CHAPTER 8

Steam Power

Coral and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Glenmore Road, Paddington, in Sydney’s inner city. Coral got a job managing Joint Ventures for the Aus­tralian Petroleum Management Fund. Life was pretty simple then. I remember one night lying with Coral on the floor (we had no lounge furniture) watching flies land on the ceiling; how did they do it? Was it a loop or a barrel roll before touchdown?

Qantas pay scales were very low for entry-level pilots. I started on a second officer’s salary of $3657 per 56 days (with $266 overseas pay), and I trained at Mascot on Boeing 747 Classic aircraft. This was 1986, when Qantas was still solely international and the only airline in the world to fly Jumbos exclusively. Murray Warfield, a fellow ex-RAAF pilot who also joined my course, had three young children at the time and he qualified for social security payments to supplement his meagre income.

There were four pilots on my 747 conversion course, but two of them left just before we started to join Cathay for a lot more money. Cathay called me about a year after that and offered me a job flying out of Hong Kong. I said, ‘Double my salary and we’ll talk.’ I’m glad they didn’t get back to me; I love Australia and I didn’t want to be tempted to move countries simply for the money. Qantas replaced the two Cathay-bound pilots and we moved on. We trained in simulators, learning the aircraft and all the possible failures that could befall them, which meant going over and over the standard operating pro­cedures (SOPs) and checklists.

The early generation Jumbos produced up until the late 1980s were given the affable title ‘Classic’. These aircraft had no computer networks, so engineers were carried to manage the complex systems. The Classic Jumbo range comprised the early generation 100 and 200 series (with the short upperdeck bubble), and the 300 series (with the longer bubble). With hindsight, the 747 Classics were fairly simple ‘steam-driven’ aircraft, essentially like a Cessna except bigger, faster and with more thrust. They had very simple thrust control: long cables connected the thrust levers to each engine. You had four throttle levers in a row, and the aim was to carefully push them forward or pull them back in unison because the jet crabbed sideways if the levers were not aligned (the engines on one side would power up with more thrust than the engines on the other side).

The pilot of any light jet aircraft would have felt at home in the Classic Jumbo’s cockpit. We had to manually compensate for the secondary effects of the controls (aileron, rudder). For example, when the ailerons are moved to roll the aircraft, the pilot must also pull back (move the elevators) to stop the nose dropping, and move the rudder pedals to stop the passengers slipping sideways in their seats – jobs done automatically these days.

Qantas had an exciting international network in the 1980s, servicing destinations in five of the seven continents. There were a lot of airports to get used to. My favourite airports were Hong Kong (Kai Tak), Tahiti, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Paris and London.

Kai Tak was one of the two most challenging airports I experienced in the Qantas network. When landing towards the south, pilots flew the infamous IGS dogleg approach as it avoided the 3300 foot–high mountains that prevented simpler straight-in approaches. The approach to runway 13 was a wonderful exercise in planning, using visual and instrument cues to fly, and crew support. It was even more challenging in conditions of poor visibility and strong crosswinds. We descended in cloud on the first part of the dogleg approach, aiming 47 degrees to the left of the airport. If we saw flashing strobes starting to appear through the cloud as we approached the minimum altitude, we could continue the approach visually and land (even though we couldn’t see the airport or the runway). Once we made the decision to continue, it was a bit like the goat track approach at Tapini – we had to keep descending, our only reference being the line of strobes as they led us into a right turn. At the end of the turn we would skim a few hundred feet over the tops of residential buildings while the locals nonchalantly hung their washing to dry on their roofs. The right turn finally finished as we passed 300-feet altitude with the runway straight in front of us. Here’s the catch. If there was a strong tailwind on the first leg of the approach it would become a crosswind from the right after we had turned through the 47-degree right turn onto finals. That final turn is made so low that we only had time to make one wing-down followed by a wing-up movement to align with the runway – only one turn so we had to be precise.

A good co-pilot earns his pay on this approach. You could easily end up in a situation where it’s unsafe to continue to land. Wise pilots who blew the approach ‘went around’ and tried again. One unwise pilot who continued with an unstable approach, in 1993, ended up over-running the end of the runway and parking ignominiously in Hong Kong’s harbour.

