How Qantas flew a 747 non-stop from London to Sydney

The beginnings of Qantas’ long-range travel story can be traced back to the early days of World War II. In 1941, the Australian government recognised that the airline was already experienced in flying-boat operations, so it delegated its crews to take delivery of the RAAF’s first long-range Catalina flying boats. Initially employed in protecting Australia’s sea lanes from marauding German
raiders, these Catalinas would soon fulfil a critical role in the war with Japan.

On paper, the Catalina delivery task would have appeared fairly straightforward for pilots and navigators who had already accumulated extensive experience operating flying boats from Australia to Singapore and beyond. What made the assignment different, however, was the way captain Russell Tapp and his crew decided to use it as an opportunity to test their steed.

Technically, the requirement for the three-stop delivery flights was fairly simple: initially to fly 2,680 kilometres from Pearl Harbor to Canton Island in Kiribati, to be followed by 3057 kilometres to Nouméa and then, finally, 1,720 kilometres to Sydney’s Rose Bay.

But while that might have been the standard pattern for most of the deliveries, when his turn came Tapp couldn’t resist the temptation.

Trimming back the fuel consumption, he decided to push the range of his Catalina to its limit, overflying Nouméa and reaching Sydney in one hop, covering almost 4,800 kilometres in 24 hours.

Such pioneering efforts in the careful management of fuel by Tapp and the other crews during the deliveries would pave the way for the airline’s record-breaking and top-secret ‘Double Sunrise Service’ later in the war — at times over 30 hours in the air between Perth and Ceylon, much of it through enemy territory, to keep the vital link between Australia and the UK open.

Even with the coming of the 707 jet age, such excessive range requirements saw Qantas operate the longest route sectors of any airline in the world. After the first of its new Boeing 747-400s rolled off the assembly line, it wasn’t long before the company’s original long-range experience came to the fore.

It was a Qantas London-based marketing executive, Tony Luker, who came up with the idea to break a long-range world record by flying direct from London to Sydney in the airline’s first Boeing 747-400, VH-OJA City of Canberra, in 1989. Soon those in Sydney saw the value of Luker’s suggestion. Not only could it be a massive promotion but it could also steal the limelight from rival British Airways who, rumour had it, were planning a non-stop flight from London to Perth. Such an opportunity was guaranteed to reactivate that historic competitiveness between the two carriers that was never far from the surface.

A cloak of secrecy descended as a small team of Qantas pilots and performance engineers gathered behind closed doors to flesh out the possibilities, all too aware of the risks involved in attempting to use a brand-new aircraft fresh off the assembly line. This would be not only a unique operational test but a scheme that ran the risk of becoming a public relations embarrassment if it failed.

The man that Qantas operations chief Alan Terrell appointed to lead the planning, captain David Massy-Greene, was a natural choice. Dux of the first Qantas cadet pilot scheme in 1965, he had flown Boeing 707s as a pilot and as a navigator before his promotion to captain on the 747 in 1984, and later filled the role of fleet captain on the Boeing 767 before his appointment as the project pilot for the yet-to-fly 747-400.

Given the complex array of organisational and operational issues that such a non-stop, long-range venture demanded along with the need for secrecy, Massy-Greene’s extended periods quietly gathering information as VH-OJA took shape in Seattle required him to exercise extreme caution. His colleague Alan Bones describes the atmosphere: ‘As a member of a small team of executives, including British Airways, advising Boeing of each airline’s particular requirements for the aircraft, he must have at times felt he was walking on eggshells. One slip of the tongue would mean the secret was out of the bag.’

Not that things were much different for yet another select group gathering at Mascot. Their critical function was to obtain the one element upon which the project would succeed or fail: aviation fuel.

First, they needed to fill the tanks with enough fuel for the flight itself, which they did using a very different method to the one used for a scheduled 747 passenger service. Bizarrely, the team’s calculations showed that filling the tanks individually in the cool of the evening before departure until the fuel literally ‘spilled out’ of the wing vents would allow the fuel to contract overnight, thus providing space in the tanks for an extra 500 to 600 imperial gallons (2,273 to 2,728 litres) the next morning.

Second, they needed to determine the special type of fuel required, which would ultimately be the most important challenge as far as fuel was concerned. As the weeks went by, Peter Brooks, the man responsible for negotiating the airline’s worldwide fuel requirements, found himself receiving some strange inquiries from the airline’s former chief operating officer John Ward.

First it was: ‘What’s the density of fuel in London?’

Brooks’s initial response obviously didn’t satisfy Ward, so several other questions quickly followed, until finally Ward let him in on the secret: if a non-stop flight was to be achieved they would need a special high-density fuel — and Brooks’s task was to find it.

