Chapter
Three
COMMERCIAL
PILOT'S LICENCE
The next three months at the commercial pilot
school were a great time in my life as all the students had a similar goal, that
of becoming a commercial pilot. All the subjects were interesting except
aviation law. Practical things I could grasp, but not all the rules and
regulations. Flying was all the students lived and breathed, and our out of
school activities were also carried out with the smell of aviation fuel in
the background.
Spending a weekend with friends who were gliding enthusiasts, I instantly saw an opportunity that would allow me to fly without incurring any expense. It wasn't gliding, but glider towing that attracted my attention. The aircraft being used was a Tiger Moth and the nearest aero club from which I could seek a type rating, as well as towing rating, was three hours away by road. Although I was on a very tight budget, I talked myself into this expense in anticipation of the rewards that would follow. I hadn't flown in a Tiger Moth since my first lessons in Hokitika, and had to virtually start from scratch. After five exciting hours of Tiger Moth flying I secured my ratings, and was ready to start towing at a forthcoming glider camp.
One scary part of the
endorsement involved restarting the engine, but this time with the propeller in
a completely stopped position. Normally, if the engine stopped the propeller
would keep spinning, but this assessment of a worst case scenario necessitated diving the
fragile bundle of fabric and wire at the ground until enough speed was obtained
that the enormous airflow forced the propeller away from its bold rigid stance.
Have you ever had your
hand out a car window and felt the force of the airflow? Airflow has strange
effects on different objects and one of them is the lift given to the wing of an
aircraft. An amazing experiment you can try in your kitchen is to take a spoon
and place it under a fast flowing tap. Think to yourself what will happen to the
spoon if you hold it lightly between your fingers and let it swing freely. First
imagine what will happen when the inside of the spoon comes in contact with the
water, and then slowly do it. Now try it with the outside of the spoon. You
expect it to bounce away from the flow, but you have been sucked in. The airflow
has the same effect with the profile of a wing.
The gliding camp that I
obtained the tow rating for was great, and I completed several flights in a
glider - but glider towing? No. The regular tow pilot was not going to have some
'rookie' let loose in his Tiger, so I had to watch from the
sideline.
At the conclusion of
the three months course I returned to Christchurch to live with
my mother, while waiting to sit the exams, and to notch up more flying time ferrying my
non-fare paying friends here and there. At the first exam sitting I failed one
subject, and had to wait for another two months to resit it, but that wasn't a
disaster as I still had one hundred hours of flying to complete before I reached
the required two hundred hours.
I was lucky to find a
job surveying for a flood control study of the Avon and Heathcote rivers, which meandered
through the cathedral city of Christchurch. My mother lived within walking distance of the
city, and I chose the route that so happened to pass the front gate of my
inspiration just as she was leaving for work with her friends. Sometimes I would
stand around the corner, waiting for the right moment to arrive at her gate just
by coincidence. Weeks were spent drifting down the rivers under the weeping
willow trees through this picturesque city, tying up every few hundred metres to
take soundings across the rivers and the adjacent banks. After this practical
part of the survey was completed the next part of the job was to draw up the
hundreds of cross-section plans from the survey results, and
my employer allowed me to draw them in the evenings, thus allowing me to spend
my days, and my pay as soon as I received it, gallivanting around the
skies.
Eventually I passed the exams and the flight test, and was now an unemployed commercial pilot. During my studies I had noticed that pilot navigational computers were difficult to get in New Zealand, due to import restrictions. Using the skills that I had acquired when producing my surveying computer, I decided I would turn my hand to making these navigational computers, and went about the task of designing one. Unfortunately I was not granted an import licence to buy the type of plastic sheets required, and I had to use a substitute product that was available. I went to my friend at the bookbinders and we printed enough circular plastic blanks to make about one hundred computers. Great, I was in business again and about to make my fortune, I thought with great ambition as I put the computers together. The following morning I was woken by my mother beckoning me to come and look at my project, as she thought the computers were looking funny. Funny was not the word; the plastic I was made to use was a vacuum-forming grade and, with the warmth of the morning, all my computers had warped.
My flying computer
Things were obviously
not going well for me, and my mother suggested that I go to a Christmas aero
club camp at Nelson and start afresh. Complete with spear gun and flippers, I
set off for sunny Nelson and made myself known at the club. The members could
not have been more hospitable, and visitors to the club were really entertained.
The club building was a
very large hangar with offices and a kitchen attached at one end, and one
evening while discussing my sign-writing skills I was asked if I could paint a
large club badge on the hangar roof. What a challenge! I was about to accomplish my biggest job
and, after a few days scrambling over the roof, the badge was finished. What a
sight it made from the air, with the wings encompassing the width of the hanger.
But all good things must come to an end, and so did the camp, although I did
manage to finance a few extra days there by selling my diving mask, flippers and
spear gun which I had taken to the camp.
