Air Disaster Canberra

After 11 years as a NSW state Liberal MP, Andrew Tink left parliament in 2007 to pursue his passion for history and writing. His first book, William Charles Wentworth, Australia’s greatest native son,  won “The Nib” CAL Waverly Award for Literature. He followed this with Lord Sydney – the life and times of Tommy Townshend and now has published Air Disaster Canberra: The Plane Crash that Destroyed a Government which explores the wartime disaster which killed Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ key war ministers. Controversially, the book also explores whether Air Minister Fairbairn was piloting the Hudson Bomber when it crashed into a ridge near Canberra. On Monday 8 April 2013, Andrew Tink addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the Canberra Air Disaster which ultimately destabilised a government.

AIR DISASTER CANBERRA

ANDREW TINK

 You might think that politics in Canberra today is in a tumultuous state. Let me say it’s nothing compared to what politics was like in the national capital between 1939 and 1941.

In April 1939, Joe Lyons, a long serving conservative Coalition Prime Minister, died and his immediate replacement was the leader of the Country Party, Earle Page. Earle Page accepted a commission to be Prime Minister on two conditions: the first was that, as soon as the UAP selected a new leader, he would stand down as Prime Minister; the second was if that UAP leader happened to be Robert Gordon Menzies, he’d stand down from the ministry.

The UAP ignored this threat and went ahead and elected Robert Gordon Menzies to become leader of the UAP. Then, while still the Prime Minister, Earle Page went into the chamber and unloaded on Menzies, accusing him of cowardice for having failed to serve in WWI. For that reason, Page argued that Menzies was not fit to be Prime Minister at a time when another war was clearly looming.

Menzies survived this attack, he was resilient. But he was also helped by three very great friends in the parliament – Geoffrey Street, James Fairbairn and Henry Gullett. And all three had been promoted to senior ministers under Menzies – Fairbairn as Minister for Air; Gullett as Vice President of the Executive Council which did not reflect his true influence within the cabinet and Geoffrey Street: as Minister for the Army.

They were Menzies’ Praetorian Guard, when he was attacked for not enlisting in WWI. And he was attacked not only by Earle Page but also by Tommy White, another very prominent conservative politician and a WWI fighter pilot. These three ministers held him up, and helped him to remain in control.

After Britain had declared war on Germany on 3 September, Menzies declared Australia was also at war with Germany. But, for a year or so, the war remained in a sort of a phoney phase in Western Europe, as they say, until the Nazis turned their attention to the Western front and then, of course, France collapsed very quickly.

By August 1940, the Battle of Britain was underway in earnest. The Australian Defence Department was based in Melbourne at this time. Canberra was still a very small place, where only some 10,000 people lived. But the parliament met in Canberra by that stage, and cabinet meetings were held there too. So the Ministers responsible for Defence would spend their time in Melbourne, at the department, and then they would come to Canberra for cabinet meetings. This was the position on the 13 August 1940. 

Street, Gullett and Fairbairn were at Victoria barracks in Melbourne and they joined the VIP flight – which happened to be a Hudson Bomber converted to civilian use – for the flight to Canberra to join Menzies and the other ministers for a cabinet meeting.

The plane made an uneventful flight until it reached the outskirts of Canberra. Being a VIP flight, there were a number of people waiting for it at the Canberra aerodrome. There were also farmers around Queanbeyan and various other places, so that many saw this plane circle Canberra twice in a left hand direction lining up for the airfield and to land into a westerly breeze, which meant the final approach came over Queanbeyan.

Then, as the plane dropped height, it was noticed that the left wing dropped. The plane appeared to go into a spiral dive and went straight down from a height of about 1000 feet, crashed, burst into flames and everybody on board was incinerated. There were ten victims in all. It remains, in terms of lives lost, Canberra’s worst ever disaster.

The fallout from it was immediate. Menzies personally was devastated. He was a tough character; he had been an outstanding barrister at the Victorian bar and was a constitutional lawyer. He had a very high opinion of himself, not without good reason, and he handled himself pretty well on most occasions and in most circumstances. But this tragedy just knocked the wind out of him, and he was quite distraught about it.

The funerals were held and then the public at large largely forgot about it because the war had entered a new and dangerous phase and minds were elsewhere. Lives were being lost all over the place, and planes were crashing all over the place. But a long fuse had been lit, politically, which was to burn away for the next year and ultimately to burn away a conservative government.

Three bi-elections had to be called because each of these ministers was in a lower house seat. Menzies approached the Governor General, Lord Gowrie who, with the general elections due in just a few months time, decided to grant a general election. The election was called for September 1940.

