Air Safety – “PressOnitis”

On our return I duly went on leave to Tocumwal, where my father was the commanding officer of the small RAAF unit, and set about finding the vehicle of my dreams. Unfortunately, being young and naive I was soon conned into buying a 1940 Austin Eight, in retrospect a less suitable car I can’t imagine.

Nevertheless, proud of my new acquisition I immediately set about refurbishing it, including having the front leaf springs reset. In my ignorance I failed to put lock nuts on the U clamps holding the front springs onto the axle and just outside Albury on my way back to Nowra, the axle moved, locking the mechanical brakes hard on one side. The car immediately did a flick roll through 450 degrees from which 1 miraculously managed to emerge unscathed. Funny how the mind works, I was more concerned about the loss of petrol pouring from the tank which I had just filled, than I was about a very bent motor car lying on its side; shock I guess.

flightline with all the attendant delays, I decided to take it as it was.

Now at this stage, if I had been a little older and a little wiser, I would have twigged that someone was trying to tell me something, but unfortunately it went straight over the top of my head.

Well, I finally got airborne after all the frustrating delays and set course for Tocumwal, planning to fly under the fairly solid cloud which extended westward as there were no let down aids at Tocumwal. In fact the airfield had no ATC or even radio as it was just a holding depot for hun- dreds of wartime aircraft awaiting disposal.

Now I had 650 hours under my belt at this stage of my career and knew that I knew all about aviation so I didn’t bother with a detailed flight plan, all I needed was a line on the map.

As I proceeded westward the cloud started to get lower, but I wasn’t too worried, as everyone knows, once you get past Wagga and The Rock its as flat as a pancake and all you have to do is to hit the Murray deliberately left of track and then follow it to Tocumwal. That was the theory, unfortunately it turned out to be one of those days when the tree tops disappear into the murk and shortly I found myself scraping along under ever lowering cloud trying to find a way through.

It didn’t take too long for the parlous situation I was in to hit me, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really know where I was within a fifty mile square.

Now you will be wondering at this stage what this has to do with flight safety; bear with me, it will soon come clear.

My father retrieved the car and set about putting it back into shape (fortunately he had been a motor body builder prior to joining the RAAF shortly before the commencement of WWII).

Saving as hard as I could go I managed to buy new springs, shock absorbers etc, to complete the job, but then had the problem of getting them to Tocumwal. With my fingers crossed I sought permission from my CO to fly the assorted hardware home in a squadron Firefly which, after a few words about my doing extra days of squadron duty officer for the privilege, he approved.

I quickly did some planning for the trip including request ing a double drop tank configured aircraft and came the day, duly loaded up my bits and pieces in the rear cockpit. However, rare for a Firefly it went U/S after start up (for reasons which I can’t recall) so grumbling to myself, I sought another aircraft and was allocated one with the standard configuration of one drop tank and a radar nacelle. After laboriously unloading and reloading all the gear, to my surprise and growing frustration this aircraft also went U/S.

The third aircraft offered to me only had about 25 gallons in the drop tank but as it meant getting a bowser to the All along at the back of my mind was the ignominy of not being able to make it. I knew most of the small RAAF team at Tocumwal and I felt that I had the honour of the Fleet Air Arm to uphold. In addition there was the matter of the load in the back, if I couldn’t make it I would most likely have to freight the items to Tocumwal at some expense and inconvenience. Everything added up to a classic press on situation. Now unfortunately (as is fairly obvious) I had been a little casual with my navigation which had not been aided by extensive flooding making ground features very hard to cor- relate with the map. In addition I had been ducking and weaving in my attempts to stay in contact.

Finally I had to admit defeat; it had become a grey mist in front of me with ground and cloud merged into one, there was no way I was going to get through and more to the point I didn’t know where I was. Having made the decision I should have made some time previously, and very con- scious that there could be a hill straight in front of me, I went to full power and started a max rate climb. To have attempted to turn back at that point would have been fatal.

To my surprise I soon popped out on top as the cloud was only about 2000ft thick but it extended to every horizon. In an instant the situation had changed. A quick visual fix would have sorted out my navigation problem but now I was desperately trying to mentally reconstruct my flight path over the last hour.

It didn’t take too long for the parlous situation I was in to hit me, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really know where I was within a fifty mile square.

Unfortunately, Navy aircraft in those days only had one navigation aid other than the Mk I eyeball and that was a homing device called the YG Beacon (YE afloat) installed at naval airstations and in aircraft carriers. The Royal Navy from which we had inherited the short range YG beacon did not believe in the Radio Compass as it required the carrier to radiate on HF, which was a dead giveaway of the ship’s position to any enemy also wanting to home in. Lacking any form of onboard usable radio aid (there aren’t too many carriers or airstations west of the Divide), my only hope was of a RAAF ground station providing me with a VHF bearing. Having collected myself, I decided to call Wagga which was the nearest RAAF airfield and ask for a homing and letdown as my rough calculations showed that I mightn’t have enough fuel to get back to Nowra.

