chairman and managing director, transferring those positions to the new government corporation that would run the national flag carrier when the deal was finally sealed in September 1947. The original Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services company that had begun it all was liquidated. Qantas, like many other newly government-owned airlines around the world, was taking off into a new era of aviation.
The first Lockheed 749 Constellation, the Charles Kingsford Smith, took 29 passengers and food parcels to London on 1 December 1947 to inaugurate the postwar Kangaroo Route. It took four days, with passengers spending two nights in Singapore and Cairo and two in the air.
While passengers to London were enjoying first-class luxury, the airline was also returning to its pioneering days with a service to Papua New Guinea. On these trips, operated by a mixed bag of de Havilland Otter and Beaver land and float planes and a Catalina flying boat, passengers climbed in with their luggage and were handed a thermos of tea as their in-flight hospitality before take-off. Pilots reported the clouds over Papua New Guinea, which has a spine of mountains rising 15,400 feet, as being like a box of chocolates: ‘Some have soft centres and some have hard ones, and you don’t know which is which.’13 The technical term for those hard clouds is cumulus granaticus.
This service proved an excellent training ground for Qantas pilots looking to move to the more prestigious routes flying the new Constellations. The New Guinea operation was built up to be an important part of the Qantas empire, with four-engine Douglas DC4s being brought in to fly the Sydney–Port Moresby–Lae service in 1950. The airline also worked on developing the de Havilland Drover aircraft, one of which crashed in 1951 killing all seven on board following a series of non-fatal accidents involving the centre propeller. In 1959 the Papua New Guinea operation was providing Qantas with eight per cent of its total revenue. However, it was brought to an end when the Australian government, as a result of intense lobbying, decided the service was really domestic and handed it over to TAA and Ansett.
Qantas was growing rapidly and security was becoming an issue. Thefts and petty pilfering started to be a problem. When a director’s wife left her fur coat in the luggage rack of a flying boat at the Rose Bay base and it went missing, Fysh knew the time had come to act. The director was particularly unhappy because his suitcase had been dropped overboard during his last visit! A security team was set up, which Gordon Fraser, who was poached from the airline department of the New South Wales Police Criminal Investigation Branch, joined. He was soon to put those skills he learned in his 11 years with the police force to good use.
At this time Qantas was also expanding its services, with a route into Lord Howe Island. The airline was in direct competition with a start-up airline called Trans Oceanic Airways (TOA) run by former World War Two pilots under the guidance of aviation pioneer P. G. Taylor. On 23 June 1949 the Qantas Catalina broke her moorings in a ‘blow’ on Lord Howe Island and was washed ashore. Only the previous night the same thing had happened to the TOA Catalina, but the crew had remained aboard and been able to salvage the situation. An investigation was launched into why the galvanised steel mooring cable, which had been tested and passed as fit by the Civil Aviation office three weeks earlier, on 1 June, should break. The Defence Research Laboratories