When Retro was the Real Thing

During our service period, along with many long-term ground staff, we have been witness to many changes. A succession of CEOs and their management teams have passed across our bows, new and better aircraft have brought withthem advances in technology and of course the ever-changing (and diminishing) route structure, to name but a few.

There has been no shortage of ups and downs (pardon the pun) but the one constant was and is, the unswerving loyalty of the staff to the Qantas brand and its passengers. A more personal observation is the humour and morale amongst those staff and I regret to see some of this has waned in later years. This is hardly surprising in light of recent events.

On a more positive note, most of us look back with a smile about the airline we knew. For me, those thousands of hours on the flightdeck and the days spent with crews in slip ports loom large, bringing to mind countless stories and yarns. The passage of the years has seen many of my peers retire, taking their good humour and recollections with them.

Bloody shame!Heightened by the arrival of the ‘retro roo’ I really do think there is a mood of retrospect about Qantas and some concern about the future. But, as the retro 737 evidences, there is plenty to celebrate about the Flying Kangaroo’s past.

As 1970 approached, the Qantas passenger fleet consisted of two DC-4s, four Lockheed Electras and the pride of the fleet, the Boeing 707s.

Pilot checking and training during those years was predominantly done on the actual aircraft…in the case of the 707, an aircraft would be taken out of service and positioned down to Avalon for this task. The very sophisticated simulators that we know today were unimaginable then. The 707 simulator was excellent for its time but was ‘fixed base’, that is, bolted to the floor and offering no visual picture…it really was just a procedures trainer. Visual picture technology arrived in due course and initially it ran on a scrolltype system that could slide across in front of either pilot and was usable only by him.

The pilot strength in the 1970s was about 300-400 men, with a much smaller number of flight engineers and navigators who sat at the rear of the flightdeck consumed by mathematical tables and astro navigation. The operational ground staff were an equally small number located at Mascot in the ‘Admin 1’ building. Computers were about to appear but for now all the rostering of crews was done manually on large sheets of paper with a great matrix of crosses, lines and colours.

I did spend a couple of months in this crewing area before the introduction of a pilot seniority system and pilot bidding. Tripswere handed out at the behest of the roster clerks and I did note the odd bottle of duty free passing across the counter ensuring a favourable trip for the donor.

Similarly the flightplans and load sheets were all done by hand. Qantas had either its own staff overseas for this or contracted this work out.

I remember a transit in Delhi where an Indian gentlemen presented the captain with the most immaculate set of handwritten documents. This was a small airline and close working relationships existed, friendships were made and they continue to this day.

The arrival of Doppler navigation was a major leap forward, but saw the slow demise of the navigators – a great pity as most of them were memorable characters. The Doppler system could only hold two legs and cruising at Mach . 81 meant a very intensive time, constantly loading the next leg in a busy airway system.

Fast forward to today where all this preflight paperwork is computer-generated and now with onboard computers, codes are entered into the aircraft’s

Most of us look back with a smile about the airline we knew.

flight management computers and ‘bingo’, the whole flightplan is there ready to go. That is not to suggest today’s crews have a diminished workload…on the contrary, the preflight and inflight duties are just as demanding – maybe more so.

Communications with ATC on long-haul routes was achieved primarily using high frequency radio (HF). This had many limitations, not least the limited number of frequencies with every airliner and ground controller trying to transmit and receive on the same frequency.

The result was noisy static, a gabble of voices trying to be heard…just mayhem. The poor second officer was usually assigned this work! The much clearer and better very high frequency radio (VHF) was excellent but had limited range… repeater stations were yet to come.

On a Sydney-Singapore flight, the VHF would drop out about the time you flew overhead Parkes in NSW and from there until about 100 nautical miles from Singapore it would be all HF. I really did enjoy the arrival of satcom and sat nav.

On the subject of communications, our families had a tough time.

Faxes, let alone emails and iPhones, were a long way into the future. On a trip to London, for example, the most pressing item on arrival was to call home which meant finding one of those red telephone boxes and dialling the overseas operator who would wait while you emptied a great handful of two shilling pieces into the phone before connecting you. In what seemed like seconds, her voice would come back “three minutes are you extending?”.

Letters written by your wife the day after you left Sydney had a fair chance of being at the hotel in Singapore when you arrived on your way back from London…nice to receive, but in reality not much news.

The successive arrival of the Boeing 747 in all its versions alongwith the Boeing 767 and then the Airbus fleet brought tremendous changes, not least the slow demise of our highly skilled flight engineers (and their bad jokes). These aircraft were fitted with an APU (auxillary power unit) and could provide air conditioning while the aircraft was on the ground…the days of the 707 at an airport in the tropics with the cabin temperature taking on the ambient outside air temperature were gone.

The early version of the 747, quaintly now called ‘the Classic’, had an inertial navigation system that could hold nine waypoints at a time – compared to Doppler, this was great progress. The 767 saw the introduction of ‘glass instruments’ and flight management computers.

The associated simulators are now of remarkable fidelity and all pilot training and checking is completed in these machines.

During the 1970s, the limited number of aircraft in the fleet and thin passenger loads meant that on many routes Qantas did not mount a daily service…the net result being that crews enjoyed quite long periods in the various slip ports.

A London trip for us could take from 10 to 16 days and the hosties had a doosey that had them away from home for 21 days. Over many years the rosters were done for a rotating eight-week period resulting in the captain, the first and second officers feeling as though they were joined at the hip, flying together for the eight weeks.

Many of the captains during the 1970s were men who had served during WW2 and the position of captain was quite autonomous.

There were some testing times but for the most part it was good fun and the crew enjoined as a team in the air and on the ground. By contrast, today it is rare to fly with the same pilots on consecutive trips. Those early and often long slips would see boys being boys and with the passing of so many ‘olds and bolds’, the great yarns and antics either have to stay overseas or are lost in time. That said, I did have a laugh when one of my colleagues retold a story from Karachi. This slip port abounds in crew stories and I regret that I was never able to stay there. The crews were accommodated at Speedbird House, a purpose-built crew hotel, in the days when British Airways was called BOAC (to this day they still use the ‘Speedbird’ callsign).

On this particular day my colleague was sitting by the pool when a BOAC crew arrived, checked in, proceeded straight to the pool with their bags and then it was beers all round. That done, the entire crew (led by the captain) marched line astern around the pool and one by one turned left out onto the diving board and jumped in…in full uniform! Enthusiastic onlookers joined in to what was a hilarious scene! Would this happen today? I don’t think so! The hotels varied enormously from the excellent Shangri-La in

I did note the odd bottle of duty free passing across the counter ensuring a favourable trip for the donor.

Singapore to Tehran where the crew hotel had the grand name of the International Hotel but in fact it was a converted hospital with the communal crew lounge being the converted morgue. I struggled with a beer in that setting! The airline that is Qantas today is a vastly different company from the one I knew and enjoyed. I look back with great satisfaction on a career that came my way. The crews, the operational ground staff, the engineers will always have my respect – they were and are truly the U in Qantas. Nearing retirement Bill Anderson resolved to try and capture some of the events and the stories that occurred during a 40-year career with Qantas, so he set about completing a range of interviews with work colleagues. Those interviews now form the content of two books – A Lifetime in Long Haul and A Lifetime in Long Haul – the Bigger Picture – which he hopes goes some way to documenting some of the history of a great Australian airline. To learn more visit www. billanderson747. com