In Henty, the seat which had been held by Sir Henry Gullett, Arthur Coles, Lord Mayor of Melbourne and one of the people behind the Coles retailing empire, decided to stand as an independent. But because he was a conservative, Menzies and the UAP elected not to stand anybody against Coles and he was elected fairly easily in Henty. In the other two seats, UAP candidates were elected. Menzies had campaigned unevenly in the 1940 election. He was still out of sorts with the tragic crash and still grieving for the loss of his friends and the end result was a hung parliament where the balance of power was held by two independents.

In those days, there were 74 members of the House of Representatives. In the election in 1940, 36 Coalition members were elected, along with 36 Labor member and two independents – Arthur Coles in Henty and Alex Wilson who was re-elected as the independent member for Wimmera, a Western Victorian rural based seat. After discussions with the independents, Menzies and the Coalition formed a government with their support.

Menzies did his best to conduct a war-time government when there were pressures on him to pay attention to the threat from Japan. At the same time, there was pressure on him to contribute forces to the defence of the British Empire or more particularly to Great Britain itself, which was literally fighting for its life. The combination of many pressures affected Menzies at this point and, unfortunately, all from within the Coalition party room. John Curtin also did not enlist in WWI but the constant backbiting was always in relation to Menzies not having served.

So concerned did Arthur Coles become about the personal attacks on Menzies, that he joined the parliamentary UAP in 1941. But, after a fairly controversial visit to London in early 1941, whereby Menzies was away from Australia for the best part of five months , further dinted Menzies’ goodwill with colleagues. In spite of the fact that Menzies had attended meetings of the British war cabinet, his critics argued that the Australian Prime Minister should be at home and not in the UK.

The pressure eventually led Menzies to resign in August 1941 and Country Party leader Arthur Fadden, who acted as Prime Minister while Menzies was in London, was chosen in a joint party meeting to take his place. Arthur Coles left the UAP over the treatment of Menzies and within 40 days had voted with Labor and the other independent, Alex Wilson, to support a motion put by Labor leader John Curtin thereby bringing down the Fadden Government

I would venture to argue that, not only did the air crash lead to John Curtin becoming Prime Minister, it actually inverted their respective successes. If Menzies had remained Prime Minister throughout the War, it’s unlikely he would have gone on much longer after it, and it’s likely there would have been a change in government then. My bet is that the next PM would have been Bert Evatt and that is a scenario best left to others. That air crash had long lasting repercussions.

So, why did a plane like this come to crash? It is reasonable to assume that the RAAF keeps its planes in good condition, for obvious reasons. Just as the American government keeps Air Force One in good condition for pretty obvious reasons too. The planes are maintained, the pilots are competent, and things should not go wrong on such flights. So how was it that something went wrong in war time Australia, in 1940, when Britain was fighting for its life, and we suddenly lost our key war leaders?

There were a number of enquiries into this crash – a coronial inquest in Canberra , two Air Force enquiries and there was an enquiry conducted by Mr Justice Lowe of the Victorian Supreme Court sitting in a special Air Force tribunal. A number of witnesses were interviewed many times. This created problems as well as the case being investigated by two jurisdictions – the ACT police, who interviewed everybody who saw the crash from Canberra, and the NSW police who interviewed everybody who saw the crash from Queanbeyan. There were issues.

Unfortunately, too, the RAAF took control of the crash site. Canberra airport was closest to the crash site, which was on a ridge beside Canberra airport. The RAAF got there first, put a cordon around the site and controlled it to the exclusion of the police. As a result, no forensic photographs were taken of the victims in the wreckage, a practice which had been commonplace in NSW since the 1920s wherever a murder or suspicious death occurred. In NSW, photographs would be taken of the deceased.

There was also no tagging of the bodies in place, such that they could be taken to the morgue later with a diagram of where the body had been found in the plane in order to help indentify it later on. The bodies were not identifiable immediately by vigilant observation.

So what had happened, and what did these enquiries find? The plane was a brand new plane. It had only seven hours on it. It was a Lockheed Hudson, based on the Lockheed Electra, which was a famous aircraft for civilian use before the war. It had been very well maintained, and been strictly under guard at Laverton in Victoria.

The plane was specifically converted for VIP use. All the bomb racks, which you normally find in a Hudson, had been removed and it had six passenger seats. It also had dual controls – which is most important in this story – two seats from where a pilot or a co-pilot could fly the plane, without changing seats.

