Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [32]
‘This loss placed us at a great disadvantage but we were able to continue with the service until, at 2.22 am on Saturday morning, 27th August 1949, the Catalina VH-EAW blew up at its Rose Bay moorings with a roar that woke me in my home at Wallaroy Road,’ wrote Fysh.15 Security chief Fraser at first thought the explosion was the result of an accident, but when the wreckage was dragged from the bottom of Sydney Harbour, a device was found under the flight engineer’s seat and the New South Wales Police Arson Squad was called in. ‘Following salvage operations a piece of fruit case board was found under the seat of the flight engineer attached by string and fishing line, and there was an alarm clock, a six volt battery and a vibrator coil,’ said Fraser.16 There was speculation that this apparatus was designed to throw a spark and ignite the fuel that had drained into the engineer’s compartment from the broken locking device on the port side fuel gauge. ‘It was a very neat job but the perpetrators had not expected the apparatus to be recovered virtually intact,’ said Fysh.17 The subsequent investigation put the managing director of TOA, Bryan Monkton, into the dock but he supplied a strong alibi with the help of P. G. Taylor and was acquitted. He may have survived but his airline did not.
The security service was also important because Qantas was transporting a great deal of gold mined from Papua New Guinea. The importance of the new security service was emphasised when, just as it was formed, a BOAC security guard in London was offered a £1,000 bribe to put sleeping pills into the meals of staff handling the strongroom at London airport. The guard tipped off Scotland Yard, which replaced the airport staff with police officers who pretended to be asleep. When the gangsters entered the secure area they were all arrested and subsequently received lengthy jail terms. The BOAC security guard who raised the alarm was given a job at one of Qantas’s most remote bases under an assumed name.
These diversions aside, Qantas was concentrating on the business of building a global airline. The service to America was key because there was little time difference between flying to the UK via Asia and the Middle East, or via the US. The fear was that, if the Commonwealth countries did not offer a service, the Americans would clean up. Pan American had already opened up the route over the Pacific in 1947, flying into Sydney with a glamorous ‘sleeperette’ service. Naturally Qantas wanted to run the operation across the Pacific, basing its argument on the fact that it had successfully flown the route to deliver Catalinas during the war. But the Australian government, having just bought Qantas, then baffled most observers by going into competition with itself. It bought half of British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines (BCPA) in partnership with the British and New Zealand governments. The new airline, which did not have any planes at that point, was to fly to England via New Zealand and America. It was an ill-fated idea. The new airline struggled and, when a BCPA aircraft crashed on approach to San Francisco airport in 1953, what was left of the airline’s morale was destroyed with it. The airline was cleared of any blame but BCPA was finished. The Australian government bought out the British and New Zealand governments’ shares and vested them in Qantas.
In May 1954 the first Qantas Super Constellation, Southern Constellation, flew from Sydney to San Francisco and opened the way for the Australian national carrier to circle the globe. But Qantas had not forgotten its outback routes. It was operating the Flying Doctor Service with de Havilland Dragon aircraft, a successor to the ill-starred DH86 planes. The airline had also worked on the development of the de Havilland Drover for the service, which suffered a string of