Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (22 page)

Senior First Officer Ian Steven was in the left-hand seat. Captain Ron Jackson-Smith sat on his right-hand with the young Flight Engineer, Ken Hickey, just behind him facing the flashing lights of his switchboard. It was a fine November morning and Steven taxied Convair VR-HFX away from Kai Tak’s Terminal Building in the warm sunlight of Guy Fawkes’ Day.

The flight was a full one: 116 passengers to Saigon, Bangkok and Calcutta, a good number of them South Korean engineers and merchant navy seamen and Vietnamese civilians. It was also a ‘check’, or monitoring, flight. That meant that the normal complement of two pilots, Steven and Jackson-Smith in this case, was increased by one, a Check Captain, Bob Howell, there to assess the performance of the other two – of the First Officer’s suitability for promotion to Captain, and the Captain’s suitability for appointment as Training Captain on the line. In these perfectly normal circumstances Steven was in control of the aircraft, Jackson-Smith occupied the co-pilot’s seat, while Bob Howell breathed down both their necks from the ‘jump seat’, the spare seat behind the pilot. It is probably worth adding that, although this was a ‘check’ flight, all three men were fully qualified to fly Convairs.

At 10.30 a.m. the Control Tower signalled ‘cleared for take-off’. Steven called to the Flight Engineer for maximum power and away she went. Everything normal. Faster … faster…. At 122 knots, well below take-off speed, the plane began to vibrate.

‘This vibration increased’, Steven said later, ‘and became very severe; the whole aircraft was shaking.’

No one on the flight deck could tell what it meant, Steven couldn’t control it and, to add to the bewilderment, Bob Howell thought he had heard a loud bang just as the vibrations started. Had a bird been sucked into an engine? The question was academic – the Convair had to attempt to rise into the air or stay on the runway and try to stop without hitting anything. The shaking was now so bad that the aircraft might not be able to fly, and Ian Steven had to make the split-second decision of a lifetime – and he made it. ‘Aborting!’ he yelled, and wrenched back the power levers and slammed on the brakes.

‘I had my feet hard on those brakes and heard Bob Howell shouting, “Maximum brakes!”’ Steven says. ‘Trouble was the braking didn’t seem normal. The aircraft just didn’t decelerate. My God! I reached across for the reverse thrust levers, and yanked ’em right back.’

For all the effect it had he might just as well have combed his hair. The aircraft continued to speed ahead as in a nightmare. With her brakes fully applied – doubly applied in fact, since Steven could feel Jackson-Smith also pressing on the right-hand pedals – and reverse thrust from all engines,
VR-HFX
began to veer to the right. The end of the runway was getting closer by that time, and Steven, having applied full left rudder to counter the slew to the right and feeling no response from the rudder or nose wheel steering, could only brace his legs against the rudder pedals and his hands against the instrument coaming as the plane roared across the grass flanking the runway towards the waters of Kowloon Bay. Like a drowning man he saw a good many of his thirty-four years flash vividly through his mind in the fleeting moments before the Convair took the sea wall like a steeplechaser rising to a hurdle. Then she put her nose down, and dived into the harbour in a spectacular cloud of spray.

Ian Steven did not drown. Luckily for him, Ron Jackson-Smith and Ken Hickey, the fuselage cracked just behind the cockpit when it hit the water and, although the cockpit itself did submerge, the greater part of the plane’s body stayed afloat. It lay there about eighty yards from the sea wall, like a lazy silver whale with a broken nose.

‘The three of us in the cockpit were unhurt,’ Steven says, ‘and I saw Ken Hickey trying to open the cockpit door. The damned thing had jammed. We decided to abandon the aircraft by the sliding windows on the flight deck and they opened without any trouble. The water level was just below the left-side window and I virtually swam straight out once I’d seen the other two go out of the starboard one.’

Bob Howell had been between the two pilots, standing behind them.

‘When I saw that the aircraft was unstoppable and heading across the grass strip for the Bay, I dived smartly out of the cabin and wedged myself between two seated little Chinese girls. I had no belt on of course, so I got bumped around a bit when we went over into the water. I remember one of the Chinese girls saying nervously, “I can’t swim, Captain.” At first many passengers had wanted to make for the rear door and shouted to Chief
Purser Chir to let them out. Well, if he had done so he’d have let the water in and then the plane’s tail would have subsided and disaster would have been certain for those inside. So Chir urged them all to wait to get out the front way. He won an award for that.’

