Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (28 page)

Cathay’s lack of a government to provide a financial umbrella could have been fatal. In Hong Kong the umbrella was there in another guise – the personal relationship between Swires and the Hongkong Bank was just as good. The Bank were 30 per cent shareholders; they came up with the loans and gave copper-bottomed guarantees when Cathay was buying new aircraft. ‘I cannot overemphasize,’ Adrian says, ‘the importance of the link we have had with the Hongkong Bank. A line of credit for many millions of dollars could be arranged on trust by a simple phone call.’

Cathay’s later history endorses the view Derek Davies had expressed in the sixties: that Cathay benefited uniquely by being part of the
old-established
Swire empire. Swire managers knew the area and its agents – for example, the fact that Swires had been involved in Japan since the 1860s was particularly valuable to the airline. The Company was not considered there as upstarts.

Adrian believes, ‘The management pattern – often Oxbridge, traditional, commercial, flexible – avoided the common postwar fallacy that airlines
could only be run by retired air force officers.’ The current Managing Director of Cathay, Peter Sutch, is an illustration of the interchangeability of Swires’ managers: he, like Michael Miles, Duncan Bluck and John Browne before him, started his life with Swires in the shipping division.

Cathay can be unorthodox. A Company article of faith, for example, is that an airline should employ the minimum number of aircraft types. The ever-active brain of Duncan Bluck invented a phrase to encapsulate a policy that stems from this belief – ‘the intelligent misuse of aircraft’. This means, in essence, a policy of using (or ‘mis-using’) the same type of aircraft on widely differing routes – a 747, say, on the long Vancouver route one day and on the very short Manila route the next – the object being to maximize the passenger load and minimize the amount of time the aircraft spends on the ground.

Even with its unique advantages of place and history, Cathay did not soar effortlessly from the rag trade of Shanghai to the riches of contemporary Hong Kong steered by a breed of supermen plucked from the dreaming spires of grand English universities. Not the least ingredient in this adventure was the mood of Hong Kong itself, an impatient, money-fixated place of refugees and exiles determined to pull themselves out of the rubble of the Japanese occupation.

What next? Hong Kong will become part of the People’s Republic of China in 1997. According to the Sino–British Joint Declaration of 1984, the Colony will become a Special Administrative Region of China. There will be One State but two Systems: in China, communism; in Hong Kong, a capitalist dispensation very similar to the present one, though without a British Governor. The hope is that the Chinese of Beijing will see that their overriding interest lies in making sure that Hong Kong remains a thriving financial centre, a producer of the hard currency they so much desire and need. Swires say they have confidence in post-1997 Hong Kong; they intend to demonstrate that faith by continuing to invest there. This presupposes a belief that the Beijing Government mean what they say – that they want Hong Kong to prosper; that the Chinese genuinely appreciate that it can only do so as an international city; that they will allow Cathay to keep its international management. For if they don’t the Company could wither on the vine.

It has recently acquired a new director, Larry Yung, the son of the chairman of the China International Trade and Investment Corporation (CITIC), the Chinese government’s main commercial arm and since January 1987 a 12.5 per cent shareholder in the company. A guarded optimism rules the Cathay boardroom, as it usually has. Duncan Bluck
points to Cathay’s own huge investment in aircraft and in training, and the Swire companies’ investment in luxury hotels, in two new apartment blocks, a new Coca Cola factory, a new paint factory….

Naturally, growth has loosened the family ties within Cathay Pacific. ‘It’s getting today so that you don’t know your First Officer or your Flight Engineer,’ Ian Steven tells me. Duncan Bluck still greets most of the Company’s recruits as they join. Peter Sutch is a youngish man of extraordinary warmth and energy. He takes an obvious delight in mixing informally with Cathay’s employees, however grand or however humble they may be. He continually bobs up on the flight decks of whatever planes he happens to be flying in – cheerful, encouraging, more like a friend than a Managing Director – and the crews are delighted to see him. Still, the airway is no longer the cosy organization Jock knew. In the Hong Kong takeover of 1997, Adrian Swire confronts a hurdle bigger by far than anything that has come before. With a bold expression, he says, ‘Cathay Pacific is established. I believe that it will grow as Hong Kong’s scheduled carrier in the post-1997 era.
J’y suis, j’y reste
.’

A nice mid-morning at Kai Tak: dry and bright under fairly high cloud. In a few minutes CX800, waiting on the apron, will leave for Vancouver and San Francisco.

In the grey eyrie of the cockpit the First Officer, John Williams, says, ‘It must be three months since I did a Vancouver trip. It’s been all London or Frankfurt.’

‘Nice change, eh?’ Peter Jerdan, the Captain, replies.

Jerdan’s Australian voice is as calm and as cheerful as usual. As calm as it had been a month or two earlier when we had sat in the cockpit of the 747 simulator at four in the morning and he put the electronic marvel through its paces. He had dive-bombed Kowloon, shot the Jumbo over neon-lit Nathan Road with the speed of a flying saucer, and over Stonecutters Island thrown her into the sort of tight, heart-stopping turns I associated with a jet fighter, not a 747. He had turned the dignified Jumbo into a sort of airborne performing flea, and the plane’s warning systems had reacted in outrage. Urgent mechanical voices in the cockpit barked, ‘Too low! Too low!’ and ‘Terrain! Terrain!’ Sirens wailed, hooters hee-hawed, lights flashed. Quite right too. But we were alone and in a building, and only there can you see what amazing things a 747 can do if you ask it politely. That morning Jerdan had even allowed me to take the captain’s left-hand seat to steer the Jumbo onto the simulated Kai Tak runway, to rev up those mighty engines, to roar them down the narrow path of lights, and to heave the 300 or 400 tons of her into the night air with my own hands. Like lifting a block of flats off the ground, he’d said. It was extremely real and much better than any electronic game in an arcade – I’d managed to take off twice without dumping the whole caboodle into Kowloon Bay. ‘Pretty good, Gav,’ Peter Jerdan had grinned when we rocked to a stop, and I had thought so, too. Maybe I could start a new career.

