Up Front

with the Editor

“So this is the Qantas 747B —the most advanced Jumbo Boeing has yet produced. The largest 747 lounge in the world, first-run feature movies, top-class musical entertainment and downstairs galleys for 56 first-class and 300 economy passengers.” This is how the plug goes for Qantas’ new Pacific jumbo service.

1 flew on the first of them the other week, and somewhat to my surprise I liked it. I was surprised because I expected a machine of that size, loaded with passengers, to be a depersonalised, perhaps inhuman mode of transport. Who wants to take to the air and promptly become just another movie viewer? What’s happened to the art of flying ?

Strangely, I liked the Jumbo be cause its very size constantly re minded me that I was flying. All those aisles, and space enough to do your morning jog around the perimeter, and the damn thing flies, too.

Just a laugh Aboard an aircraft I’m habitually a wanderer. I like to talk to people, sitting on the arm of their seat, moving on only when the hostess starts to become exasperated over serving the meal trays; so the aisle space that the Jumbo has suits me fine.

But my flying career hasn’t always been like this. Like most Australians I started early, but in Dragons and Drovers and DC3s and aircraft of a similar modest size and vintage that apparently counted for little but a laugh in the jet set world that was developing in the other half of the globe.

It wasn’t very long ago, I re member, when Eric Lawson, late of the Solomons, was chuckling over the arrival in Honiara of Jack Paar to do a documentary on Kennedy’s PTIO9 for American TV. Much travelled Paar had arrived in Honiara from Australia and decided to fly out via the New Hebrides and Fiji.

Fiji Airways at that time used small Herons, and when Eric and Gabriel

took Jack out to Henderson Field to board his Fiji flight, Paar’s hair almost stood on end.

“It’s a Heron,” said Eric, with re assurance. “It’s perfectly safe. We have aircraft smaller than that in the Solomons.”

“Goddam!” said Paar. “The only thing smaller than THAT is a broom stick up your ass!”

That reaction reminds me, appro priately, of a flying-by-the-seat-of your-pants experience I had in Papua a few years ago with an aircraft con siderably smaller than a Heron. I had chartered a Cessna to get me from Milne Bay to Port Moresby, but the weather came down as soon as it arrived. For the next two days the pilot and I sat around Guerney Field, which was even more in the bush than it is now, waiting for a hole in the rain that he could poke the aircraft’s nose through.

Perhaps half-a-dozen times a day we would strap ourselves into this little craft and go up to actually sniff around for a hole in the gloom.

Above swamps Joy, or something, came late one afternoon on one of these exploratory expeditions. There was this hole at about 2,000 ft, and we slipped through it. The hole then closed in, leaving our Cessna to be buffeted by rain and cloud, which soon forced us down to a few hundred feet, above swamps.

There was nothing for it but to keep going, and eventually we recog nised the coast dimly below us and promptly turned up it—or more cor rectly, along it, because conditions were now so evil, with the light fading so fast, that we were forced down to palm-tree height a couple of wing-lengths out to sea from the beach. The ceiling, as they say, was

zero and there was nothing on the dock but the maker’s name.

“If we run out of light and luck,” shouted the pilot above the noise of the hurricane that was storming in from the Coral Sea, “I’ll put her down on a beach. TTiere’s supposed to be a ruddy plantation airstrip here somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s ruddy-well gone!”

With our confidence thus pitched at this high level, we sat alongside each other in the small noisy cabin while we both got on with the job of flying by the seat of our pants. I believe I worked as hard at this as he did.

Enjoyment

It was as the last of the light faded that the storm-whipped palms along the beach suddenly gave way to a grassed clearing, dotted with cattle.

This was the plantation strip, but we gave the cows no opportunity to con template our soft under-belly. We simply shoved the wheels into the grass.

I suppose we sat on that cow paddock a full five minutes just en joying the feeling of being there, before we clambered out and sought a bed for the night at that most hospitable plantation homestead.

I never put the experience into print, because we had broken all the rules and the pilot wanted no please explains from the authorities.

I doubt, though, if we would have enjoyed even a first-run feature movie if the service had included one.

Stuart Inder