Despite his confident smile Bob Howell could swim no better than the little Chinese girl and found himself stuck half in, half out of the front passenger door – all Ian Steven saw as he swam up was Bob’s bald head and an arm sticking out. Steven yanked the door open and ‘the next thing, Bob was floating away and the two little Chinese girls who couldn’t swim were sitting on my head’. Untangling themselves, they struggled to a rescue boat. Several were already there, thanks to an alert Traffic Control Officer who had sounded the crash alarm when he saw the plane going over the sea wall. Tugs and launches crowded round the long fuselage, and even the
cross-harbour
ferry boat
Man Shun
had swung off its course between Hong Kong Island and Yaumati to reach the port wing where many passengers were huddling, having escaped through the emergency exits. Others squeezed through cracks in the hull. Later, they all praised the cabin crew, composed on this occasion of Japanese and Thais as well as Hong Kong Chinese. One Korean seaman said the Cathay cabin girls were the heroines of the day. ‘Most of the women passengers lost their heads and began shouting. The stewardesses did everything to bring order. If not, I don’t think I’d be here.’

An American lady, Mrs Barrett, said that the plane was rushing along the runway at high speed when suddenly she felt a sharp braking that jolted the entire aircraft; then came a bump. ‘We shot into the water. My husband quickly helped me unfasten my seat belt’ and she followed
fellow-passengers
through the emergency exit onto the wing. A pretty Korean crooner on her way to entertain Allied troops in Vietnam wept for her missing passport. ‘I hope this accident will not prevent me from doing my duty to the boys in Vietnam,’ she moaned seductively. The press cameras flashed and she was soon comforted by reporters and discharged her duty in due course. As Duncan Bluck remembers it, an Indian passenger claimed that he had lost a bag crammed with thousands of dollars, his life savings, and demanded compensation double quick. Bluck arranged for divers to make a special search; but when they brought up the bag it contained nothing but a bundle of well-worn dhotis.

Of the 116 passengers and eleven crew aboard, eighty-two of the passengers and all the crew escaped unhurt, although thirty-three
passengers
were treated in hospital. Tragically one passenger, a Vietnamese woman, died at the moment of impact from a fractured skull.

How did this experience affect the crew? According to Ian Steven: ‘I
hadn’t smoked for some time, but I must have had five or six cigarettes on the ferry taking us ashore. Going over the sea wall I had thought I was dead.’ He didn’t stay dead long. He was flying again almost at once, and as I write is still flying for Cathay as a Senior Captain on Boeing 747s, although talking of his retirement in Australia or New Zealand.

Still dripping from the wreck, Bob Howell telephoned his wife as soon as he got ashore. ‘Good heavens, Bob,’ she said, expecting him to be well on his way to Saigon. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Oh, just having a swim.’ But despite his light tone, he was as shocked as Ian Steven. As the plane swerved off onto the runway’s grass verge and headed towards the harbour, he had heard himself silently screaming, ‘This can’t be me!’ For both men the great uncontrollable rush towards the Bay had seemed to go on for ever. Witnesses in the Kai Tak Control Tower could tell them that actually, from Steven’s shout of ‘Aborting!’ to the sickening plunge into the harbour, a mere twenty-one seconds had elapsed.

The Convair had been seriously damaged. Crane barges had difficulty towing the wreck to the RAF slipway, and once there, in order to lift it ashore, a cable was slung around the fuselage. When winching began, it was found too late that part of the tail was embedded in the harbour mud and the cable cut through the fuselage like a wire through cheese. The aircraft was finally brought ashore in pieces while all four engines stayed on the bottom of the Bay. They too were recovered, badly damaged. But Convair 880
VR-HFX
was a total wreck.

