Air Safety

Nobby’s aviation background, at least at that stage of events, was just as vague, though he talked as though he’d been flying all his life. They tell me now he only had a private licence. Funny, because the regulars he used to swap yarns with in the Club over a few beers, always took it for granted he was a commercial pilot from way back. At any rate, Nobby and his Comanche had become part of the scene at Barracoola and I don’t think anyone ever questioned his competence in instrument weather. He’d occasionally be coming or going when the cloud was sitting on the coastal ranges to the west of the airport and everyone, Flight Service included, just assumed he was instrument rated.

You know, in all the years I’ve been flying, Atc or Flight Service, as it was then known, have never once questioned my credentials when I’ve been lodging a flight plan, even when I was a complete stranger to them, and I guess the same went for Nobby. Maybe, the way the story’s come out since the accident, it’s a pity they didn’t. Anyway, his friends where he’d lived before in Queensland knew differently and that’s how the investigators eventually found out.

Piecing it all together from what I’ve been able to pick up, it seems that Nobby had only been flying about three years. Until just under 12 months ago — about the beginning of last winter it was — he’d had a sales territory or whatever it was he did, up in Queensland, out west from Rockhampton. He’d been there for years, doing business travelling around by car, and had become pretty well known in the district.

One day when he was calling at one of the stations in the district, the owner had to take a couple of his men out to fix a windmill at one of the bores, and he invited Nobby to go along for the ride with them in his Cessna 172. It was a big property and the bore was about 50klics from the homestead and I’m told Nobby was absolutely amazed at how easy the trip was in the aeroplane. You see he’d been bouncing over those hot, dusty, corrugated Queensland roads for so long that he’d almost become immune to the discomforts of his job and the amount of time he had to spend travelling.

Well, the trip in the Cessna ruined all that for him. For the first time he realised there was a new world waiting for him if he could only learn to fly. And this is just what he did — down at one of the flying schools of Rockhampton I think — and he went straight through to his unrestricted licence. Soon after he’d got his Ppl, he bought himself an old Tri-Pacer in fairly good condition. From then on he did nearly all his trips by air, which isn’t nearly as silly as it sounds from down here, because in those parts every property has its own strip of sorts and I gather most of his work at that time was to do with country properties.

All went well for quite a while, but then Nobby gave himself a bit of a fright. It seems he was on his way down to Rockhampton to pick up some stuff and, flying higher than he usually did on his short hops around the stations, he tried to climb above the inversion layer out of the turbulence, and poked into a bit of cloud. The cloud itself was harmless enough — just a bit of puffy stratocu at about 7000ft — but the little bit of instrument flying Nobby had done was pretty rusty by this stage.

As he told one of his mates later, he was concentrating so hard on trying to keep the wings level that he didn’t notice the airspeed and almost stalled. Then by the time he’d sorted that out, he found the aeroplane was in a turn, but in the heat of the moment he couldn’t work out which way to correct it. In the end he gave up trying and just gave his full attention to keeping the airspeed somewhere near right and he flew out of the cloud the opposite way to what he went in. Probably the Tri-Pacer’s interconnected controls must have saved him from getting crossed over and spiralling out of the cloud in a high speed dive.

Whatever it was, it made him realise his flying still had its limitations. So next time he was down in Brisbane, he spent some time at Archerfield on a bit more instrument training. I don’t think he ever gave much thought to getting a night Vmc rating, but he did enough to satisfy himself that he could handle the occasional bit of cloud without losing his confidence. From then on he had no hesitation about flying through cloud, even though it was illegal. Of course, up in that part of Queensland the base is pretty high a lot of the time and there isn’t a lot to worry about if you keep your wits about you.

This would probably have gone on for years without anybody that mattered knowing, but then Nobby’s firm, imagining they were doing him a favour after all his time in the outback, promoted him to some sort of area manager and moved him down to Wollongong, south of Sydney. His new job still involved a lot of travelling, but I don’t think he was so much involved with individual customers — more with his firm’s salesmen in the towns. This suited him because it meant that he could still do a lot of work by air and he’d been well and truly bitten by the flying bug by this time.

It wasn’t long before he was up to his old tricks. But he soon realised that cloud flying over the ranges in southern Nsw was a different ball game. After one or two attempts to climb through a great layer of cloud when heading inland from the coast, he sensed he was courting trouble and gave it away — at least for the time being.

He stayed out of cloud now but he would make use of direction finding radios to find his way around the hills whenever the base was low and visibility was bad. Young Bull Johnson, one of the instructors at Cooma, can tell you of an experience he had with Nobby nearly a year ago. He too was new to the area at the time and had to ferry the Club’s 172 back from Barracoola in dirty weather. Finding that Nobby was also about to depart for Cooma in his Tri-Pacer, and thinking he was an old hand in these parts, he asked Nobby if he could fly back in company with him.