Where was I going to go
to now? There were no flying jobs
for me or the other new graduates. I was asked to give a quote to paint the
club's complete hangar, so with an imaginary brush I painted a section and then
worked out how long it would take me to complete the job. Of course, my low
miscalculated quote was accepted, as I didn't take into consideration the time I
would spend mixing the paint and putting on a harness while on the roof, or the
hours I would spend climbing ladders. There were benefits though, as a small
bedroom and shower were fitted in the hangar for me and I received pocket money
by piloting the club's scenic flights. What must the passengers have thought, as
the painter was called down from the ladder to be the professional in care of them for the next half
hour! Eventually the hangar was finished, and as I was now an accepted piece of
the furniture I was given the job as secretary and commercial pilot.
One of my most
interesting jobs was flying lighthouse keepers to the remote area of
Farewell Spit. As the landing was to be on the
firm sand on the beach from which the tide had just retreated, the timing had to
be right. The aircraft I flew was a
vintage Dominie that was like a two-engined Tiger
Moth, but with a seven-seater cabin.
Flying that aircraft was a treat, and as it only had one pilot seat my
briefing was given with the instructor standing behind me, with no possibility of his taking over
should I have lost control.
My earlier investment
in obtaining a glider towing rating paid off, as on the weekends I pulled the
graceful birds into the sky behind the gliding club's Tiger Moth, and very soon
I was in the same position as the tow pilot who had shunned my services at the
gliding camp. I was now the king pin and tried to copy his practice of keeping other eager volunteers
away.
What fun it was to spin
down after the glider released! The glider pilot wanted the Tiger back at the
airfield as quickly as possible, as the tow was being paid for by the minute.
The rope that I was towing the gliders with had to be dropped off before my
landing, and to the horror of the nearby residents I would accomplish
this with the style of
the vintage air ace 'The Red Baron'. After a high speed 'beat-up' of the glider landing area, I would
release the tow rope and fling the aircraft into a contortionist manoeuvre,
returning to land without flying out of the confines of the airfield - that was
until my control tower friend asked me, for the benefit of everyone, to please
complete a proper circuit.
Being a tow pilot gave
me some interesting opportunities to retrieve gliders that had run out of puff
on a cross-country flight. Some of the paddocks that glider pilots had chosen to
land in with the use of their air brakes were certainly on the borderline
length. For the Tiger to get airborne with the glider in
tow, many takeoffs were performed with my hand on the cable release, as it was
possibly going to be a choice of 'them' or 'me'.
I also enjoyed the
sport of gliding, and was really thrilled the day I remained aloft for five
hours. The time was passed away having conversations with a fellow pilot via a
small open window in the canopy. The silence and freedom of a glider have to be
experienced to really understand what it is like to be a bird but - unlike a
bird - my flight had to end when nature's calling made it too uncomfortable to
sit cross-legged any longer.
The instructor who had
given me my first flight in the Tiger Moth in Hokitika was given the
challenging job of demonstrating a British Beagle Airedale, a new aircraft to be
tried out in New Zealand. I was ecstatic when he asked me to join him on the
demonstration trip around the country. There would be no pay for the trip, but
our accommodation would be free as we could stay with his friends, since he had
friends at all of the aero clubs we visited. The instructor also had a small
emergency flare kit to sell, and the task of demonstrating them was given to me,
which in turn gave me some cash as we travelled around the country in comfort
and style. I didn't have an instructor's rating and therefore could not let
other pilots fly the aircraft, but there was no limit to the number of
passengers that I could show off this lovely aircraft to.
I went to great lengths
to become an instructor and prepared some great literature and diagrams to show
my students, but when it came to the flight test I froze like a student - so
that was that. The nearest I came to sitting in the instructor's seat was when
some photographers hired an aircraft from the aero club, with me as their
pilot, to photograph farms. We had special permission from the Civil
Aviation Authority to
fly at low altitude for the filming, and I'm sure the tops of some farmhouse
trees must have been very close to brushing our wheels. After several days of
filming, the photographers would drive to all the farms and sell the photos to
delighted farmers, who now realised the reason for the small aircraft doing
'beat-ups' a few days earlier.
I had become a close
friend of a shy cabinetmaker who had an immaculate Tiger Moth stored in the aero club hanger,
while at his home he had
another one, plus a
complete World War II Mosquito Bomber. Although the Bomber couldn't fly,
it was a heart-throbbing sensation when the two Rolls Royce Merlin engines were
started. The chickens, whose run was behind the aircraft, were all windblown and
pinned against the back fence for the short duration. Although the cabinetmaker
had a private pilot's licence, he was not confident of flying on his
own, and to my
enjoyment I became his personal pilot.