The next day Brooks was on a flight to London with a mission to find a substitute for the standard Jet A-1 fuel used by the 747s, only to discover the nearest example of the type required was that used in cruise missiles. When he fired off a query to Seattle to test that idea, Boeing came back with the news that cruise-missile fuel was so heavy it would cause the 400’s wings to fall off.

In the end it was Shell, the company that had helped Qantas survive in its very earliest days in the outback, that looked like it might come to Brooks’s rescue. They believed their subsidiary in Germany could produce the relatively small amount of the special fuel mix capable of doing the job, although even then the logistics required were formidable. Brooks was told 10 tankers would be required to carry the finished product across Europe to London, and even then the blended fuel would need to be constantly shunted backwards and forwards in its Hamburg rail cars to ensure it retained its mix until it was loaded onto the ferry to cross the English Channel.

While Brooks manipulated the fuel problem, others back at Mascot were looking at trying to solve what was morphing into another logistical nightmare. A one-off flight would demand its own air traffic control route across the more than 9,000 nautical miles between London and Sydney, requiring optimum fuel-saving altitudes while at the same time avoiding air traffic delays. This meant negotiating complex and specific overflight rights with the numerous governments along the route, with the inevitable result of accepting compromises with routing and altitudes. But by mid1989, with some of the critical negotiations now at decision point and with the August flight only weeks away, the secret could be kept no longer.

On 26 July, Qantas director of flight operations Ken Davenport announced the airline’s plans to use the flight ‘to validate the 747- 400’s performance data and fuel management techniques’, while at the same time entering the aviation record books, surpassing a South African Airways 747 SP which held the non-stop record of 8,872 nautical miles from Seattle to Cape Town. Davenport also announced the three operating captains who would accompany M assy-Greene: flight operations training director Ray Heiniger, flight standards and safety director Rob Greenop, and manager of flight simulator George Lindeman.

Additional passengers on board would be limited to 23, and included board director Jack Davenport; representatives of Boeing, and engine and oil companies; and a small, carefully chosen group of journalists, several of whom would provide live radio feeds as City of Canberra crossed the world. To reduce weight, even their baggage would come on a separate Qantas service. Carrying so few passengers, however, had its advantages: the flight would need only one heavy galley for provisioning meals, minimal water tanks and only one of the standard three air-conditioning packs.

In early August, with the aircraft now in Qantas hands, test and endorsements flights for the crew began over Moses Lake near Seattle. It was here that the first serious problem arose. Mysteriously, after around four hours of training and with their instruments showing normal oil pressure, other indicators started to reveal an alarming reduction in the amount of oil being used in two of the aircraft’s Rolls-Royce RB211 engines. Ray Heiniger would subsequently describe it as an ‘oil hide’, but its initial discovery certainly created enough concern to put the whole plan in  jeopardy. He promptly sent a warning telex to Rolls-Royce in England that they might need to have two spare engines on stand-by.

To everyone’s relief, the problem would finally prove to be a byproduct of the intense training regime the crew had put the aircraft through at Moses Lake, where the 747 had been consistently engaged for hours in left-hand turns in the circuit area. This consistent left turning ‘bias’ had somehow affected the readings on the engines on the ‘downside’ during the turns.

On the morning of 11 August, City of Canberra — watched by a small contingent of media specifically flown to Seattle to witness the occasion — took off on its positioning flight to London. The media group’s size was in a striking contrast to what lay ahead in the UK, where anticipation of the record attempt was already attracting extensive press interest. Once in London, Massy-Greene and his crew were required to divide their time between a hectic schedule of official dinners, media commitments, and journeys back and forth to Heathrow to oversee preparations for the flight. There’s little doubt it was a difficult four days for British Airways.

Here, on their local turf, the former colonials were getting frontpage coverage in London’s Daily Telegraph and dominating nighttime television, culminating in a congregation of media at Heathrow on the morning of 16 August as special arrangements were put in place to prepare VH-OJA for flight. Its take-off would bear little resemblance to a regular Qantas 747 departure from  Heathrow’s passenger terminal.

On this morning, City of Canberra’s engines would not be started immediately after push back. Instead, those on the tarmac watched the 747 in awe when, with its tanks so full, fuel began rolling off the wingtip vents as the aircraft was towed to the end of the runway. Since his calculations had shown the aircraft would use a half-tonne of fuel taxiing between the terminal and the start of the runway, Massy-Greene wanted to conserve every drop.

