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Back in the 80s while working as a television news reporter, a crew and I were despatched to spend a week covering major flooding in the border rivers area of northern NSW and southern Queensland. To get around, we were issued with a small aerial fleet of a fixed wing twin and a helicopter. On the final day of our assignment we flew the JetRanger on an exhausting seven hour journey around the outback, racing to end up at the small NSW bush town of Nyngan to meet an appointment at the local Telecom telephone exchange/repeater station to feed our pictures back to the TV station in Sydney. Now these were the days when Telecom could have run the show properly if it wasn’t for the customers. And if you didn’t turn up for your booking within about three minutes of the appointed time well, sorry, bad luck, too late, missed out, queue up and fill in all the forms again! We arrived overhead Nyngan in the JetRanger with only minutes to spare. But the Telecom compound didn’t have a car park, and the local airport was too far away from town by road (anyway, the only taxi was in Dubbo that day!). So we made a command decision; land in the middle of town on a large area of flat, vacant ground on the main street, alongside the railway line. The locals were much in awe as we landed, and as three likely lads disembarked from the helicopter with various bits of electronic gear under their arms, sprinted to the Telecom exchange (we got there in time!). Our helicopter pilot, a Royal Navy trained, nonchalant, British sort of chap, took all this in his stride, tied down the rotor blades and made himself comfortable in the back with a newspaper. Comfortable, at least until there was a knock on the window, and Constable Plod announced “You can’t park here, mate. You’ll have to move along!” The complexities of TV deadlines and the Telecom bureaucracy were a little beyond Plod, who felt the majesty of the law had to be observed, and so proceeded to take the helicopter’s “particulars”, so a parking infringement notice could be issued! The locals later assured us this particular constable had previously been stationed “out in the country”, and he wasn’t quite used to the sophisticated sort of things that happened “in town”. Oh and the parking infringement notice seemed to get lost in the mail. But those were the days when Australia Post…. (Ross Dunlop, Sydney, 2000)
About ten years ago, I had just graduated from my Iroquois conversion course with the RAAF and was sent off on an exercise in northern NSW. Definitely the lighter side of aviation! My squadron’s job was to support the hostile air threat with Winjeels providing Forward Air Control (FAC) for a squadron of ‘baby knucks’ flying Macchis from 2OCU. The Macchis were well suited to the hilly terrain we were operating in, as the Mirage would have had trouble turning in such tight areas without crossing into Queensland halfway through a turn! During one of the troop lifts on which I was copilot, we were returning from dropping off another ‘chalk’ of troops when we were bounced by a couple of Macchis. We had the frequency that the Forward Air Control (FAC) Winjeel was using to guide the Macchis and we were expecting them, so it was “all eyes out” so we would know when we had been spotted. Anyway, the loadmaster on the left side behind me, was the first to spot them and called that they were “rolling in”. Suddenly, he yelled in a voice which had rapidly shifted up a couple of octaves “They’re shooting at us, they’re really shooting at us!!!” I looked around and saw the lead Macchi headon and approaching us from the side. “It’s OK mate”, I said, “that’s the anti col you’re looking at!”.
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