A bitter disappointment

An existing problem problem for TAA was the Adelaide-Perth sector. Watkins explained, “We did operate the Viscount service usually non-stop Adelaide to Perth, but when the prevailing wind from the west was particularly strong there were occasions when we had to refuel at Kalgoorlie. And of course this gave the service a bad name and we could never carry a full payload anyway on that run. We adopted the technique of reflight planning over Kalgoorlie giving ourselves the necessary reserve on that stage, we could have returned to Kalgoorlie if necessary or gone into Perth with a 15% reserve. But it wasn’t the right aeroplane for the run.

It became clear from our route studies that the Caravelle would really be in its element. That sort of stage distance was just right for it, Adelaide-Perth. What we intended to do with the Caravelle basically was to run the two aircraft to and from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide. Initially we would have had just the two aeroplanes on that, with a Viscount feeder service from Melbourne to Adelaide. Occasionally we could have run the aircraft through Melbourne. There was some argument about Essendon’s suitability but we would check that with the actual operating behaviour of the aeroplane. It wasn’t vital to the system. It wasn’t just the engineering people, my people who were interested keen on the Caravelle, our pilots, our management everybody had gone over and had a look at it and flown in it, tried it out and everyone was really enthusiastic about it.”

On July 5 1957 Warren McDonald, chairman of the Australian National Airlines Commission (which traded as Trans-Australia Airlines) discussed with Sud Aviation an extension of an option to purchase two Model SE210 Caravelles for TAA for delivery during May-June 1960. McDonald made three approaches to the government to secure the Caravelle purchase but all attempts proved futile. The government contended the domestic system was not sufficiently robust to progress to larger and faster turbine aircraft at that stage.

Adding to TAA’s Caravelle purchase woes was Ansett’s intransigence. John Watkins summarised the situation, “As a matter of fact John Ryland (TAA’s General Manager) said to me several times after that, that was the most bitter disappointment of his life. He never imagined that that was going to be refused and he was looking forward very much to getting the Caravelle into TAA service. But from the Government’s point of view it was just at the time when the Two Airline Policy was coming into effect and using hindsight one can understand that they believed that unless both operators could be induced to introduce jets at the same time, that sort of technological quantum leap would put one airline at a grave disadvantage in comparison with the other. And this would upset the whole philosophy of the Two Airline stabilised industry.

Ansett was not prepared to switch in favour of the Caravelle, we had a number of very interesting discussions with the management and technical people at Ansett, but we couldn’t convince them that they’d be better off going for Caravelles than Electras and they couldn’t convince us that we’d be better with Electras than Caravelles. But in the upshot the Government decided that if anybody was to get any aeroplanes in that category, and they were of a comparable category in terms of passenger capacity and stage capabilities, it would have to be Lockheed Electras. So we had no option but to go with the Electra.

The Electra was a good aeroplane with certain qualifications. I don’t know whether you say an aeroplane is a good aeroplane when you have to send it back to the manufacturer twice to have its wings rebuilt. Well the first problem was they started crashing in America because the wing was too elastic and they developed a propeller whirl mode that you shook the wings off. That happened a couple of times and the aeroplane was put under very severe speed restrictions until the problem was solved. And we had to send all the fleet back to Burbank, Lockheed picked up the tab, they had to.”

In a last ditch stand, during May 1962 Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle F-BJAO *Santa Maria** visited Melbourne on a demonstration tour. This writer was on holidays in Melbourne and visited Essendon on May 4 1962 to witness the Ansett team conduct an inspection of the aircraft prior to a demonstration flight. It was a charade as Ansett were not in least bit interested in a Caravelle purchase.

The introduction of scheduled domestic jet airline services in Australia would be spearheaded some years later by the Boeing 727 in November 1964 and Douglas DC-9 in April 1967.