Over the signatures of John Bremridge, Managing Director; Dave Smith, Alec Wales, Don Delaney and R. J. Smith, Cathay’s Training Manager, the Company’s report blamed the accident mainly on the sudden shredding of the right-hand nose wheel tyre. Retreaded more than once, as was customary, the tyre had disintegrated causing the terrible shaking. With the nose wheel to all intents and purposes gone, Ian Steven lost his ability to steer with it, hence the uncontrollable swerve to the right. The Goodyear Company, the manufacturers of the tyre, stated in its report that it believed foreign objects on the runway – markers, lights and so on – might have torn the retread. The Cathay report recommended that retreading of nose wheel tyres should be more carefully monitored. Both reports completely exonerated the flying crew and congratulated the cabin staff for preventing panic and an even worse disaster.

Even so, it was a bad day for Cathay. For a time ‘See the Bay with CPA’ became a local joke. Worse, the Company had lost an aircraft when its fleet was already at full stretch, though it was some consolation that Don Delaney was able to salvage something financially from the wreck. ‘We had a fantastic
amount of spare parts from it,’ he said, ‘and the hull we sold quite well for scrap.’

The accident had come just as John Browne was preparing to announce the Company’s acquisition of a HK$7.5 million (about
£
500,000) Convair simulator from Japan. This would reduce the need to use real and expensive aircraft for crew training and, of course, the risk of losing them. Now, thanks to Don Delaney’s brilliant gift for improvisation, a number of bits and pieces from the carcase of poor Convair VR-HFX went into this new Japanese electronic wonder.

Delaney also had the presence of mind to rescue the Convair’s registration plate. When Howell retired, Delaney presented it to him as a souvenir. Bob had it mounted on wood above the legend: ‘The One He Swam Away From – VR-HFX 5.11.67’, and it hangs on Bob’s living room wall.

The Kai Tak mishap had been caused by a few feet of worn rubber. It could have happened to anyone. Five years later a second Cathay Convair became the centre of a horror story embracing multiple death, mystery and the pursuit of an alleged mass murderer.

On 15 June 1972 a ‘Top Urgent’ message to Swires in London brought news of the airline’s worst tragedy:

Duncan Bluck had been out on his sailing boat that morning; it was lucky that a Cathay captain had seen him setting off and was able to find him and bring him back. Neither Bluck nor anyone else connected with Cathay Pacific would get much sleep for several days. A midair collision? Over Vietnam, too. That complicated things for the American war with North Vietnam was then at its height.

Next day came a follow-up message. Jock, John and Adrian Swire and Michael Fiennes, suffering mental agonies in London, learned that a Cathay investigation team flown from Hong Kong to South Vietnam the night before had already been lifted by American Army helicopters to the scene of the crash, far up in a remote, forested region of the Central Highlands near the town of Pleiku. The team was led by Captain Bernie Smith, Cathay’s Operations Manager, and included Brian Thompson, the Chief Engineer, representatives of HAECO and of Hong Kong’s Department of Civil Aviation, notably Cyril Wray, the Colony’s Accident Inspector.

Peter Sharrock, Reuters’ bureau chief in Saigon, was quickly onto the story and his first urgent dispatch quoted an American military spokesman as saying that the Convair had collided in midair with some unidentified
aircraft, and that one of the two planes had fallen midway between Pleiku city and the port of Qui Nhon on a mountain range about 250 miles
north-east
of Saigon. The collision was merely presumed, although the spokesman added that no locally based military aircraft was listed as missing, and yet the theory did seem plausible since commercial airliners like Cathay’s regularly flew across Vietnam at about 30,000 feet, an altitude sometimes favoured by the high-flying American B-52 bombers based on Guam. Nevertheless, nothing in the wreckage spotted so far bore the green and black colours of a B-52; the tail plane in the jungle was silver.

A dispatch from Agence France Presse added to the speculation, quoting a Vietnamese Government spokesman who said that the second plane had been a Nationalist Chinese C-46 military transport from Taiwan, not a
B-52
. The report added that uniformed Montagnard tribesmen (the friendly hill-people of central Vietnam) were poking about the wreckage in gas masks in appalling heat, while aviation experts tried to read some sort of message in the widely scattered bits and pieces. It even hinted that there might be some survivors.

