iscover
Future Squadron Leader, Neville Wallis, examines the cockpit of a RAAF P51D at Oakey in the late forties.
Short Finals
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Beating the dogs!
How do you keep souvenir hunters and adventurous little boys out of a paddock housing hundreds of stored Mustangs, Hurricanes, Mosquitos, Liberators, Spitfires, etc, etc. The first thing you do is to install a stout fence and have savage guard dogs patrolling. The problem is that quite often the dogs get excited and tend to dine on one another.
Just such a situation was told to us recently when Neville Wallis, as a young lad, used to gain access to the vast aircraft storage facility (refer p30, Sept 86 AA) at Oakey in the late forties. Once behind the wire the trick was to outwit the dogs. To stop the dogs fighting, their attendants had placed them on leashes tethered to running wires that ran the perimeter of the facility. Ideal in theory but the weak point was where the wire ended so that the dogs could not make physical contact. This left about a one metre-wide corridor in which enterprising youngsters could quickly pass, literally between the jaws of the snapping Alsatians. And so a number of Oakey youngsters were able to survey at close range a scene that nowadays we can only marvel at.
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As for Neville Wallis, well he later entered the RAAF and eventually retired with the rank of Squadron Leader, as a young lad that’s him sitting proudly in the cockpit of a P-51 D Mustang. His only regret, of course, is that in hindsight he didn’t get his parents to buy some of the now priceless hardware at time of disposal.
Next Issue. . .
The July edition of Australian Aviation certainly has some prime-time content. Apart from Part II of our annual DofA Civil Aircraft Register (listing all aircraft L-Z) there will be a Profile on the P-51 Mustang, an in-depth report on the RAAF’s new PC-9, a probing interview with Qantas’ Chief Executive, John Menadue plus all our regular features. In Australian Service also returns with the F27 Friendship as the subject.
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