Air Safety – Unscheduled Landing

The latter aircraft was the one scheduled for this day’s trip. Originally trimotors, VH-UYY and her sister had been inherited from Airlines of Australia when ANA absorbed that company in the early 1940s. Airlines of Australia had four of the aircraft, but two, VH-UHH and VH-UGG, were lost in fatal accidents in the late 1930s. The former crashed in the MacPherson Ranges on the NSW/Queensland border, that legendary accident that led to the extraordinary rescue epic of the two survivors, described in the late Bernard O’Reilly’s book, Green Mountains.

By the time ANA got the two remaining Stinsons, they were fairly tired and due for retirement, but the war was on and anything that could fly was a valuable asset to Australia’s hard-pressed airlines, ANA included. So they were given a new lease of life by re-engining them with two 650hp (485kW) nine-cylinder Pratt & Whitney geared R1540 Wasp engines, instead of their three 335hp (250kW) seven-cylinder Lycoming radials. The Stinsons’ performance was actually better with the two Wasps than it had been with the three Lycomings!

Anyhow, to return to the Bass Strait story. Despite deteriorating weather on this occasion, the flight in VH-UYY was relatively uneventful from Essendon out to King Island and on to Smithton. But here the first officer and I decided we would have to give the planned landing at Wynyard a miss, because of prohibitively low cloud and rain on parts of the north coast of Tasmania. In those days of course, Wynyard had no approach aids.

So we took off from Smithton with the intention of remaining below the cloud over the sea and following the coast eastwards to the mouth of the Tamar, then continuing up the river at low level to Launceston. All went well to start with, but as the flight progressed, it became impossible even to maintain visual contact with the coast, because of the lowering cloud base and extremely poor visibility in rain.

So we decided to climb to 3000 feet and continue to Launceston on instruments, intending to carry out a letdown at Launceston, using the airport’s “homer” (read ADF today) and our one and only primitive radio aid – a radio compass with manually operated loop and “coffee grinder” hand crank! Because we were carrying only minimum fuel (too much and away went the payload!), it was essential under these conditions to obtain an up-to-the-minute terminal weather report from Launceston to determine whether we could achieve this safely.

Having positioned ourselves over Low Head (the eastern headland at the mouth of the Tamar), using the broadcasting station there as a “homer”, we called Launceston to pass this position report and obtain the required weather details. Launceston didn’t answer and after several more attempts, the awful truth dawned on us – we had just suffered a complete radio communication failure! This unhappy fact was confirmed by the absence of any voltage indication and our failure to receive any reply to our transmissions – or for that matter any other station on our communications receiver.

The difficulty of the operational judgement that now faced us can well be imagined. To continue to Launceston without any assurance of a successful IFR approach, and without the ability to transmit our position (our last communication with Launceston was when we were climbing to 3000 feet just off Wynyard), left us open to two difficulties. We had insufficient fuel to divert to any other possible landing point if conditions did not enable us to make an instrument approach at Launceston; and there was the danger of collision with other IFR aircraft that would be blissfully unaware of our presence.

In the light of these not inconsiderable hazards, we decided to let down out to sea from Low Head on a northerly heading, hoping that conditions would allow us to establish visual contact over the water. From there we could make a visual approach back to the emergency landing ground at Low Head, again using the broadcasting station at Low Head as a homer, this time to establish our inbound track.

As we broke out of cloud at low altitude on the outbound track, we caught sight of the good ship Nairana, which had just steamed out of the Tamar Estuary, northbound for Melbourne – in fact we nearly collided with her masts! But the ship provided us with assistance we had not counted on – the wake of the steamer was still quite visible on the sea as we flew inbound again and this proved to be an excellent visual aid in the severely reduced visibility.

The beach to the east of the Low Head lighthouse finally hove into sight through the rain, but visibility was extremely poor – only about half a mile. It all began to look hopeless – although the Low Head emergency field was only one or two miles inland, and only 20 feet AMSL, it was completely enshrouded in cloud and drizzle, making any sort of approach quite impossible.

As luck would have it, the tide was right out, leaving a wide expanse of hard smooth sand on the beach. Making the only decision now left to us, we began a turn to the left out to sea again and, keeping the beach in sight with some difficulty but assisted by the line of breakers, managed to line up on a reciprocal heading into wind, and put down safely on the beach.

Our five passengers (the Stinson had seating for only eight) were somewhat bewildered by this unexpected arrival on the sand, but seemed quite philosophical when we explained the situation to them. The first officer then set out on foot through the rain for the lighthouse to contact Launceston by telephone and advise them of our position, as well as to request that a taxi be organised to collect the passengers and take them into Launceston.

It so happened that Captain Ivan Holyman (ANA’s managing director) was en route from Hobart to Melbourne on board one of our DC-2s at the time, and learned later that, on receiving radio advice of our beach landing, he requested the captain to go down to appraise the situation. Needless to say, the attempt was unsuccessful and the DC-2’s descent was discontinued without getting below cloud, though we heard them very close overhead.

Later on, with the passengers gone, I rang the company in Melbourne myself from the lighthouse to point out that things were getting a bit critical – the result of the continuing bad weather and the relentless incoming tide. The senior route captain didn’t mince matters when I asked his advice. “Get that bloody aeroplane off the beach before the tide gets it!” he told me curtly.

About half an hour later, the cloud had lifted just enough for us to get across the sand hills to the Low Head emergency aerodrome. By this time, the tide had come in to the point where our wheels were actually splashing through the wash of the waves as we took off!

We landed at Low Head and laboriously hand-pumped two 44-gallon (200-litre) drums of fuel into the tanks. After obtaining another weather report by telephone, we flew VH-UYY on to Launceston, the weather there, after all our adventures, turning out to be quite reasonable after all.

Forced to abandon the Launceston/Flinders Island/Launceston legs of our trip because of the constraints of time, we finally flew back to Melbourne via King Island. On arrival at Essendon, feeling rather pleased with myself at a successful outcome to a difficult and hazardous set of operational circumstances, I telephoned our Superintendent of Operations, Laurie Johnson. He rudely brought me back to earth by telling me the company did not appreciate unscheduled landings – especially on beaches!

The unfortunate epilogue to this story is that only six months later, flying the daily scheduled trip from Melbourne to Broken Hill, via Kerang and Mildura, with a full load of passengers, VH-UYY suffered a catastrophic in-flight structural failure of the port wing over Redesdale, Victoria. The pilot in command of the ill-fated flight was Alan Mum, and the first officer a New Zealander, Orville Openshaw. There were no survivors.

VH-UYY’s sister ship, VH-UKK, was grounded after the Redesdale accident – the only one of the four Stinsons to survive to retirement – and soon vanished into obscurity.

The saga of the four Stinsons is told in detail in Macarthur Job’s two-volume Air Crash, (Aerospace Publications), which traces how Australia’s airways system evolved over the years as a result of operational lessons learned from major airline disasters – Ed