The captain of the flight was Flight Lieutenant Bob Hitchcock. Bob Hitchcock was an interesting chap. His father, also called Bob, had gone in search of Kingsford Smith when he crashed in North Western Australia in 1929. So some said that crash was a publicity stunt. Bobby Hitchcock and Keith Anderson had searched for Kingsford Smith and crew whom they thought had crashed in Tanami dessert. In fact they hadn’t. Bobby Hitchcock and Keith Anderson crashed in the Tanami desert in the search and both perished from thirst.

When Bobby junior was approached and asked whether he wanted money for his family, he said it wasn’t what his Dad would have wanted. Kingsford Smith’s name was not held in high regard, and the new hero became young Bobby Hitchcock whose local member, John Curtin, said, “Lad, what do you want to do with your life? I’ll see to it that you do it.” And young Bobby said, “I want to be a pilot, Mr Curtin, in the RAAF.”

Curtin saw to it that Hitchcock joined the RAAF and in the opinion of some was an advanced beyond his capabilities because his file was marked with the magic words, “son of Bobby Hitchcock, who died in the Kookaburra looking for Kingsford Smith”. With that on his Air Force personnel file, some said young Bobby got a lot further in the Air Force than his skill and merits said he should have. Bobby had various crashes in planes. He had a bit of a reputation as a tricky pilot.

However, when Bobby was transferred to Hudsons, he managed to fly a 107 hours as a captain incident free. I’ve looked at his log book in the National Archives, been though it very carefully. Hitchcock flew a 107 hours incident free and his squadron leader, when cross examined later, said he was a slightly above average Hudson pilot. To put that in perspective, there were only about four or five Hudson instructors in the entire country who have flown longer than Bob Hitchcock in Hudsons.

Hitchcock had done the Canberra run before and he had landed the Hudson into similar conditions coming in over Queanbeyan and that little ridge. So, when the enquiries were held and sabotage, aircraft unworthiness and other possible scenarios were eliminated, the various courts found that pilot error was to blame. But Justice Lowe and others had trouble trying to conclude that Hitchcock had been flying the plane. They could not marry up his record in Hudsons with what had happened and what was a pretty reasonable flying day.

Nevertheless, the blame was attached to Hitchcock by default in the sense that it was said the air crash was caused by pilot error. And that was accepted. But there were two other pilots on the plane that day. One was Richard Wiesener – who was a pilot officer, an outstanding young pilot but still very new. He was not certified to fly Hudson bombers. He was on this flight only as an observer.

And then there was Air Minister James Fairbairn, one of the most distinguished pilots in Australia. He was a very distinguished WWI fighter pilot on the Western front. At the time of the crash, he was licensed to fly 25 different aircraft. He’d flown a plane from London to Melbourne in the mid 1930s – no small thing in those days. And, about a month before the accident, Fairbairn had flown a plane around Australia in a time which allowed him then to hold the round Australia air speed record. Fairbairn was no slouch as a pilot. And he had made a statement during a ministerial visit to a school in Adelaide, about a week before the accident that might be evidence he could have been keen to try flying a Hudson.

Speaking to the headmaster of this school, who was also a pilot, they got to talking about Hudsons, and this is what Fairbairn said:

 Hudson bombers have a rather nasty stalling characteristic. The combined effect of throttling back and dropping the flaps preparatory to landing, will land you in whole heap of bother. They’re very sensitive at this stage to varying air pressures and from what I’ve been told, the pilot coming in to land can find himself suddenly and without warning in a machine that’s no longer airborne, heading straight for the ground. I will be using a Hudson for my departmental travelling, and on every possible occasion I will practise landings and find out about this stalling trick. Personally I think it’s only a matter of handling the throttles wisely.

 Looked at in the light of what happened to the plane as it crashed, to me that is a powerful statement of intent, admissible or otherwise.

Secondly, Herb Plenty recalled speaking to Sir Frederick Thomas who had been Bob Hitchcock’s squadron commander during the war. He was a very distinguished pilot. Thomas told him that he had told Hitchcock to let the Minister have a touch of the controls. That’s the second point.

The third point was that one of the people who attended the scene, soon after the fire had been put out, was a Canberra fireman called Tom Hines. As Tom Hines was moving through the wreckage, he tripped over what he thought was a log. When he looked again, to his horror he discovered it was a body. He said later, “Something about this body convinced me that the wrong person was flying the aircraft.”

These things, to my mind, all add up as against the relative improbability of a pilot with 107 hours up, crashing a Hudson in those circumstances.

