A memorable jaunt

Carefully recorded in those seven volumes are his 19,500 hours on 109 types of aircraft, both civil and military, that he accrued since first stepping into a cockpit seven decades ago. And just as assiduously detailed is his priceless reference work, the third and fourth volumes of which he labours to complete as I pay him a visit.

The fascination begins

Keith’s first formal engagement with military aviation came via his membership of the Air Training Corps in the second half of World War Two.

Living in Preston, Melbourne he would take every opportunity to head out to Essendon or Laverton, and in his words, ‘hop on an aircraft going anywhere’.

There followed employment with Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, CAC, then at its wartime peak and being run by the legendary, but less than consultative, Lawrence Wackett.

The Port Melbourne-based company was producing, among others, Wirraways, Boomerangs, while working on the prototypes of two aircraft that survive only in the memories of hard bitten enthusiaists, the CA-15 and Woomera.

By 1945, Australia had become the only nation outside the US to undertake serial production of the P-51 Mustang.

“I started off working on Boomerang engine installations, then the Woomera, riveting wings and centre sections,” Keith recalls.

“In October I got a posting, ‘Meggs, down to the flight hangar!’. My first job was to take an engine out of a Spitfire Mk VIII, to compare with a Mustang, to compare the different model Merlins.”

Nearly 70 years on, his eyes still twinkle at the memory of working on the mighty Mustang.

“I had three years [at the flight hangar], and within 12 months, I was on Mustangs. I did all the initial runs. It would come down from the factory, and I’d do all the ground running up to 67 inches of manifold pressure, then handing over to an inspector. I was the only junior. The aircraft was tied down for anything over 40 inches, with 400lb on each side, otherwise the prop digs in very quickly.

“After it’s cowled up again they check it. It was run, uncowled, for any leaks or required adjustments.”

When the war ended, Keith found himself multiskilling, or as it was known in 1945, picking up the slack, and arming Mustangs for test firings off the coast of Torquay.

“The guy who had been doing it was ex‑ir Force and went back to making jam or something.”

After five years at CAC (“It was magic, heaven. Five years of joy.”), Keith, eager to fly aeroplanes rather than ground run them, applied to join the RAAF. He was accepted and so began an eventful career in uniform from which he was to emerge a decorated combat veteran.

“I left CAC on the Friday and went into the Air Force on the Monday, at Point Cook. I did six months of ground school with 12 months of flying.

“By luck, I was posted onto Mustangs with 3 Squadron who were in Canberra doing Army cooperation. We had Mustangs and Austers.

“When the Korean War broke out, three people from the squadron were immediately posted to Japan, to 77 Squadron. I was posted to Williamtown to convert from recce to fighter work. We all went to Iwakuni to do transition training. I arrived December 1950, in time for Christmas.”

It was a hot war fought in a bitterly cold environment, as the Chinese and North Koreans began their offensive in January 1950, resisted staunchly by the United Nations forces. It was war at a frenetic pace, with ownership of airfields changing, it seemed, by the hour.

“I was hit over North Korean lines, but turned south, and lo and behold there was Kimpo,” Keith recounts.

“I wasn’t aware of the situation – it was a place to land. Originally I was going to bale out – I undid my harness but the guy with me said, ‘There’s Kimpo ahead’. Not having taken notice of the briefing that morning, Kimpo had been taken the day before by the Yanks. They’d driven the Chinese and North Koreans out, not far north of where I was hit. I still had rockets on board and couldn’t fire them south into our lines! I belly landed the aircraft, and the Mustang soaked up the impact. I looked out and there was a Corsair beside me!” Given the tempo of the war, there was no time for a prolonged recuperation.

“I was flying the next day. Got taken to a MASH, but I missed Hot Lips.Then it was down to Suwon where the first Sabres were on a C-46 Commando. Then, a Dak down to Pusan. Missions again the next day.”

I ask Keith about the performance of the Mustang as a ground attack platform, and he claims it was vulnerable due to its belly-mounted radiator and use of liquid coolant.

“In ground attack, they were quite ok. People make much of the fact that they might get hit in the coolant. What about oil lines? As for me, I got hit in the radiator. Oil pressure went down. I knew where I was hit from the sound. It was copper and brass and aluminium. I said, ‘ahhhh, that’s the oil cooler.’

In 1951, to counter the superior MiG-15, 77 Squadron began its transition to the Meteor Mk 8, which had arrived in Korea via Singapore on the deck of HMS Unicorn. Conversion was effected by four British instructors, who against regulations, were determined to do their bit to aid the war.

“They weren’t supposed to fly ops but they did. They’d come out before the Meteor, and come out to Pusan where the Mustangs were. They all managed to get in 100 missions each on Mustangs and Meteors.”