Into this tortured uncertainty the
Hong Kong Standard
decided to jump with both feet. On 16 June a front page banner headline proclaimed ‘CPA Ignored Air Warning’, and in fine thumping vein went on: ‘Cathay Pacific ignored three warnings – one by the Hong Kong Government – to stay out of the Vietnam air “corridor” that claimed the lives of eighty-one people yesterday.’ It would be hard to imagine a more damaging allegation the day after such an accident, and it struck everyone at Cathay a second blow almost as devastating as the first. It came before any reliable facts were available, and it was wholly false. Duncan Bluck, after alerting Cathay’s legal advisers, put out an emphatic rebuttal which in the circumstances he managed to keep remarkably calm.

    The following day the
Standard
did an about-face. In a headline display on its front page, as eye-catching as the original calumny had been, the
words ‘Apology To Cathay Pacific Airways’ were followed by ‘The
Hong
Kong Standard
acknowledges that our report was wholly inaccurate and regrets the false impression created by [it]. The
Standard
wishes to make it clear to its readers that Cathay Pacific Airways have at no time ignored any warnings or failed to accept any recommendations which are made in the interests of the safety and comfort of its passengers.’

The paper unreservedly acknowledged the untruth of its own reported slice of fiction and apologized to Cathay for permitting it to be published. It was a rapid and handsome apology and the
Standard
ran it for two days.

With that distressing distraction out of the way, all thoughts could turn to the search for survivors and to discovering the cause of the disaster. This was not easy. One of the first two Vietnamese helicopters to have found the wreckage was shot down next day by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army units infesting the region, but despite the dangers and difficulties of the war zone Cyril Wray, Bernie Smith and their colleagues poked about the crash site in almost unbearable heat and humidity, charting and identifying the various bits and pieces. They soon reported that major parts of the wreckage could be removed to Saigon for closer examination by
Vietnamese,
American and Hong Kong experts, with accident investigators expected to arrive at any moment from Britain.

The first Cathay announcement of the disaster had spoken of eighty-one passengers and crew. There had actually been seventy-one passengers of a variety of nationalities, mostly Japanese, Thai and American. Two complete families had been on the Convair: at Bangkok seven members of an American family called Kenny had boarded together; and a Filipino civil servant, Norberto Fernandez, his wife, his niece and his five children were on their way home to Manila. ‘There’s a possibility of survivors,’ the Saigon spokesman had said, but a telegram from Bernie Smith put paid to that hope: ‘Returned from crash site definitely nil repeat nil survivors.’ That dreadful message, according to Adrian Swire, left everyone in Swires’ London office feeling almost intolerably remote and miserable; Joan Esnouf recalls seeing old Jock in tears. The Convair’s Captain had been an Australian, Neil Μorison, Fleet Captain of the 880s fleet and a friend of Adrian Swire from his Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force days. First Officer Lachlan Mackenzie had flown 2,687 hours in Convairs and had been flying the aircraft under routine instruction from Morison. The right-hand seat had been occupied by First Officer Leslie Boyer and the Flight Engineer was Ken Hickey, one of the Cathay crew who had swum to safety from Convair VR-HFX after her plunge into Kowloon Bay. The Hong Kong Chinese cabin crew consisted of two pursers, Dicky Kong and William Yuen, and
four hostesses – Winnie Chan, Ellen Cheng, Tammy Li and Florence Ng.

To the Vietnamese helicopter pilots who first spotted it, all that was left of the Convair, strewn across an area of wooded hillsides, must have looked like the debris of a monstrous paper-chase, but even so an initial close-up inspection of the crash site told the investigators a good deal. Before hitting the ground the aircraft had broken into three main parts: the nose (all that part ahead of the wing), the central fuselage (where the wings join it and the landing gear joins the wings), and the aft fuselage behind the wings. This last part had fallen vertically and been impaled on a tree. The force of the fall from the plane’s normal flying altitude of 29,000 feet had compressed it into a mere six feet, crushing seats, galleys and overhead racks; on its right side there were distinct signs of scorching. A search round the wreckage showed that many passengers had been thrown out, although some were still strapped in their seats. The cockpit too was hideously crushed and virtually inaccessible. Bernie Smith spoke delicately of the ‘unpleasant proximity of crew remains’.

