The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (5 page)

It was just one of those nights that you really didn’t need to go out flying in, especially if you were a pilot like I was. The weather was bloody abominable. It was the middle of the wet season. Thunderstorms were everywhere.

But around nine o’clock there was a call from Balgo Hills Mission, which is out across the desert, halfway between Alice Springs and Derby. Believe it or not, a chap by the name of Father Hevern ran the mission, a terrific guy he was. Anyway, they had a patient who was deteriorating rapidly.

So the doctor called me. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘will you go?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I will.’

And so I set off with the doctor and a nursing sister. Like I said, the night was exactly as predicted. The weather was foul; thunderstorms were everywhere.

It might sound a bit rudimentary but, although radar was available at that time, we were nowhere near getting it in the Queen Air that I was piloting. So I adopted my usual technique of flying under those types of conditions and I navigated by the intensity of the lightning. That meant getting my belly down in the weeds, as the flying term goes, down to about 3000 feet, under the base of the cumulonimbus which were around 5000 to 6000 thousand feet. Then I’d wait for a bolt of lightning. That wouldn’t take long.

When the lightning struck, it’d burn a photo imprint or impression on the back of my retina which
gave me a bloody good idea of what was up ahead. So I just took the line from the lightning and flew in that direction until I hit another lightning strike, then on to another, and another, and so forth, and I kept on steering around the columns of rain where the most severe turbulence was.

As I said, it’s called navigating by the intensity of the lightning, and it works. Mind you, we took a bit of a bloody hammering at times but it was the safest way to go.

On this particular night we wound our way through the thunderstorms, the down drafts and severe turbulence for nearly two hours. It was a pretty horrendous ride for everyone concerned. Not even the doctor or the nurse had much to say to me. Either they were too scared, or they were sick, or they just figured out that I had a few other things on my mind, which of course I did.

See, other than negotiating the foul weather there was also another problem I had to be wary of out in that area. It’s what’s called ‘jump-up’ country, a flat mesatype landscape where high steep-sided rock plateaus just jump up in front of you. Balgo Hills Mission is a typical example. Balgo sits on top of a rocky plateau. It’s quite impressive really. The only thing is that if you undershoot you’ll fly straight into the side of a cliff.

So I got close to Balgo. But I still couldn’t see it. They’d radioed and said they’d have the basketball court lights on but I couldn’t even find them. Then as luck would have it, when I flew over where I thought the place should’ve been, I caught a glimpse of the mission down through some broken cloud. So I did a
circuit, came back round, and lined myself up on final approach.

Now, on final approach, a pilot’s technique is to look at the end of the runway and if the lights are getting further apart it means that you’re getting too high and if they start to join together then you’re obviously getting too low. And it was pretty important that I got the approach right this night because, as I said, if I didn’t I could well fly smack-bang into a cliff face.

I set myself up on final approach all right. There was some pretty severe turbulence. The windscreen wipers were belting away, and I was sitting there glued to the lights along the runway. Then as I prepared to land I noticed that the runway appeared to be getting shorter, and I’m thinking, ‘What am I seeing here?’

So I tried to analyse what my brain was telling me and, while that was going on, the runway’s getting progressively shorter and shorter and more and more lights are disappearing up ahead of me. Suddenly, only about half of the lights were visible. Then less than half.

‘To hell with this,’ I thought. ‘I’ve come this far, I’ve got to land.’

So I thumped the aeroplane across the threshold, banged it on the runway and as I did, the remaining runway lights completely disappeared. I couldn’t see a thing. Not a thing.

Then it struck me. What was happening was that a thunderstorm was sweeping in and a torrential wall of water was working its way down the runway. By the time we were rolling to a stop, the runway lights on either side of the wings had vanished. You couldn’t see them. That’s how heavy this sheet of rain was.
You couldn’t have heard yourself scream inside the aeroplane from the intensity of the rain.

So we just sat there in the middle of the airstrip waiting for a slight break in the downpour and I called the doctor up and I put it to him. ‘In view of the intense nature of this trip,’ I shouted, ‘if there’ll be no dramatic improvement by transporting the patient back to Derby tonight, we should look very closely at overnighting here in Balgo and seeing how the weather is tomorrow morning.’

Well, that was duly noted. Then when there came a bit of a break in the rain, I managed to turn the aeroplane around and taxi back to the holding area where the doctor and the nurse disembarked and were rushed off to attend to the patient. After they’d gone, I did the things that I had to do then waited until someone came back and transported me into the mission.

