Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (24 page)

It was also alleged that Somchai had taken a course in explosives during an official training visit to the Netherlands. While on the subject of Somchai’s knowledge of and interest in explosives (the prosecution made quite a lot of this), a Thai police pilot was brought in to testify that, on a course at an aviation training centre at Hua Hin in southern Thailand, he had given Somchai a cake of C-4 high explosive. He’d got the C-4 from a friend, he told the three judges, but hadn’t really wanted it – on leaving the course he had passed it on to Somchai, who later told him he had used the
C-4
to ‘blow up fish’. A Thai master-sergeant at Hua Hin testified that Somchai had actually asked him where the best place was to place a bomb in an aircraft. ‘Somewhere near the wings,’ he was told.

Heads craned (according to the press) when the pretty night club hostess, Sathinee Somphithak, tripped into the witness box. She told a hushed court how Somchai had tried to bribe her to take his daughter to Hong Kong, and why – thank God – she had refused.

Of extreme importance was the evidence of Wesley A. Neep. A former chief of the US Army Mortuary in Saigon, he testified that between 1966 and 1972 he had identified more than 30,000 bodies of American servicemen at the Saigon mortuary, and assured the judges that in his twenty-six years
of experience he had never made a wrong identification. In this case he admitted he had had his work cut out. It had been necessary to use a process of meticulous elimination to identify Somwang’s body. Hers was a difficult case, he said, because there were no teeth, no hands for fingerprinting and the facial half of the skull was missing. So were her legs below the knee, although her body was scarcely touched. In fact, Wesley Neep told the court, the injuries were typical of a boobytrap or grenade victim. Enlarging on this, a Thai police ballistics expert theorized that Somwang had been sitting with the bomb at her feet. She might have been reading. Or she might have bent down to open her case and so triggered the bomb.

The condition of the wreckage was vouched for by Cyril Wray for Hong Kong’s DCA, who also confirmed that Somwang’s corpse was ‘peppered with foreign bodies’. As for the cause of the disaster, Eric Newton derided a suggestion by Somchai’s lawyers that the plane could suddenly have stalled, gone into a vertical dive and disintegrated. ‘I have to assume,’ he said, ‘that the pilot would be able to gain control of the aircraft in the event of a stall and continue to fly perfectly safely.’ He similarly parried a second suggestion from the defence that the plane might have crashed because a bird had been sucked into an engine. ‘To my knowledge,’ he said firmly, ‘there is no big bird that flies over Thailand or Vietnam at an altitude of 29,000 feet.’

The trial dragged on. In all, the prosecution called sixty-seven witnesses. Waiting to be called to give evidence, Vernon Clancy, the accident investigator from London, was obliged to hang around Bangkok for nearly two months, increasingly worried by the thought of all the work piling up on his desk in England. There were delays while the interpreters struggled to gear their inadequate linguistic skills to cope with the technical evidence. On one exceptionally stuffy morning the strain proved too much for one of them and he passed out. People rushed to stretch him out on the prosecution’s desk. His tie was loosened, his jacket removed. Someone held smelling salts under his nose. It took more than half an hour of determined fanning before he was able to stand up. He was told to go home and the hearing was adjourned for a couple of days. But at last, on 30 May 1974, Somchai stood before the crowded court in chains, his eyes hidden behind wrap-around dark glasses, and heard Judge Chitti, the Deputy Director of the Criminal Court, deliver the two-and-a-half-hour summing-up.

Judge Chitti started by pointing out, first, that Somchai was not badly off and, second, that he said he loved his daughter. He could not therefore be said to suffer from the family or financial problems attributed to him by the prosecution. Somwang was not a prostitute, as Colonel Term had alleged,
for if she had been, Somchai, who came from a respectable family, would not have accepted her as his common law wife. On the question of the bombing itself, the judge felt that it was not sufficiently proven that Somchai had taken an explosives course in the Netherlands, and the court also found it unlikely that the police pilot at Hua Hin who said he had given Somchai the cake of C-4 had actually done so. ‘Why didn’t he use it himself?’ the judge wanted to know. ‘Why did he deliberately give it to Somchai?’

As for the Café de Paris hostess, Sathinee Somphithak, she alleged that Somchai had offered her a free trip to Hong Kong and 30,000 baht as part of a phoney marriage deal, but Somchai had stated from the witness box that he had never set eyes on Sathinee until she pointed him out in a police
line-up
. Anyway, the court could not believe Somchai had made Sathinee such an offer because he had arranged already for Somwang to go to Hong Kong. That lack of belief took care of Sathinee’s further allegation that after the air crash she had been threatened with death by one of Somchai’s friends.