Wagga replied that their homer had been taken out of service the previous day for maintenance; hadn’t I read the Notam? At this news I must confess that I chained smoked three cigarettes in an attempt to calm myself down. It was strictly illegal to smoke in Navy aircraft (subsequently OK in the Tracker), I had never done it before, but I needed something to cope with the fact that shortly I would have to announce to the world that Her Majesty was possibly about to lose one of her aircraft.

Wagga was very good and tried to help by comparing VHF signal strengths to try and see how far I was from the air- field but it was a fairly forlorn exercise. I was next asked my endurance but could only make a stab at it because I didn’t know how much had been in the drop tank. I replied with eighty minutes, which I subsequently learnt was passed to Nowra as eighteen minutes, which caused the whole of the east coast SAR organisation to be swung into force.

Having calmed down a bit more, and collected my wits, I settled down on an easterly heading and hoped for the best. After quite some time, which gave me the opportunity to reflect on just how I was going to explain how I had got into the present situation, my prayers were evidently heard because a break in the clouds came up and there was a railway line running north south! A quick look at the map showed that it could only be the line from Canberra Queanbeyan to Cooma or possibly the old Captain’s Flat line. So, with rising confidence, I informed Canberra that I now knew were I was and that I was proceeding to Nowra.

To my surprise I was informed by the RAAF controller that I was to land at Canberra and refuel, somebody had decided to take me in hand and exercise a bit of operational control.

I duly landed and with the brashness of youth informed the refuelers that I was only taking on fuel as a precaution and that I didn’t really need it to get back to Nowra Not bothering to check the weather, I fired up the Griffon and set off again, but what I didn’t know was that in the interim the weather had really deteriorated between Canberra and Nowra. It was soon apparent that there was no way that I would be able to get under it so once again I had no option but to proceed on top. I then commenced to climb only to find that it was solid, and shortly I was on instruments. Now, although we were all instrument rated in those days, most of our flying was done at about 2000ft on ASW patrols and we rarely entered cloud. In addition, because we were only day capable from the carrier there was no operational requirement for night flying, hence we rarely flew at night. As a result of all this, my instrument rating wasn’t worth the cardboard it was printed on.

Deciding that the best course of action was to do a 180 and climb on the reciprocal until I could see that I was on top, I duly commenced a climbing turn, however with a totally inadequate instrument scan, I was soon in trouble and found myself in a downward spiral.

At this point I really had a few words with myself and concentrating hard, managed to recover back to a proper climb and shortly after got back on top at something like 12,000ft. I had by this time called Nowra for a homing and letdown and as I listened to the quietly confident controller, wondered how on earth I was going to survive a letdown through 12,000ft of solid cloud after my recent pathetic performance on instruments.

Once again The Lord above came to my rescue, just as I was getting close to the overhead a hole in the cloud appeared and as I flew over it, I could see the dark smudge of good old Terra Firma. With a quick request for the cloud base, which was advised as 1000ft, I called visual and plunged down through my hole which was just big enough for me to do a tight spiral.

All this is absolutely true so you will have to believe me when I state that I was going so fast at the bottom (no speed brakes) that I had to do a wide turn round the airfield to wash off speed before I could enter the circuit.

By this stage of the game my flying skills had deteriorated to rock bottom and landing far too fast, I rounded off the trip by bouncing from one end of runway 26 to the other. I taxied in, got out of the aircraft and without a word to anyone got myself up to my cabin (navy for room) and sat on my bunk and looked at the wall for several hours, reflecting on the need to sharpen up on all aspects of my approach to flying, Why did it happen? Firstly I was suffering from a very bad case of that great killer, “pressonitis” allied with a classic 500 hours plus ego. Although I must accept the major responsibility for the whole sorry saga, there was a strong element of command direction and supervision lacking, particularly on the question of instrument flying. My logbook shows that since joining the squadron 14 months previously I had not flown once at night, and had accrued a total of 4. 40 hours actual and 1. 35 simulated, all achieved popping in and out of cloud. No way to develop or maintain basic instrument flying skills. The lessons? Didn’t check the weather properly (twice!), no proper flight plan, didn’t know how much fuel I had, didn’t check the Notams, didn’t navigate properly, couldn’t cope on instruments, and finally allowed my basic flying skills to deteriorate to the point where I was almost a passenger in the aircraft. Finally, apart from the above, the one big lesson I learnt for future application was to make certain that pilots under my supervision were capable of carrying out the mission to which they had been assigned. Well, I lived to fly another day, much wiser, and I think it marked the end of my flying adolescence. I was lucky, at least I could fly on instruments a bit shaky. A strictly VFR pilot with no instrument training would have had no chance of surviving.

I’ve often wondered since what makes the ball bounce your way, how many pilots caught in similar circumstances haven’t made it because their luck (and that is what it is until you develop the necessary skills) ran out that day?