Nobby agreed, but led Bull on such a chase up the valleys and around the hills that Bull swore he’d never have anything to do with Nobby again. “I’ve never had such a wild ride in my life,” he told me the other night in the Club at Cooma when we were talking over what had happened. Bull said he’d only found out much later that Nobby had been following his little direction finder tuned to the commercial station at Cooma. With it, he just kept poking around the cloud topped hills until he found a way through — more or less by trial and error.

Well, a little later, after Nobby had given himself another nasty fright — this time when he nearly collected a tree which suddenly materialised out of the murk while he was doing the same sort of thing, he decided he’d better get himself something more suited to the conditions he was operating in. Why at this stage he didn’t get himself an instrument rating I’ll never know — maybe he felt he’d never reach the standard — but at any rate he swapped his Tri-Pacer for a second hand Comanche 180 up at Bankstown. It seems he thought this was going to solve all his problems because it had an Adf and an autopilot — one of those little two axis jobs with a heading hold.

After this with a real live navigation aid and an aeroplane that would fly itself, Nobby started doing some instrument practice during his trips. In this way he was soon able to solve the problem of getting around when there was cloud on the ranges — though I think he usually made sure the base was reasonably high at his destination so he could break out without having to come too low. Of course, by that time of the year, the weather was getting better — even when there was cloud on the ranges, there wasn’t usually much in it. I think it was those sort of conditions that gradually lulled poor old Nobby into a false sense of security, and set the scene for what happened. He had really come to think of himself as an instrument pilot, and it wasn’t until he got into some real Ifr weather that he found out he wasn’t. And then of course it was too late.

You know what the weather was like that night. It really painted Nobby into a corner — that and the schedule he’d set himself. It seems that Nobby’s firm had a series of conferences on — something to do with a new product they were launching. By this time Nobby was a sort of regional manager for most of southern Nsw, and that particular day he had these meetings to go to — one out at Leeton first of all, and then down here at Barracoola the same night. I think the one down here was the important one for him — a big affair at the Black Marlin with a lot of company people coming from interstate.

Anyhow Nobby had set off fairly early that morning from Wollongong and had flown out to Leeton in showery but passable weather. He didn’t refuel when he landed because there was a car waiting to take him straight to the conference. He was at the meeting most of the day, and it was nearly four o’clock when he finally got back to the aircraft. Apart from anything else, this meant he’d be cutting it pretty fine with last light at Barracoola, so again he didn’t wait to refuel. He told his local bloke who drove him back to the aerodrome that he still had at least two and half hours in the tanks and that was more than enough for the flight to Barracoola.

It would have been too, if conditions had been Vfr. He did make a quick telephone call to Wagga Flight Service because he remarked just before he took off that the weather on the coast “wasn’t too good”. That of course was putting it mildly. You remember there was a strong easterly stream for about three days last week, and on the night of the accident the weather on the coast was about at its worst. The flight details he gave Wagga were pretty optimistic — they had to be, otherwise it would have been evident to Dot that he’d be getting into Barracoola in the dark.

And then would they pointed be very marginal to him for that Vfr, conditions he told them he would divert into Tumut or Cooma if the weather didn’t look the best. Well off he went with all the assurance in the world and, if his flight plan meant anything, he should have been passing Cooma by about 1710 local time — which would have got him into Barracoola right on last light. As it was, the couple of position reports he made to Flight Service along the way showed he was falling further and further behind his Eta, which is just what you’d expect punching into that stiff easterly.

The result was that when he called abeam Cooma it was already 1725 and, as everyone can see now there was no hope of him getting into Barracoola in daylight. At this stage Cooma was temporarily closed because of very heavy rain — they already had a commuter in the holding pattern over the Ndb waiting to get in — and so they asked Nobby his intentions. He should have gone straight back to Tumut, or even Wagga if necessary, which would have got him out of trouble. But I think Nobby was already flying in cloud on his autopilot by this time, and the presence of that commuter somewhere near him in the clag must have rattled him. He was also very committed to getting to Barracoola that night for his big function. In the event, he just told Cooma that he was having difficulty reading them and would call Barracoola shortly.

What Cooma didn’t know was that Nobby was operating Nosar and Barracoola didn’t even know he was coming. At that stage, I don’t think even Cooma realised the full implications of Nobby’s decision to continue. Bill of course did the only thing he could, and slapped a distress phase on the aircraft, not only because he couldn’t get any sense out of Nobby, but also because he realised pretty quickly that the aircraft, whatever it was, must be in fairly serious trouble.