After 166 missions, including 44 in Meteors and one each in an SA-16 Albatross (performing SAR on Korea’s west coast) and a C-47 (flare dropping for A-26s), Keith’s tour was over. His chest now bearing the ribbon of a Distinguished Flying Medal, he was not sent home but instead dispatched to the US to take part in a memorable jaunt, promoting the war.

“I went from Korea to the States on a goodwill tour. A member of every force in Korea got together, and I was sent after I finished my tour. We were flown across to the US. We spent a month visiting high schools, industrial centres and factories, before ending up at UN Headquarters. [The tour was] to sell the Korean War to potential members of the forces, war bonds etc. At the end of the tour, I boarded a B-29 and flew from Hamilton AFB, California to Seattle, and went to the Boeing factory. I saw the first 707 (367‑0) and B-47s being produced. It was an exhilarating month.”

Keith also got the chance to dine with a former first lady, whose notable contribution to military aviation was her very public advocacy of fellow Mustang pilots, the Tuskagee airmen.

“We stayed at the Waldorf Astoria for a night. There was a function and I had breakfast with Eleanor Roosevelt –sat opposite her!”

Upon Keith’s return to Kimpo, he learned that he was to be sent to Malta, after converting to the De Havilland Vampire at Williamtown.

The Vampire was an instant hit. “It was a pussycat. Although, I wouldn’t have liked to have been flying it in Korea. We had two engines in the Meteor.”

Australia had been asked by Britain to contribute an air garrison in defence of Malta, and in 1952 Australia committed personnel from 78 Wing, who, once in‑country, took over the Royal Navy airfield at Tal Far.

Meggs recalls: “The RAF had been in Malta, they were wanted in Europe because of the Russian contretemps at the time. Ourselves and 14 Squadron RNZAF were sent over to the Med to replace the RAF. It was a good two years over there, going to Cyprus on armament camp.”

In 1954, Keith returned to an air force that had drastically curtailed the number of flying hours its fighter pilots flew. (“It was only 55 hours a year, they were sending people out to help airfield construction squadrons, parachute courses”). He found himself at RAAF HQ in Melbourne, then at Training Command at Albert Park, working 24 hours on and 48 hours off. It was there the idea germinated for a book on the aircraft industry in Australia which he would write after combining archival material sourced from the RAAF with a vast trove of primary source documents collected with the support of no less than Lawrence Wackett himself.

Aviation scholar

Fast forward 60 years and Keith’s house is a veritable suburban Smithsonian, piled high with indexed boxes of historically significant documents, drawings and photographs. I enquire about the mammoth job of photocopying them from the originals. “Photocopying? What’s that? They’re all hand written notes.”

These carefully collected archives were to be the basis of Keith’s indispensible reference work, Australian Aircraft and the Industry, the first two volumes of which, covering the years 1884 to 1939, were published in 2009.

Two further volumes, covering 1939 to the mid 1980s, should see the printers in 2016 and are said to contain production proposals for the Vultee Vengeance, Grumman Panther, Bristol Buckingham, North American F-100, Avro 10 and the Republic F-105, plus a mountain of previously unreleased information on the CA-4/11 Woomera torpedo bomber and literally anything in between.

Reflecting on aircraft manufacturing in Australia, Keith names the piston engined CA- 15 as the industry’s finest hour, sadly one reached as the jet age dawned and new paradigms of fighter performance were being written. In terms of the industry’s greatest missed opportunity, he unhesitatingly volunteers the ill-starred A-10 Wamira, a locally developed basic trainer that was cancelled after the completion of a prototype in 1985.

“During the war, so many people working in the industry. The Wamira killed [it].”

Overview of an industry

Having left the Air Force, Keith remained in aviation, being welcomed back to CAC in 1957 to work on the Meteor’s replacement, the Sabre, and the indigenouslydesigned Ceres crop duster.

Two years later, he founded the still extant Aviation Historical Society of Australia (AHSA), before turning his hand to air traffic control and freelance charter flying. Civilian flying was not without its moments; Keith casually mentions two passengers who refused to pay him after he flew them to the UK and back in a Bonanza. (They were policemen. From the Fraud Squad.) And offhandedly recounts (another) forced landing, this time in a Cessna 182. With the majority of his hours on civilian types, he nominates the Piper Chieftain as his favourite twin to fly, just pipping the DC-3.

Now retired, he fills his days with duties as patron of the AHSA and with the seemingly unending task of completing Volumes 3 and 4 of his book. And while he’s not as nimble as the Mustangs he once flew, the will, wit and discipline that landed him in the cockpit of single-seat fighters is still very much in evidence. What drives him in this endeavour is certainly not money, but rather he declares, the desire “just to record my interest and involvement in aviation, and the awareness in people I got to know.”

As he shows me to the door, he bids me farewell, only interrupted by a reflexive look upwards to check a passing aircraft.

I was hit over North Korean lines, but turned south, and lo and behold there was Kimpo. KEITH MEGGS