So there I was, as it happened, in a little room at Balgo Hills Mission. The very same establishment that was run by Father Hevern. I suppose, in retrospect, it must’ve been a small dining room or something. I was totally by myself. By this time, it was around eleven o’clock at night. And I was sitting there reflecting about how narrow the margins of error got on the way out, and contemplating the horrors of a return flight to Derby that very same night, when I received this premonition — a spiritual experience, you could even describe it as.

A nun quietly opened the door behind me. As soft as air, she walked around and looked straight into my eyes. Then, without saying a word, she placed a bottle of Queen Ann whisky and one glass in front of me, walked out and closed the door behind her.

Jim, the base director from Derby, phoned one night and said, ‘Listen, Jan, we’ve got a bad one up at Kalumburu Aboriginal Mission.’

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘A guy’s been run through by a bull’s horn and pinned against a fence post.’

‘Oh, gee, Jim,’ I replied. ‘Penny and I have got to go to Kalumburu at six tomorrow morning to do a clinic. Can’t the patient wait?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The patient’s dying.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’re on the way.’

Mind you, as well as being the Royal Flying Doctor Service’s flight nurse, I was also married to Jan and six months pregnant with Dan at the time. Anyway, we rushed out to the airport and jumped into the Beechcraft Queen Air. By that time it was about nine at night.

The weather itself wasn’t bad, but it was the middle of the dry season. That’s when all the burning off takes place and, to make matters worse, the prevailing easterlies had brought in a mass of smoke and dust across the Northern Territory. So once I was at cruise level, I could hardly see the ground. Still, it was something that I knew I’d encounter. I’d actually mentioned it to Jim during the call — the possible complete lack of horizontal visibility due to the lowlying smoke, especially when I came in to land.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Jim had said. ‘I’ll get them to turn on the lights of the basketball court.’

As you might imagine, with the whole of the outback being dotted by fires, the lights of one basketball court weren’t going to make a scrap of difference. What’s more, it’s bloody uncanny the way those fires seem to run in lines just like streets lights do. You’d swear black and blue that there was a town or a settlement down below. So all I really had to rely on was my previous flying experience throughout the area.

I hadn’t mentioned my concerns to Jim, though. ‘Thanks, Jim,’ was all I’d said at the time because my mind was already mulling over another problem that I was afraid we’d run into. And I’d been right. Not long after we took off, we lost HF radio contact because the Asian radio stations were jamming the airways. They’d blown us right out of the air. For all intents and purposes we’d disappeared off the edge of the planet. No base. No bugger-all.

Still, I kept on track and heading until we eventually found Kalumburu. Now most people who fly in there will tell you that Kalumburu’s a pretty risky place to negotiate because it’s shaped like a dish surrounded by hills. At night some of the pilots get quite edgy about it. So we flew over the top and I caught a sighting of the mission down through the smoke. But, because of the prevailing conditions, there was no bloody way in the world that the horizontal visibility was going to permit us to see it at a low-landing level. It was like an extremely thick fog down there.

But, as luck would have it, there was some moon this night so I went back, right up over the Bonaparte Gulf, and let down over the water, down to about 500
feet. Then I followed the moon path up a creek that led to the threshold of the runway. Right opposite the threshold of the runway I knew there was a bend in the creek. So I flew up there with the moon behind me, turned left at the bend and figured that the runway was dead ahead.

While Jan was doing that I’m sitting there knowing what’s ahead. And I know that at the other end of the airstrip there’s a great big mountain, a massive pointed lump of rock. As I said, I’m about six months pregnant at this time and I’ve got my hands tucked underneath my safety belt so that I can’t touch anything because I’m getting particularly anxious and I’m starting to climb backwards up the seat. I don’t know if you’ve ever climbed backwards like that, but it’s quite unnerving because what you’re trying to do, in effect, is to remove yourself as far as possible from the point of contact.

Throughout all this, Jan’s still driving on with his eyes glued into the white smoke-filled air. He’s nice and cool and collected. He’s a particularly calm sort of pilot, just a natural. And I’m saying to him, ‘Put the lights on, Jan. Put the lights on. I want to be able to see what’s going on up ahead.’ This is through the thick smoke, like. So Jan finally said, ‘Oh, all right.’ And he put the lights on and it’s like a total nothing, nothing but a blanket of thick white. You can’t see a bloody thing. At this point I’m terrified.

‘All right,’ I shouted. ‘Turn the bloody lights off.’