Now, at 11.35 on an April morning, Jerdan sits in the left-hand seat, adjusting its height so that his eyes are level with a mark on the bulkhead nearest them: twenty-five feet above the ground. John Williams is on his right and Flight Engineer Martin leans forward between them from his position facing the banks of switches. An all-Australian crew.

The blue plastic coffee mugs with the dregs of instant coffee have been laid aside. A Chinese air hostess has appeared in the cockpit with a tray of cold towels like snow-white spring rolls, handed them out with a small pair of tongs, and taken them away again.

Now the ritual murmur of check question and answer between the Flight Engineer and the pilots comes to an end with the Engineer confirming: ‘Checks complete.’

Then the Captain: ‘Doors all closed?’

‘Closed.’

Jerdan says: ‘Start Four.’ Martin brings the engines to life one by one, beginning with No. Four, and needles on the dials in front of us begin to jump. A smell of aviation fuel fills the cockpit, faint and not unpleasant. Ten hours forty-five minutes non-stop flying time to Vancouver requires 123 tons of fuel to burn on the way, a load which, with 326 passengers and their luggage aboard means that in a few moments Jerdan will be launching a
358-ton
missile at the Lei Yue Mun Gap at an angle of 13 degrees.

He talks to the control tower asking for permission to taxi, gets it and releases the brakes. Set free, the plane rolls softly forward. Infinitely slowly we creep towards the thirty-foot Marlboro sign behind the boundary fence at the corner of Concorde Road and the turning to the Harbour Tunnel. Just in front of us, a pale blue Korean Airlines monster skims in over the drab tenements of Kowloon City, smoothly touches its undercarriage onto the runway in a puff of bluish smoke, runs on, swings left off the runway and begins the slow trundle back to the passenger terminal.

Jerdan says, ‘Take-off checks.’ Flaps? Stabilizer trim? Fuel set for
take-off?
Cabin crew alerted? Yes … yes … yes. We lumber on, then swing left to point down the runway’s centre line. Jerdan presses down on the foot pedals to align our nose with long white arrows that point to the far end of the slender bay-bound causeway – about 11,000 feet away but to me more like 100 yards.

Adjust headsets. Check seat belts. Ready to roll.

The world stands still….

Roll.

‘Max thrust.’ Leaning forward, Jerdan presses all four throttle levers forward as far as they will go. The metal shell trembles, begins to bump rhythmically, to sway. The runway flows towards us like a moving belt, faster and faster. In a moment or two we are eating it up at an amazing rate. I have an impression of the water on either side of us, grey and cold, but there’s no time to look at it. A barge dumping rubble comes level and is instantly snatched away. Watch the centre line! 155 knots – 178mph….

‘V.1.,’ the First Officer says distinctly, telling Jerdan our take-off speed is near. The water at the end of the runway is very near too.

‘V.R.’ R for rotate, meaning lift the nose so that the aircraft tilts upwards on the axis of its landing gear. Jerdan’s hands grasp the black ‘horns’ of the control column near the top and pull back firmly and evenly several inches, perhaps nine. He feels no resistance – a gentle easing is all it takes to lift a block of flats with wings and a tail moving at 190mph. Our nose tilts: 10 degrees, then 13 degrees. Wheels off the ground, the great body begins to shake – but only for a moment, and then there is only the rush of air and a steady soaring.

‘V.2.’ 210mph now; the long finger of the runway has fallen swiftly away below us. I see objects like toys in the water: barges; a floating crane; a hoarding advertising cement.

‘Gear up.’

The wheels retract with a tortured metallic groan like an ogre in pain. In the morning air, lifting, caressing, cradling, the plane is alive as a ship entering the open sea is alive when the immeasurable power of the ocean takes hold of her hull, changing as it enters its special element. Non-existent while we were on the ground, the air as we rise in it becomes as palpable as water, thickening as we thrust up through it into an almost solid substance.

To the left I can see half a hillside hacked away; the soft ridges of the New Territories; the islands of China. Then we are climbing through cloud.

Jerdan says: ‘With our weight it’ll take us about thirty minutes to get up to 29,000 feet. That’s under 1,000 feet a minute.’

In the cloud CX800 is a blind white fish. Cloud-shadows flicker round the grey womb of the cockpit, across the crisp white shirts of the impassive men staring ahead into the fog with narrowed eyes or at their dials. Any minute … any minute … we shall burst out into the infinite sunshine. Now! In the sudden liberating explosion of light, the great white, green and silver flying fish gives a joyful spring. Sunlight showers over us. Everything is smooth and weightless.

‘What about it?’ Peter Jerdan speaks to me over his shoulder. ‘Pretty good, eh?’

The sky all around us is clear, blue and full of promise. I loosen my seat belt. I might as well relax. There is still a long way to go.

Swire, John Kidston 1946–66  

Swire, John Anthony 1966–87

Swire, Adrian Christopher 1987–

Charles Collingwood Roberts, 1941–48;1951

Eric Guard Price, 1949–50

John Arthur Blackwood, 1951–57

William Charles Goodard Knowles, 1957–64

Herbert John Charles Browne, 1 October 1964–30 April 1973

John Henry Bremridge, 20 May 1973–31 December 1980