The other thing I should mention is this. When they went to take off from Essendon Airport, the plane taxied out to the end of the runway. In a Hudson that means you’ve got two large landing wheels under the main wings and a tiny little wheel at the back. The plane is going out like a DC-3 with its nose up. This means it is hard to see into and no one could really tell from the ground who would be sitting where as the plane taxied away.

At the end of the runway, the plane stopped for 10 minutes. There were a number if trainers in the tower, as Essendon was a training aerodrome. The aerodrome was full of young men learning to fly before heading to Europe and the war. So the tower gave the red light to the incoming planes not to land. You can imagine that the aircraft controller with so many students in the air would be acutely aware of time. And this VIP flight is sitting on the tarmac for ten minutes. Then it moved a little further and sat again there for another five minutes before finally taking off.

What I think happened was this. Hitchcock was on the left hand side in the captain’s seat. Wiesener was on the right hand side in the co pilot’s seat. At some point, while the plane was still on the ground, Fairbairn went forward, tapped Wiesener on the shoulder and asked him to swap seats as Wiesener was only an observer and told the young man that he just wanted to sit there and observe.

So Fairbairn got into the co pilot’s seat. People ask what would the Army minister or the Vice President of the Executive Council say about this?  Or the Chief of General Staff, Sir Brudenell White, have said about this? They were all on the plane. My answer is nothing, because Fairbairn would have said he was only going to observe. What’s more, Fairbairn was federal parliament’s pilot in the 1930s, the only MP with a licence at that time.

In the co pilot’s seat, Fairbairn would have worked on Hitchcock, who is described by his instructor and his superiors as an old soldier type or somebody who does what he’s told, especially by somebody like an Air minister. And, basically, Hitchcock let Fairbairn fly the plane.

And all was well, until they made their approach to land. Fairbairn was used to flying an older type of plane where they had gliding characteristics. In other words, on approach to land, you could ease off the throttle and let the weight of the plane, to some degree, bring you down – which is of course the way modern planes land, to some extent. And that was what Fairbairn was used to. The pilot would come in fairly low, fairly slowly, and make a shallow approach. But you cannot do this in a Hudson Bomber.

The Hudson Bomber was a high performance plane – it looked big, it looked bulky, it had tapered wings, it was very high powered, it had two 1050 Horsepower Pratt and Whitney engines. It was a monster in its day and it had what they called a high wing loading, so the weight of the plane was high compared to the area of the wings. You could not glide a Hudson Bomber. So you had to land them hard, and fast, and you had to land them from a high angle of attack.

Unfortunately, I think Fairbairn attempted to land the plane going back to automatic, so to speak, or landing as if it was a plane that he was used to flying and not this new high performance plane. The irony of it was that what he told the headmaster is an exact summary of what happened. More so than anything Justice Lowe or the wing commanders or the Coroner in Canberra ever wrote about the final moments of this flight.

Fairbairn, in a spooky sort of way, had nailed it a week before the crash had happened.

I walked up and stood up on top of this ridge where the crash happened, right beside Canberra airport. If you know Canberra airport, you’ve got Pialligo Avenue running along the end of the north south runway. If you go down a hill, you come to the Sutton Road which leads back up to the Hume Highway. This ridge runs parallel to the Sutton Road on one side and the main north south runway on the other. It’s not very high, and you can climb it easily.

I stood up there, with the transcripts of evidence, and a compass, and tried to work it all out and get it sorted, knowing that the memorial that is there by the way is right on the side of where the plane was found. And it seems to me that Fairbairn came in too low and too slowly. He had a moment of realising his trouble with the terrifying thought of, what am I going to do? I’m not going to clear this ridge. So he did what Hudson pilots have told me they would have done in that situation. Your instincts kick in, you ease the nose up, and you put the power on to climb over the hill, so to speak. And, in a Hudson, that’s fatal. If that is attempted, then the plane would do a left wing down stall, pushing this type of plane down to the left. And that’s what happened.

There’s some suggestion that when this happened Hitchcock finally, for his own self preservation I guess, grabbed the controls and almost landed the plane in some sort of Herculean feat of piloting. There’s a theory that the plane landed largely intact and what got them was that unfortunately they went over the top of a log which ripped off the undercarriage and burst the fuel tanks and burnt them.

There’s an intriguing photograph of the plane in one of the newspapers of the day. It is in the book. It shows the plane in an upright position. Although the wreckage is burnt out, you don’t get a sense that the plane has been catastrophically destroyed, rather that it has been burnt out. So, at the end of the day, it might have been a fairly close thing.