Moving on to the cosmetics case said to have been carried on board the Convair by Somwang, the judge said, ‘If there had been explosives in it, the case would have weighed about five kilograms and given Somwang cause to suspect what was in it.’ It was also most unlikely, he added, that Customs officials would have missed checking such a heavy item, particularly if it had had holes drilled in it as alleged by the prosecution. True, expert foreign witnesses had stated that they had found ‘foreign bodies’ in Somwang’s body, but why were no fragments of the case found in it?’ The judge made no mention of Somwang’s (and Somchai’s) insistence that she and Somthaya be given seats 10E and 10F over the wing.

The long-awaited verdict caused a sensation. ‘Not guilty. Somchai to be held in custody pending an appeal.’ As the words fell into the room, sweating, shouting spectators stood on tables and chairs in a hubbub of applause amid the blinding explosions of flashbulbs. Somchai, who had stood to attention during the long summing-up, his face expressionless, now managed a tight little smile. ‘I’m very happy because I am innocent,’ was all he said, and he took off his dark glasses for the photographers. His triumphant father and defence counsel, Sont Chaiyasuta, added, ‘I’m pleased to have won the case. He’s not only my son, he’s my client.’

The prosecutor, Foi Malikhao, had already made up his mind to appeal and he did so a few days later. But he had no better luck the second time round. More emotion, more tension, and when at last the final act was played out, two more weary years had dragged by and the appeal judges had discovered new reasons not to convict Somchai. One was the idea that, because the aircraft had broken into three pieces, there might have been
more than one bomb on board. The judges were also impressed by the fact that, after learning of the crash, Somchai had left for Saigon immediately without notifying his boss. This, the judges said, proved the impressive power of Somchai’s family feeling – his natural anxiety for the fate of his wife and daughter had clearly transcended his fear of disciplinary punishment for having gone absent without leave. Furthermore, the judges considered that if Somchai had really sabotaged the plane he would have tried to vanish into the blue instead of returning to work. (How, having skedaddled, he would ever have managed to collect the insurance money, presumably the sole object of the alleged exercise, the judges did not explain.)

At the end of everything, his shackles removed at last, Somchai walked from the Central Military Appeals Court a free man. Outside, he handed a local reporter a written statement which said, ‘Thank God that the Court of Justice still exists in Thailand…. For those who have tried to insult me, God says “Forgive and forget”, and that’s what I aim to do.’ He was given back his police rank and in later years was to be promoted two grades. He took the insurance companies to court one by one and by 1978 had received the millions of baht for which, six years before, he had insured Somwang and little Somthaya.

The perpetrator of the mid air bomb explosion was never brought to justice. After Somchai’s acquittal no other suspect was ever considered, leave alone pursued. The crux of the matter was this: that despite the heavy weight of the prosecution’s evidence against Somchai, the crucial parts of it were entirely circumstantial – and in Thai law circumstantial evidence alone is not enough to convict. Had anyone
actually seen
Somchai placing a bomb in the plane? Who had
seen
the explosives allegedly hidden in Somwang’s cosmetics case? The answer to both questions was – no one.

The outcome of the trial left anger and bitterness. Many Thais were delighted to see Lieutenant Somchai acquitted, but many more thought justice had been thwarted – on orders from General Prapas, or somebody. Friends of Thailand feared that the acquittal had harmed the country more than the affair itself. To this day senior Thai police officers who knew Somchai have strong doubts about his story, and there have always been those who felt not merely doubtful about his innocence but positive of his guilt; there were even some who played for a while with the idea of vengeance – of paying a ‘hit-man’ to knock him off. A well-born Thai woman in Bangkok, quite close to the affair, expressed what I suppose is one typically Thai view of it: ‘If it’s true about Somchai’s guilt, he will be unhappy for ever. How can you live after having killed eighty-one people?’

Thailand, one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with an ancient and unshakeable culture, easily survived this dismal affair. It is a self-confident place of temples and palaces and its semi-divine king rules a strong-minded people of unmatchable charm. Since 1972 Don Muang Airport has been enlarged and modernized out of all recognition, and today it is as safe and efficient as any airport anywhere. In fact it has become a mecca for tourists and, day in day out, thousands of flights – including Cathay’s – take off or land there without mishap.

I visited Geoffrey Binstead recently. The genial tracker is living now in happy retirement with his Thai wife (he met her during the investigation) among the green peaks and clear fresh Pyrenean air of Andorra. Talking about the case, he voices the British policeman’s philosophy as well as anyone could: ‘Well – you win one, you lose one.’

As for Somchai, after resigning with the rank of Police Colonel, he went to the United States in 1983. Two years later he returned to Thailand with cancer of the kidney and died after two weeks, aged forty-three.