We went to several
great rallies in that Tiger, and at times paid heavily for the privilege. On
some flights we were so cold that all we wanted to do was land and get out of
that hellhole of a cockpit. This coldness would also bring on the need to go to
the toilet, but that was impossible. If the harness was removed to get into the
right position to use a container, there was a possibility you could pop right
out of the open cockpit! We had fun just experimenting with the Tiger and one
day, just for interest, we tried to see how high we could climb before tumbling
down. It was 10,000 feet, and the return trip to earth was accomplished in a
series of spins and loops that must have made us look like an injured butterfly
unable to keep airborne!
Eventually my welcome
at the aero club waned, and I managed to secure a position with a small airline
(two planes) that flew a daily service with newspapers each afternoon to several
West Coast towns. My friend had now become an air hostess, and a friendly
aircraft loader would always tell me when she was arriving in Nelson, enabling
me to be at the right place at the right time to show off in my home-made
stripes. Well, I was the captain of an aircraft - small as it
was.
The motto of the
airline was that they must operate in all weather conditions, and
the
only way to navigate when flying around the coastline in the
rain
was
to look directly out the side window and keep
the breakers at the same distance away. There was virtually no vision out of the
front, as these
aircraft had no windscreen wipers. The pilot always sat on
the left side of the
cockpit, and looking for a coming right turn was nerve-racking, since the plane was nearly over the
shoreline when the curve in the breakers could be distinguished through the
murk.
Eventually, after a
couple of close shaves due to bad weather, overloading and running out of fuel,
I took my leave, and started a small factory making my calculators. Once again,
getting the correct raw materials was difficult and, even though I had orders
for my navigational computer from Australia, the New Zealand Government would
not budge on their import licence quota; however, I still managed to produce
several small slide rule type calculators with various uses.
The most popular was
one for calculating
ready mixed concrete, and these were sold to ready mix concrete companies who in
turn gave them to their customers.
By using the measurements of length, breadth, and the thickness of the
slab being poured, the calculator would show the exact amount of concrete
required. I had always wondered in
awe at engineers and the like as they were always using slide rules, and I
thought there must be some mystery behind them. When designing my surveying
calculator and trying to determine how a slide rule worked, I stumbled across
the principal of it, and from then on it was no longer a mystery. It is just a
matter of marking logarithms around a circle and, by positioning the inner scale
against the outer one, the same result is achieved as adding or subtracting two
logarithms together to multiply or divide.
I had applied to Qantas, as
well as many other airlines, receiving the standard reply that they required new
pilots to have about 2,000 hours on multi-engined aircraft, which was a
difficult achievement for a non-Air Force pilot. Trying to bring
about an interview with Qantas, I offered to pay for my own airfare to Sydney.
They graciously let me purchase a full price airfare and put me through all
sorts of hoops and tests, causing my hopes to be very high on my flight back to
New Zealand, but shortly afterwards a blunt letter arrived saying that I didn't
have enough flying hours. They bloody well knew how many hours I had before I
went for the interview, so maybe my invitation was just a ploy to sell another
ticket.
Finding the correct raw
materials was difficult at that time in New Zealand, and my slide rule and
calculator business didn't completely get off the ground, so it was a great
relief to me when a nearby airline, Straits Air Freight Express, fondly called
SAFE, was recruiting pilots. The day I was to go for my interview I was asked to
fly a service for my previous employer, but 'only if I can use the aircraft to
go to the interview', I bargained, and later that day I proudly arrived at the
SAFE base in 'my' private twin. I will never know if it had any bearing on my
acceptance, but a few months later I found out from my father that the wife of the chief
pilot had been married to my uncle. I'm sure that this coincidence must have
been discussed in his conversations at home, as I was in some weird way his
nephew.
I was recruited by SAFE
to become a first
officer flying Bristol
Freighters, but my
employment would initially be in the operation section until the results of an
exam that I had just sat for an instrument rating came through. I duly fronted
up at the operations office, expecting to receive my uniform and begin the task
of learning the ropes. Oh no!
Sorry, but we don't need you here, so you are to go to the stores and get
a set of overalls. Your designation will be aircraft cleaner.
So cleaner I became,
learning that it takes nearly a whole day to sweep a hangar floor, with the
occasional break from the monotony being spent removing the grey air force paint
from a newly purchased aircraft. Invariably, I would sit on paint remover that I
hadn't removed earlier, and the burning sensation for the rest of the day
reminded me that I had been slack.
One afternoon as my
broom and I were doing our rounds of the hangar, a suited gentleman approached
me and asked, 'Do you know who I am?' After indicating that I didn't, he
introduced himself as the general manager and with obvious pleasure told me to
put the broom away and report for flying duties. I had passed the
exam!