As you can imagine, Barracoola’s Flight Service office is a pretty quiet spot on a winter’s night. The place only has four Rpt movements a day at this time of the year — all of them at more civilised hours. That evening, with the rain belting in from the sea as heavily as ever, old Bill Sanders fully expected his shift to pass without a single call. As luck would have it, the Ndb had gone out just before he took over and, as far as he was concerned, that clinched it. When he’d finished issuing a Notam on the Ndb and ringing the Radio Tech to come out and do something about it, he reckoned that was it for the night.

So you can guess how dumbfounded he was when the speaker suddenly crackled: “Barracoola, this is Alpha Delta Uniform, confirm your Ndb is operating?” As I said, they didn’t even know Nobby was on his way. As you would expect, Bill recovered himself quickly. “Negative,” he answered, “we issued a Notam on it at 1735. Advise your intention. We have no notification on your flight.” It must have really shattered poor old Nobby if you think about it, because at that stage there was really nowhere else he could go.

But if this was so, he didn’t let it show. Not at this stage anyway. “Roger, standby,” was all he said. Certainly he gave Bill no inkling he was in serious trouble. I think Nobby had developed a philosophy of using his radio only when absolutely necessary. “What you don’t tell ’em, can’t hurt you,” he used to say in the bar. We used to think he was joking, but now I think he meant it. So when the pace got too hot for him on the radio, he either wouldn’t answer or he’d use some other device to avoid replying and “putting himself in” as he used to say. Just like he had at Cooma earlier that night.

I think he realised straight away that he just had to get into Barracoola somehow and, as he had done in the past, he tuned up the local Abc regional station on his Adf. The only trouble is that the transmitter is about 20 kilometres north of the field and not right on the coast like Barracoola. He would probably have fixed his position over the transmitter at a safe height, then let down on an easterly heading out to sea. The night was as black as pitch, and how he managed it we’ll never know, but the fact of the matter is that they heard the sound of his engine over Barracoola about 20 minutes later as he flew around trying to find a way down.

There was nothing anybody could really do at that stage — even if Nobby had been willing to ask for help instead of trying to do his own thing. He simply had no fuel left for climbing to altitude and being vectored somewhere else by Atc. Old Bill had been calling and calling him, trying to find out what he was up to, but Nobby, if he answered at all, would only answer “standby” and once, (his voice was becoming more uncertain by this time,) “We’re trying another type of approach.”

After circling overhead for a few minutes, Nobby finally called up again.

By this time all his pilot’s composure had gone and he just blurted out, “I’m in real trouble. I’m almost out of fuel and I’ve got to get down somehow.

I can see lights occasionally through gaps in the cloud, but not enough to make out the strip. You’ve got to help me — and pretty damn quick!”

Bill told Nobby not to descend below the night minimum descent altitude of 1500ft until advised, then got straight onto the local Cfi, Taffy Wigmore, at his home. He was out at the field in about five minutes, but poor old Nobby was really desperate by this stage. One tank had already run dry and the other was showing empty. Well, Taffy stood outside the Flight Service building to listen for the aircraft, trying to shout instructions to Bill through the window. It was almost impossible — you know how they always seem to build flight service units with no view of the outside world.

What Taffy was trying to do, purely by engine sound, was to try and line Nobby up with the main north-south runway so they could descend him. With the rain still coming down in buckets and all that high ground to the west of the field, I think they had Buckley’s chance, but at least they had to try. Well you know what happened. After two or three fruitless attempts, with the lights of the Comanche glimpsed only once or twice through the overcast, the sound of the engine just cut out.

Then Nobby called, “Mayday Mayday Mayday — I’m out of fuel — engine stopped — I’m going in!” And that’s the last they heard of him except for a click from his transmitter about a minute later. Nobby had been warned several times during the approach of the hills to the west of the field, and for this reason I think he must have turned on to an easterly heading when his engine failed. Anyway, as you can imagine, he went into the sea — at least that much is certain because they found some cushions from the aircraft washed up on the beach the next day.

Well that’s it. It’s a terrible pity and very sad because it needn’t have happened at all. Nobby will certainly be missed at the club bar in the evenings. You read about these things sometimes in the Basi Journal but you don’t really take a lot of notice until it happens to someone you know, I guess a bit like car accidents. I’ll have to be on my way now — got to do an Ifr charter in the Baron out to West Wyalong. I’m glad I don’t have to try and operate like poor old Nobby. You know it’s hard to believe there are still pilots flying around who will stick their necks out like that. But one thing’s for sure — they’ll get caught in the end if they keep it up long enough. I’m more convinced than ever of that now.