So I did. I turned the lights off. By this time I reckon that I’m lined up for the runway. I just had to be because
I got the turn of the creek right. The gear’s down by this stage, half flap out. I still couldn’t see a bloody thing. A total white-out, like Penny said. So I just keep flying the heading. ‘Fly it. Fly it,’ I’m saying to myself.

Then, like a flash, right before my very eyes, the first of the runway lights come into sight. Bang, the wheels hit the ground, just like that. We’d landed. We were down. We were on the runway.

So we picked up this wretched guy, the one who’d been run through by the bull’s horn.

And he wasn’t too bloody happy either, I can tell you. So we loaded him on board. By this stage, just about every bloody air radio station in the country is calling for us. ‘Foxtrot. Delta Victor. Foxtrot. Delta Victor. Do you read me?’

It’s now two hours out and nobody’s heard ‘boo’ from us and they can’t contact Kalumburu Mission anyway because the radio is out and there were no telephones in those days.

When we took off again I climbed out of Kalumburu and took the Queen Air to the highest bloody altitude it could get to, in an attempt to clear up the airways and get some range into the signal. I even tried to raise somebody on the higher VHF frequency instead of the more usual HF. There I was, calling, calling and calling, and still no bastard wanted to know me.

While Jan’s doing all that, he’s having some oxygen so that he can keep flying without too many problems and I’m giving the patient oxygen to keep him going. Then I’m giving me and the baby-to-be some oxygen.

Jan eventually got us out of there and back home where we delivered the patient safely. But even now
Jan and I reckon that it was because of the excitement and the rush of adrenaline going through my body on that particular night, it’s why our son, Dan, was born wanting to fly; which was something that he went on to do. He became a pilot, just like Jan. What’s more, he still flies, right up to this very day.

You meet some drongos in this game. You really do. Just take the feller who wanted to go from Adelaide to Cairns. He glanced at the map. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘the shortest way is straight up the Birdsville Track.’

So he set out in the middle of summer in his four-cylinder rust-bucket. He had no spare petrol. No spare water. One baldy spare tyre. No supplies. Nothing. Anyway, he got up towards the north of South Australia and the car broke down.

‘Bugger,’ he said, and sat there wondering what to do.

Then somewhere he remembered hearing that if you break down in the outback, rule number one is to wait with your car. So he waited…for the first day, the second day, the third day. By this stage he was getting a bit thirsty. And during the intercourse of these thirsty feelings he looked out over the flat shimmering landscape, and the deeper he looked into the shimmering the more it looked like there was a lake out there, away in the distance.

‘There’s a stroke of good luck,’ he said, and hopped out of his car and set off, walking towards the lake.

The strange thing was, though, the further he walked towards the lake, the further the lake moved away from him. So at the end of the fourth day he concluded that the lake must have been one of those optical illusion things, and he decided that he’d better go back to his car.

He was surely blessed because it was a miracle that he found his vehicle. Still and all, by that stage he was absolutely perishing. It then struck him that the only water he was likely to find in a place like this was the stuff in the radiator. So he tapped the radiator. Now the radiator had anti-freeze in it, and what he didn’t know was that anti-freeze contains ethylene glycol. And one of the side effects of drinking ethylene glycol is that it could well cause brain damage.

Anyway, not too much later a car came along and took him into Birdsville where he went straight to the pub and commenced oral rehydration. At that stage the Flying Doctor Service was called and we flew out to Birdsville where we gave him some intravenous rehydration. To give you some idea as to how severely dehydrated this feller was, he was given three litres of fluid intravenously to get just one millilitre of urine out of him.

Later on, in Charleville Hospital, when he asked if there were any side effects caused by drinking radiator water, I explained that unfortunately the radiator had anti-freeze in it and that anti-freeze contains ethylene glycol.

‘And what’s the problem with that?’ he asked.

‘The main side effect,’ I said, ‘is that it could well damage the brain.’

‘Gawd,’ he said, with a worried look, ‘what do yer reckon the chances of me getting brain damage might be?’

I must say that it was a struggle to keep a straight face. I mean, you’d have to be brainless in the first place to attempt to drive across one of the most unforgiving parts of Australia, in the middle of
summer, in a vehicle that wasn’t in any fit condition to do so, without spare petrol, water or food.

So I said to the chap, ‘It’s my opinion,’ I said, ‘that in your particular case, there’d be Buckley’s chance of brain damage occurring.’

‘Who the hell’s Buckley?’ he replied.