Bugs, bombs

Judy Tudor, on board the South Pacific’s first Jumbo flight, says:

Bugs, bombs make it a flight to remember

PASSENGERS on the South Pacific’s first Jumbo-jet aren’t likely to forget it in a hurry: For me it began in Sydney in a heat wave, five hours late, and ended on a remote portion of Nadi airport, Fiji, seven hours later, being searched for a bomb.

At the beginning of the frustration-filled odyssey what seemed like a million Sydneysiders, in a quarter of a million cars, clogged the roads around the airport for a radius of five miles. What seemed to be hundreds of thousands made it to the international airport itself, formed queues for the water-taps and lavatories, double queues for anything edible or drinkable and used up the air-conditioning to the extent that it was 25 degrees hotter inside the building than out.

For their pains, these waiting hordes were rewarded by a glimpse of navigation lights as the giant plane, in darkness, whipped over Botany Bay and onto the runway, nine hours late; and four hours later in what must have been a record-breaking turn-around, whip back over Botany Bay and away.

On board the plane, passengers found the same super-heated air they’d been using in the terminal but were hastily assured that this was not the fault of the plane’s engines (rumours about which had had wide publicity in Sydney newspapers the previous day) but merely some fault in the cooling system.

Airborne, the temperature soon righted itself but not so the cabin lights which either refused to come on, or, without warning, burst in sequence into a frenzy of animated display like an advertising sign. The tepid meal (presumably another electrical fault in the galley) arriving at 11.30 p.m. was eaten in pitch darkness in our part of the plane.

But these irritations were merely a work-up for what was to come. As the pilot had not landed a Jumbo-jet in darkness at Nadi before, we were surprised but not put out when he appeared to take a wrong turning off me tarmac and finally drew up in a patch of rough p*ass, with no terminal in sight.

But this was no pilot’s error. Word had been received, we were told, that a bomb had been planted on board n Sydney and that Nadi authorities had therefore •equested that passengers disembark at the edge of he airfield while a search was made. We were required o take our hand luggage and leave as “expeditiously is possible”. 3 As they always say in the news stories, “there was 10 panic the bomb bit seemed just too pat, anyhow “but we gathered up our bits and pieces and prepared sxpeditiously to leave. But hold it! Nadi might not vant bombs going off in its terminal but it was letermmed that if we and the plane went up, we should lo so free of bugs.

Our expediting flight out of Front Exits, Right and -ett, was halted while the usual insecticiding gents,

with their pressure-packs, came on board and thoroughly sprayed the aircraft, waited the regulation five minutes, and then gave the all clear for emergency precautions to resume.

Out on the ground we were directed to small buses which whisked us away, not to the terminal as one might expect, but in the other direction, to a large bare galvanised iron hangar which proclaimed itself as the Nadi Small Bore Rifle Club.

For an hour the somewhat less than 200 passengers milled around there, or gazed hopefully out across the rough grass to the plane which now seemed to ooze tantalising comfort.

Air hostesses spread half an acre of pale yellow blankets on the dirty cement floor for those whose legs would no longer hold them up, and police, airline people, civil aviation and customs officials stood around in huddles looking as lost and weary as the passengers.

An impasse had been reached, it seemed, over the 58 passengers disembarking at Nadi. What to do about them and their luggage was, it was rumoured, too weighty a problem to be dealt with at Nadi and they were getting the comptroller out of bed in Suva to make a decision.

Whether they did, or what he said if they did, 1 know not, but another half hour later a covey of officials arrived, with their rubber stamps, together with several truckloads of baggage, commandeered a ping-pong table and began to stamp passports.

Simultaneously, two customs men, with offsiders, began to examine the assorted baggage of the 58 disembarking passengers, right there on the grubby floor of the HO of the Rifle Club.

Squatting on the floor, in among legs, children, people on blankets and the bags and cases of milling passengers, those men went through everything from ladies’ handbags to brown paper parcels in a search and-destroy operation of an intensity never likely to be equalled at Nadi. Looking for the bomb, it was said, although what they would have done if they had found it; and what would have happened to the mass of sweating and swearing humanity in the big tin shed, poses a mind-bending though now academic question.

Dawn was breaking as the last of us staggered out with our baggage from that ordeal-by-customs-officers m-Small-Bore-Rifle-Club, showed our passports once more, were allowed onto the buses and, finally, made the Nadi Airport terminal.

Through passengers were still sitting dismally on the floor of the hangar when we left and men swarmed in and out of the big plane. They finally got away at 7.30 a.m.

And Jumbo-jets? As we had been told, they’re big, statistics-wise. As high as a six-storey building; with 7 ft men being able to pull up the arm-rests of the four centre seats and stretch out to sleep in perfect comfort; and 5 ft 2 in. dwarfs being unable to reach the airblowers without standing on the seats, such is the vastness of the headroom.

When it comes to being pains in the neck on inaugural flights the Jumbos were big in that department also Ask anyone who travelled on flight 812 out of Sydney on Sunday, October 4.