Coping With Caribous

Fortunately, the empire that was eventually to be established to run these courses was only “a gleam in the eye” at that time and after three weeks and 18 hours flying I was a fully qualified Cat. B green card, route check Caribou captain.

After two weeks leave our three crews for the third Caribou ferry arrived in To- ronto, Canada (the third captain had been on the first ferry).

Great News. The 500-gallon rubber tanks for the ferry flights had been rejected by the RAAF and were sitting down in the States somewhere awaiting a decision on their future use.

As the ones used on the first two ferry flights tended to leak fairly badly we were quite happy not to have to fly aircraft with loose AVGAS floating around the main cabin.

Eventually, we were told that we could take the aircraft if we could find some way of getting out of Canada without long-range tanks. July 1 saw us heading off into the wild blue via Greenland, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Nice etc.

We weren’t really sure where we were going to end up as before we left Toronto, saw a newspaper report that the first three RAAF Caribous for Vietnam were about to leave Canada. As it was pretty obvious that this was us, we did have some doubts as to our eventual destination.

It wasn’t until we got to New Delhi that we were officially told by the Australian Defence Adviser that we would be handing over the aircraft at Butterworth to crews from Australia for onward movement to Vietnam.

This worked out well, as without long-range tanks and the necessity to avoid Indonesia, there was no way to fly the aircraft to Australia.

With thanks to Mr Pratt and Mr Whitney, we got through Goose Bay, Greenland and Iceland without incident our re-quest for Artic survival equipment ended up in someone’s “too hard” tray.

Refuelling arrangements in Wadi Halfa, Northern Sudan, were such that after fil- ling-one aircraft the tanker had then to refill itself before doing the next. We eventually got airborne as No. 2, about 40 minutes behind the first aircraft, and intercepted a rather frantic distress call.

A yank in a Cessna 206 had a rough-running engine and was trying to reach the Nile before the engine quit. Well, quit it did and before he went down we promised to look for him.

Eventually, we found him, dropped enough of our own survival equipment and rations to last about three weeks, and told just about everybody in North Africa where he was.

A party from Wadi Halfa picked him up 8 days later. I ran into him six years later in Laos flying for Air America- and believe me, that was some party.

In Aden the third aircraft went u/s and as he looked like being there some considerable time waiting for replacement fuel tank cells, we left him behind and proceeded in the other two birds to Butterworth. Twenty-eight days from Toronto to Malaysia in a “modern” aircraft must be some sort of record.

The next ferry I did later that year, with long-range tanks this time, was fairly straightforward. One of the longest, and certainly the loneliest leg, was the 12 hours from Butterworth to Cocos Island, around the top end of Sumatra because of Confrontation.

Vietnam with RAAF Transport Flight (RTFV) in early 1965: we lived in the beautiful Villa Anna in delightful Vung Tau on the shores of the glorious South China Sea. The villa had no messing facilities, no hot water apart from a gas-fired shower that was more dangerous than the VC could ever be, and a fridge for the bar. For the privilege of being there, a grateful Government allowed us the same taxation concession as that applying to Butterworth.

We operated one aircraft from Da Nang with the US Special Forces on a weekly changeover, one from Nha Trang on the same system, and two, six days a week from Vung Tau.

I was checked out by one of the local “old hands” just after I arrived. Landing a little short at Hai Yen on the Camau penninsula we rediscovered the principle that an under-carriage designed to retract for- ward causes considerable alteration to the airframe when it is forced to retract rear-wards.

Replacement engines for our aircraft were obtained from the US Army who had them overhauled in the States. As some of us found out, the power output from these particular engines bore out the truth of the old saying “wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”.

After six in-flight engine shutdowns, three ground-fire incidents and the Hai Yen prang, I was quite happy to return to Australia just before Christmas 1965.

Back to 38 Squadron at Richmond wasn’t all that uninteresting. On an exercise in Rockhampton, we took a load of passengers up to The Plains one morn- ing. Despite all the green lights the nosewheel wasn’t locked down and duly collapsed on landing. One of the witnesses described the incident as “like an elephant bowing but at a higher speed”.

A couple of months in New Guinea and then another short jolly in Vietnam. The whole world that appeared to be there at this time was certainly different from what I had remembered. RTFV had been renamed 35 Squadron and I was co-opted by them to go to Nha Trang for a week to upgrade a co-pilot to captaincy. A lot of the places we landed at on that trip had been drop zones the year before.

A quick run to Sale for a refresher on Dakotas and I parted company with the Caribou, hopefully forever. The Empire struck back in 1974 and I was at Richmond again on Caribous. The conversion course was now three months and took about 100 hours flying. Some procedures have been changed but whether for the better or not is a matter of opinion.

How to do it in New Guinea, how not to do it in Rockhampton, trips to the West and a couple of months survey in Sumatra, and in June 1977 I was finally finished with the old Caribou.

With turbo-prop engines, a little more speed and performance, an auto-pilot and a radar set, the Caribou would be a nice aircraft but then I guess we do have C130s.