I loved flying the Classic Jumbo. By the time I entered Qantas, the Classic had been in operation for almost eighteen years and Qantas was trying to get the final ounces of thrust from what was ageing engine technology. They injected 2400 kilograms of de-mineralised water into each engine during take-off to enable operations from hot, humid places, such as Cairns, with a full load. (The water reduced the internal engine temperatures, permitting more fuel to be introduced, and so more thrust. Steam also provided a thrust benefit.) The JT9 engines on the Classic could produce just 45,500 pounds of thrust (dry) and 47,000 pounds (wet) when the complicated water injection was used. These days, the new A380’s Trent 900 engine has been tested up to 93,000 pounds of thrust, though Qantas only pushes it to 72,000 pounds.

The Classic Jumbo’s technology was leading edge for its time, but is now regarded as primitive. The auto-landing system was a humble mechanical device, incorporating lots of servos and actuators that delivered mediocre performance and reliability, and needed to be checked regularly. In the 200- and 300-series Jumbos, some of the automated systems and warnings were retrofitted. There were switches and warning lights for everything, but there were no computers to monitor them. We had to continually scan the panels for failures, and every twenty minutes the engineer would record about 50 engine and system para­meters in an A2-sized log book that would be returned to Sydney for plotting and analysis. There were no warning computers or electronic checklists, so even the simplest failures could take a long time to resolve. For example, in 1988, the leading edge slats failed to deploy when I was approaching to land at Melbourne airport. It took the three of us (two pilots and one engineer) 30 minutes to work through the emergency checklist – a ­procedure that would only take two pilots ten minutes today.

The navigation systems were good for their time, but there was no GPS technology. We used Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) technology developed from the aerospace programs that used mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers. INSs were impressive back then; we could launch from Sydney, turn off all our radio aids and trust our navigation to three US$100,000 Litton INSs. Twelve hours later, as we approached Los Angeles airspace, we would be confident our position was accurate to within 72 kilometres (39 nautical miles). (GPS today would put us inside 3 metres – 23,000 times more accurate and at a fraction of the cost.)

All pilots on the flight deck were busy when we flew from Asia to Europe. On a flight to London we’d pick one route from a selection of about twenty. The route would have about 200 waypoints – positions on the ground provided by countries to control where aircraft enter, transit and leave their airspace. We would expect to be intercepted by fighters if we diverted from our cleared route. Each waypoint’s position was defined by latitude and longitude references printed on our flight plan and navigation charts. Those 200 coordinates had to be input into the INS by a pilot on the flight deck – a slow, laborious job that is done automatically by data uplink these days. One by one, the support pilots would load successive (fifteen-character) coordinates into each of the INS’s nine waypoint slots; it was all the INS could handle. The INS was then coupled to the auto­pilot and the aircraft would track to the next waypoint. It was a simple system that needed constant attention. In the days before 9/11, we’d welcome some passengers into the flight deck and show them how it all worked.

I remember one time over Russia in the middle of the night, I was entering my next sequence of nine coordinates into the machine and I must have been distracted because suddenly one of the waypoints was displayed to be 13,000 kilometres (7000 nautical miles) distant – the giveaway that I’d entered an incorrect character. The manual exercise of inputting these 135 characters, then methodically crosschecking the waypoints (by checking tracks and distances) sometimes occupied the entire focus of the support pilot. In Russia, where waypoints can be separated by one or two minutes, your efforts to pre-load the next nine INS waypoints would be in vain when the air traffic controller then cleared you to track from waypoint 1 direct to waypoint 9, and you’d have to go through your sequence and scrub out the ones now not needed then load new waypoints ahead again. It’s worth noting that the generation of flyers before us thought we had it easy; up to the 1960s navigators used sextants and slide-rules – they could plot by the stars if they had to.

Radio communications were dreadful back then, nothing like the pleasant environment we share today. Very high frequency (VHF) radios are the preferred choice to deliver clear reception over short distances (up to 280 kilometres or 150 nautical miles). But last century many countries couldn’t provide a VHF infrastructure so we used high frequency (HF) radios to communicate with the controllers. HF communications suffer from two problems: quality and interference. The controller’s voice was often drowned out by the ‘hiss’ from noise and solar activity (flares) that charge up the Earth’s ionosphere, and our HF transmissions were being constantly over-­transmitted by multiple people.

