Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [9]
More damning was the December 1999 review of the relationship between Qantas and CASA that found in the financial year before the QF1 crash only 22 per cent of the planned surveillance tasks had been achieved. Training of cabin crew had not been checked by CASA for ten years. CASA had also failed to put in place and monitor safety regulations. There was a regulatory requirement for airlines to provide landing distances for conditions worse than wet but, not only was this not clearly spelled out, neither Qantas nor CASA really understood what it meant.
Nor were there enough regulations for emergency procedures or training for emergencies. The ATSB report said: ‘In the two years before the accident, CASA conducted minimal product-based surveillance of Qantas flight operations.’ Even if CASA had carried out more surveillance it was unlikely the problems would have been picked up. ‘Most of these deficiencies had probably existed in Qantas flight operations for many years,’ said the report.27
The incident was a wake-up call for Qantas, which put in place ‘substantial changes’ to its management policies and procedures in all the areas highlighted by the ATSB. CASA also made substantial changes to its surveillance processes and regulations. But the relationship between Qantas and CASA would come up again when another Qantas jet got into trouble.
The final ATSB report into the QF1 accident left traumatised passenger Mrs Rollo feeling ‘sick to the stomach’. She told the Australian on the day the report came out: ‘When you are flying a national airline and putting your life in their hands, you don’t expect to get a lot of cost-cutting that puts lives at risk. It was only a matter of time [before a major accident]. Thankfully, we weren’t killed.’28
QANTAS HAS HAD its fair share of airborne drama. During the airline’s first hour of flight a mid-air emergency almost claimed the life of one of its founding fathers, Hudson Fysh. It was 21 January 1921 and Fysh, with just 36 operational hours’ flying time under his belt, was delivering one of Qantas’s first two planes from Mascot aerodrome in Sydney to Central Queensland. Fysh, with chief engineer Arthur Baird as his passenger, was flying an army surplus BE2E string and canvas biplane. At 6,500 feet the plane’s 90 horsepower motor would push it to a top speed of 82 mph. Fysh was following Qantas co-founder and former Australian Flying Corps pilot Paul J. McGinness in the other plane, an Avro Dyak. McGinness was by far the more experienced pilot, with over 500 hours’ flying time, and so took the lead. It was a flight that almost ended in disaster, as Fysh later recalled in his 1965 autobiography, Qantas Rising:
We taxied to the far end of the aerodrome, opened the throttles and were at last off on our great adventure, an adventure which almost right away provided us with our first little bit of drama. We sailed away happily over Sydney, towards Manly and up the coast, but the weather was steadily getting worst, with ominous dark clouds gathering ahead. Dodging in and out through clear patches, McGinness and I soon lost contact. I continued my dodging with growing apprehension, for I realised that with my limited experience I was not up to blind flying in cloud: indeed I would have defied anyone to do it in the old machine only fitted with a compass, airspeed indicator, rev counter and inclinometer, plus the fact that fore and aft trim was not possible and as steady pressure was needed on the left rudder bar to keep her straight. This was real flying: one flew the aeroplane by one’s senses.1
Despite his roiling stomach and heightened nerves, Fysh decided to tackle the cloud head-on, hoping that it would not be as dense as it looked. It was. He had his work cut out keeping control of the aircraft, which he prayed was not positioned above hilltops. With the compass swinging wildly the plane began the first stages of what would be a dangerous spin, before bursting into a small clearing near