Before another new
recruit and I could fly the Bristol we had to achieve an instrument
rating, and for this we went to the local aero club. The flying was to be
carried out on a twin-engined aircraft similar to the one I had been flying for
the small airline, but I soon found myself in hot water, as I refused to fly it
after one brief exercise. The controls are not right, I claimed, and was in fear
of losing my job before I had even started. After a thorough check it was found
that, on a recent overhaul of the aircraft, a bolt was put in upside down on the
sliding control column, and it was rubbing on the dashboard. Maybe not life
threatening, but who knows?
There were a couple of
issues concerning the Bristol Freighter that
I wasn't happy about,
and often I would be quite scared. The pilot who was going to fly the sector
would climb up the ladder into the cockpit and start the checks, while the other
pilot would wait for the loading to be finished and then close the two enormous
nose doors. To hold them closed there were several catches locking them together
but, in some instances when the loading had been completed before the crew
arrived, the loaders would do up the bottom catch. Occasionally, both pilots
would think that the other had checked them, and the aircraft engines would be
started. The Bristol
Freighter was too noisy
to converse in unless over the intercom system, so instead of reading the check
list out loud the items were confirmed from memory, and a finger was pointed at
each item in turn as it appeared in the text. The door lock warning system had a
very small red light for unlocked, and a green for locked. Sometimes the light
in the cockpit would be reflected in such a way that we would misinterpret
them, thinking that the green light for 'door locked' was shining. With a shock on the take off roll, or
shortly after getting airborne, the red light would suddenly become noticeably
visible, showing 'door unlocked'.
The green light had now absolved itself from any responsibility and was
blank.
In sheer terror the
first officer would scramble through the hatch and clamber down the ladder, and
the only way to reach up and fasten the catches was to stand on the bottom of
the doors. What if the force of the air broke the one lock that was holding them
and they opened before your eyes? A bit perhaps like a giant whale opening its
mouth to swallow Jonah as he crashed
into the sea.
The other scary
situation - well, it was to me - that could bring a Bristol to the ground quickly was due to
the metal that connected the wings to the fuselage. As these vital links were
built to be
rugged, they were
initially built to be too strong.
They were too brittle and didn't flex enough, with the fatal result that
they could break, and then the wing would fall off and make its own way to the
ground. My hostess friend's father had told me about this fault in detail, as
the aircraft that suffered this fate in Christchurch was carrying some of his
new furniture. I was shown some of the splintered pieces of the cabinet, and
whenever I was with a captain who flew a descent at an excessive speed my heart
was in my mouth, as in my mind I remembered the wood pieces. I would
semi-pray as I frequently looked at the wing
root until the aircraft had slowed down to the normal safe operating
speed.
Early mornings were
part of the daily routine now, and the atmosphere in the
aircraft was so cold in
winter that a thick overcoat had to be worn in the cockpit. The ground crew
would wait until we were ready to start the engines before removing the frost
covers. The main route that we flew was across Cook Strait, which separates the
North and South islands. It was only a twenty-minute flight, so I enjoyed lots
of take off and landing practice. Another incentive for the
early starts was that,
if I was lucky, I could have breakfast with my hostess friend in the aircrew
cafeteria in Wellington. I thought I was in a better position to claim her
attention now, as I was with an airline, even though it was just a freighter.
I continued making my
calculators, and I even designed one that was used when loading Bristol
Freighters. To me it was a great achievement when the Civil Aviation Authority approved its use for the
main loading calculations. At this particular time New Zealand was changing to
decimal currency, and once again a 'Griffin
Computer'
was
at the forefront.
The type of
flying performed in Bristol
Freighters was very
basic, as were the navigational aids at Wellington airport. No on-board landing
systems were available, and in very bad weather we would conduct a P.A.R.
approach, which was an abbreviation for precision approach
radar. It was quite
exciting, as the radar operator would direct us to a position on the extended centre line of
the runway and from then on we would follow his instructions, but without any
communications with him. We had no idea where we were and had to have complete
trust in his transmissions. He would calmly say, 'On glide path, on centre
line', and then, after a short pause, 'Turn left five degrees and increase rate
of decent to 450 feet per minute'. It was a great feeling when the runway
suddenly appeared before us, and we felt appreciative of the operator's skill
and calmness.
On one early morning
flight the captain read out a recruiting advertisement for Qantas and suggested
I apply. As our airline wasn't
expanding very rapidly, a promotion to captain would be a long way down the
track. When I told him that I had already had applied and had an unsuccessful
interview, he convinced me I should try again, and within a couple of days I was
being interviewed in a hotel in Wellington. After being asked several questions
I realised that the interviewer didn't know that I had already been to Sydney
for all the aptitude and medical tests a year earlier. I showed him the letter
that I had received from Qantas regarding my flying hours and, after a quick
phone call to Sydney, he told me that I had been accepted, subject to a new
medical. When asked where I wanted to have the medical, without hesitating, I
chose Sydney, and waited for the free tickets to arrive.
At last I was going to
be a real airline pilot.