Then the engines were started, and it was in the air for a graduated climb through British airspace and across Europe. Air traffic controllers in a succession of countries had cleared the ‘special’ flight for the use of optimal altitudes to allow it to save on fuel, and on occasions would even move other aircraft out of the 400’s way. When one airline pilot over Germany wanted to save fuel and requested the use of the same altitude as City of Canberra, he was quickly told by air traffic control they already had an aircraft at that altitude: ‘And he’s going a bit further than you are.’

First tracking over Germany and across Yugoslavia — where the Belgrade controller passed on the best wishes of the government — it flew over Turkey, Tehran and Muscat until heading towards Colombo. While the four captains took turns relieving each other in the cockpit and juggling flight levels as they watched fuel usage, Davenport and the few passengers on board kept themselves active by walking the empty aisles, and were served meals by two of Qantas’ most senior flight service directors, Dave Cohen and Mal Callander.

But those on board were not to be totally denied a touch of Qantas’ traditional first-class service. Due to weight restrictions, only 350 kilograms had been allowed for food and beverages, but the menu somehow managed to include Caspian caviar, oysters, poached salmon and, much to the delight of Sydney Morning Herald aviation writer Tom Ballantyne, two dozen cans of Foster’s, a few bottles of champagne and a small selection of red and white wines. ‘Someone obviously had been thinking of us,’ an appreciative Ballantyne would later comment.

Over Colombo, as they climbed the aircraft to 41,000 feet to take advantage of more favourable winds, Massy-Greene and his crew might have allowed themselves a brief moment to recollect that directly below them were the waters where the wartime Qantas Catalinas from Perth had established their own long-distance reputation. It’s doubtful any such thoughts lingered long, however, as those winds at 41,000 feet were destined to be the last in their favour. Once the aircraft was abeam the Cocosnds, Massy-Greene received the news he had been dreading: Sydney weather was expected to deteriorate, bringing with it intermittent thunderstorms around the time of their arrival.

From then on it would be touch and go as that traditional air crew dilemma presented itself: the necessity to handle diminishing fuel reserves yet still have enough to allow a diversion to an alternate airport. On this occasion, however, there was a world record at stake.

Meanwhile, monitoring their progress ahead of them in Sydney, Ken Davenport was busy working his open line to the weather bureau and, since an overly negative forecast might put the whole record attempt in jeopardy, gradually coming to the conclusion he might soon have to reach for his last resort: convince the bureau to alter the forecast from ‘thunderstorms’ to ‘heavy showers’, thus allowing Massy-Greene more margin with his minimum fuel requirement. To Davenport’s relief, the weather bureau agreed and the revised forecast went over the radio to VH-OJA.

Unfortunately, a few moment later, with Davenport still on an open line to the bureau, a crash of thunder burst over the Mascot Jet Base:

‘What the **** was that?’ asked the bureau official.

After a few seconds of silence, Davenport assured him that no one at Mascot had heard anything.

Soon after, City of Canberra appeared out of the overcast skies to the north, sending up a cloud of spray as its wheels touched Mascot’s runway and the record books — 24 hours, 9 minutes and 5 seconds after lift-off from London. Hundreds of Qantas staff gathered to welcome the crew as they stepped from the aircraft. Standing in the rain, one Qantas engineer, when reminded of the British Airways plans to do a non-stop 747 flight from London to Perth, expressed his doubts as to whether it would attract much attention: ‘I guess we’ve sort of stolen their thunder a bit.’

There were other comparisons of note that day: as a child in 1948, it had taken Massy-Greene and his parents a total of 93 hours, with six stops, to cover the same journey in a Lockheed Constellation. His compatriot George Lindeman could go one better than that: it had taken his great-grandfather nine months to reach Botany Bay in 1787–88.

At a Jet Base Open Day several weeks later, the Australian Youth Orchestra, The Seekers, Debbie Byrne and Normie Rowe provided the entertainment as Hazel Hawke, wife of prime minister Bob Hawke, officially christened City of Canberra. The aircraft’s long-range record remained in place until June 1993 when an Airbus A-340-200 flew from Paris to Auckland in 21 hours and 32 minutes. Even that, however, still hadn’t matched the 30-hour secret Qantas wartime fl ights between Perth and Colombo.

David Massy-Greene, the man primarily responsible for the success of the mission, would go on to deliver fourteen Boeing 747-400s into the Qantas stable, out of a total of more than 30. Its longrange capability would bring new opportunities for his airline, but for Massy-Greene it would be the prelude to a whole new phase of his career.

This is an edited extract from The Mighty 747 by Jim Eames, RRP $32.99, published by Allen & Unwin, out now.