The stress for today’s crews flying from Asia into Europe has changed. The INS has been replaced by multiple flight management computers that upload or understand the world’s routes. Pilot stress is reduced because clear VHF communications are now available in most countries. The Traffic Collision and Avoidance System (TCAS) was introduced in the mid-1990s and provided an extraordinarily successful last line of defence against mid-air collisions.

The Classic Jumbos were tough, reliable old planes. Bits would fall off and they’d still fly. One time I was flying from Sydney to Auckland and we were hit by a very strong bolt of lightning. As the aircraft became electrostatically charged, every particle of dust in that aircraft lifted up and hung in the air as if suspended. We lost one HF radio because the lightning vaporised the 4 millimetre–thick steel tube that was our HF antenna, but the plane barely reacted. It had been developed to be a military transport and it was tough.

Today, the stresses the Classic pilots had to endure have been reduced, but there are new problems to contend with – congestion, aircraft complexity, aircraft performance, aircraft automation, fatigue, complex airspace and complex air traffic control instructions. All of these factors steadily increase with time while the number of pilots in the cockpit decreases.

Pilots worked up to twenty-hour tours of duty and slept in bunks beside the cockpit, but it was more luxurious than the Air Force: all the accommodation, transportation, flight plans, fuel calculations and paperwork were organised for us by Qantas. When you shut down the engines you didn’t have to secure the aircraft; you just walked away and climbed into a dedicated bus bound for the crew hotel.

It took some time to get used to flying with such a large flight crew on the Classics. The normal crew complement consisted of the captain, one first officer (FO), one second officer (SO) and one engineer. The SO relieved the pilots and the engineer in the cruise. On flights longer than twelve hours, we’d have an additional SO for inflight relief. With five technical crew members, the Classic’s cockpit was congested on long-haul sectors, and sometimes the overcrowding produced interesting human dynamics.

Sometimes the additional pilots actioned activities outside their responsibility. In their minds they were trying to help, but instead they were interfering with the pilot and co-pilot’s standard operating procedures (SOPs). In the worst cases, ego battles could erupt in the flight deck which, if not countered, could lead to anarchy. For example, during one approach into Los Angeles, when I was sitting behind the captain, I felt the shoulder of the other second officer crush between the engineer’s and my shoulder as he pushed in front to change the active frequency on the captain’s radio control panel. He was trying to fly from the back of the flight deck – an aggressive action that could be dangerous. I was surprised the captain did not rebuke the SO’s actions as it should never have been ­tolerated.

This incident was the catalyst for my second career epiphany. I had to leave the Classic Jumbos and fly in a cockpit with fewer crew; the fewer the better as far as I was concerned. I wanted to move to an aircraft where the pilots’ roles were clearly defined and where the pilots prioritised team performance over personal ego. I also promised myself that when I became a captain I would create a friendly environment where all pilots are encouraged to contribute in an efficient team that followed the SOPs.

I got wind of a new Boeing that Qantas was looking at buying: the 747–400. It was my ideal aircraft: new high technology, the best of the best, new challenges, an exciting introduction and fewer crew!

I started the first officer promotion course for the 747 Classic in early 1988, only eighteen months after joining Qantas. I had to fly circuits for a week at the very windy Avalon Airport in Melbourne. It must have cost Qantas $80,000 for each of us given that, for every ‘touch and go’, the landing fee is $2000, tyre wear would cost $500, and that’s before the fuel bill for 8000 kilograms of kerosene per hour!

I also learned something about my eyesight. One windy night at Avalon, when we were practising landing in crosswinds, Malcolm Hatton-Ward, my instructor, told me to use the approach lights (TVASI) to help me get on the correct approach path. I couldn’t see what he was talking about as RAAF airports didn’t use these approach lights and so I had never given them high priority while at Qantas. Malcolm asked me if I could see them. I shook my head, and the other second officer I was with – Joel Gregory – took off his spectacles and offered them to me. It was like emerging in another world – everything was clear. I’d had no idea I had low-light myopia (night short-sightedness) and that I needed glasses.

I completed my first officer conversion course in early 1988 and sat in a holding pattern waiting for my position as an FO on our brand new 747–400s.