Behind a protective cordon of American troops (the Viet Cong were close at hand), the investigating team concentrated on the landing gear beam situated where the wheels and wings join the fuselage, for there they found significant signs of structural failure. It was at this point that the idea of sabotage rather than collision first crept into their minds. It was too early to be sure of anything – structural failure, after all, could mean metal fatigue. However, when the suspect parts had been moved to Saigon and two British Government experts from the Accident Investigation Branch of Whitehall’s Department of Trade and Industry had looked at them more closely, a still more significant discovery was made. A small crater was detected on the inside of the aircraft’s skin where it was attached to the main landing gear beam; a crater, they decided, caused by an explosion of some sort of infernal device in the part of the cabin nearest the right wing. Such a device would certainly have fragmented, and some fragments would equally certainly have embedded themselves in the passengers and in the seats nearest to the explosion. Who had been in those seats? It became a matter of urgency to
X-ray
the remains of passengers known to have been seated in that area and, sure enough, metallic particles were found embedded in their limbs. Further tests confirmed that these particles were indeed fragments of a bomb.

Even while the tests were in progress, the joint Vietnamese– American–Hong Kong team ruled out the earliest hypothesis. The collision theory went by the board when it was found that without doubt there had been no movement of military or commercial aircraft in the region at the
time of the crash. The other possibility considered, that of a SAM
surface-to
-air missile attack by the North Vietnamese, was also discounted because all the bomb fragments found on the Convair were of light metal whereas military missile fragments are large, heavy and thick. Furthermore, a missile is designed to shatter an aircraft over its entire length, and this had not happened to the Convair. Apart from that, once the warhead had exploded on contact with its target the body of any missile – a pretty hefty object – would have fallen very near the aircraft wreckage. A careful search revealed no such thing.

The state and positioning of the bodies, too, told their own story. The aft fuselage section contained fifteen bodies – two cabin attendants, the rest passengers: a purser was dressed in his in-flight meals service jacket; some of the passengers were in the aisle, others in the toilet area. Twenty feet from the wreckage a flight hostess lay in full uniform; she was wearing her serving apron. She was badly injured around the face, but her body had made only a shallow indentation in fairly soft ground, from which it was clear that she had fallen from the aircraft at a relatively low altitude. A little forward of the aircraft’s nose the Second Purser, Dicky Kong, lay spreadeagled on his back, his face swollen but undamaged, the two-bar insignia on his shoulders confirming his identity. The nearby body of a male passenger in the clothes of a priest was easily identified as that of the only Irish passenger, a Father Cunningham. When the mangled cockpit was prised open, the first body to be recovered was that of Captain Morison, identifiable only by his epaulettes and by his build. Later, in the Saigon mortuary, the bodies of Leslie Boyer and Ken Hickey, too, were identified. Lachlan Mackenzie was missing (and was never found).

Because, when disaster struck, some passengers had had their seat belts fastened and some had not; because some evidently had been standing in the aisle; because all doors were locked and all life jackets stowed normally; because, as far as anyone could tell in the shambles of the cockpit, the crew had not donned their oxygen masks – for all these reasons, coupled with the readings taken from the aircraft’s ‘black box’ flight recorder which was retrieved only slightly damaged, it was established to expert satisfaction that everyone aboard had been taken totally by surprise. Whatever had destroyed Cathay’s Convair VR-HFX sixty-four minutes and two seconds after take-off from Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport, the plane had been flying normally at the time.

One can assume from their dress that the pursers and hostesses were busy serving lunch when the end came. Without warning something had happened: the stricken aircraft had turned over on its back and broken up
into quite large sections during its plunge to earth, shedding bodies as it fell. The best one can say is that certainly everyone – passengers and crew – lost consciousness in the massive decompression which followed the explosion.

What exactly had happened, so brutally, so suddenly? It was time for the bomb experts to give their opinion. Vernon Clancy, a distinguished British explosives expert and a veteran of ninety-six bomb investigations, cleared the air a bit more. In his confidential report to the Vietnamese Director of Civil Aviation, Saigon, he stated bluntly, ‘There is firm evidence of an explosion of a substantial quantity of high explosive within the aircraft, probably within the cabin in way of the wing roots.’ This ‘firm evidence’ expanded on the first report of a small crater in the aircraft’s skin. By now a number of such craters, large and minute, had been found on the inner skin and near the No. 3 fuel tank. Within one of them partly fused fibres were visible, suggesting that a fragment had passed through the carpet in the passenger cabin.