The Vietnam nightmare failed to put passengers off either Cathay Pacific or its Convairs. On the contrary. Despite the worst disaster in Cathay’s history, 1972 turned out to be the best financial year the Company had ever had. Expansion had been the policy of John Bremridge and his directors before the Convair disaster, and that policy remained unchanged. Consequently the Company needed a new and larger aircraft. Boeing’s 747 (the Jumbo) sprang instantly to mind, but for little Cathay the size and expense of this giant were intimidating. The Boeing 707 was a handier size, so that was chosen instead. Cathay’s first four 707s came cheap at US$30 million as a result of a deal with Northwest Orient Airlines of Minneapolis, and HAECO smartened them up with a ‘wide-body’ interior design. By 1 January 1973 Cathay’s fleet numbered eleven, including seven Convairs. To go with the 707s the Company bought an electronic wonder appropriate to this new era of mechanical wizardry – a 707 flight simulator, to be installed at Kai Tak. Made by the Japanese firm Mitsubishi, it gave anyone sitting in it an unearthly impression of utter reality and its ‘brain’ could be programmed to reproduce with equal reality the night scenes of twelve international airports. Soaring, rocking, plunging and banking in response to its controls, it was an ideal training machine, removing the risky necessity of checking pilots in actual flight, using no fuel and saving much money. Indeed the simulator even made money for the Company; when it was joined later by more advanced replicas of TriStars and 747s, Cathay, when not using them, rented them out to other airlines for considerable profit. Jock Swire, reappearing in Hong Kong, found time to play with the new toys.

When in 1974 Cathay’s 707 fleet increased to twelve it was deemed time to revive the Company’s Hong Kong–Sydney service that had been so rudely interrupted thirteen years before, when Cathay’s Electras had battled to Sydney via Manila and Darwin and been chased off the route by the Qantas 707s. On 21 October a Cathay 707 re-inaugurated the service, and now there was no objection from Qantas. As his diary shows, only old Jock refused to be too enthusiastic about this.

Nor was his enthusiasm uplifted by a bad first flight to Sydney. It left Kai Tak at 9 p.m. and

Luckily things picked up on his return flight to Hong Kong:

Despite Jock’s forebodings the Australia service was back for good. This time there was a proper office and a serious effort to spread the good news far and wide of Cathay’s return in strength. Cathay had recently discovered – rather late in the day – the value of publicity. Duncan Bluck was its initiator, as he was initiator of so much else. ‘Well, we had to do something about it,’ he said later. Some time before the resumption of the Sydney run he had looked around for a suitable advertising agency, and chose an Australian company, Fortune Advertising. Ken Landell-Jones, head of Fortune and a highly successful Sydney publicist, recalls their first meeting:

‘There was this English bloke Duncan Bluck, clipped-voiced, unsmiling.
He threw a few sketches for a Cathay advertising campaign on my table. I said, “They’re no good. They’re childish. We’d be the laughing stock.” I sent for my Art Director. He agreed with me. I said to Bluck, “When are you going back to Hong Kong?” He said, “Next day.” Well, we worked all night and – believe me – we gave him his new ads the next morning. Duncan examined them one by one – “Yep … yep … yep….” He liked ’em. We were hired! I never met a man who’d take a decision so quickly.’

One result of Landell-Jones’s recruitment was the early Cathay theme – ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, referring to the Company’s combination of ultra-reliable British and Australian pilots up front and superlatively beautiful Asian air hostesses in the cabin. It was a most seductive formula. For now, in striking half-and full-page ads, dependable-looking pilots and bewitching hostesses smiled up at the reader over the words ‘We know you’ll like us,’ beside copy that had an unaccustomed glow:

Landell-Jones was also responsible for the addition to the livery of each aircraft of the Taikoo logo – the house flag in red, white and blue that decorates Cathay planes to this day as it has always advertised CNCo on the funnels of Swires’ ships. One thing Ken found out relatively early on was the parsimonious aspect of Jock Swire’s character. No great sums of money were going to be spent on his publicity efforts, he could see that. ‘Jock was a real Englishman,’ he said. ‘I met him in London first, he was wearing his tweeds, of course. He took me out to a lunch of cottage pie and a pint of beer in the Stock Exchange Club or somewhere (it cost about fifty pence, I know that). There seemed to be only one bottle in the office, a bottle of sherry and he and his old friend, John Scott, took it in turns to buy it. “Your bottle next time, Scott,” Jock said.’

By the time Cathay’s 707s resumed the Sydney service another Australian live wire, Keith Sillett, had joined the Company as Marketing Manager, and with him and Landell-Jones at work Cathay returned to Australia with a bang, to be welcomed with rapture Down Under. So many Cathay pilots were Australians it was like a homecoming. The newspapers published photographs of a Cathay flight crew, all of whom were Australians: First Officer H. F. Dyball of Sydney, Captain B. J. Wightman of Lismore and
Flight Engineer P. D. Dunn of Sydney. Although not Australian himself, the man who actually piloted Cathay’s inaugural flight into Sydney, Captain Len Cowper, was much interviewed.

One of the Company’s ‘stars’, when he retired a few years later he liked to boast that he had flown every type of Cathay aircraft since the DC-3 except the Catalina.

A new slogan – ‘Fly Hong Kong’s discovery airline’ – put a dash of adventure into Cathay’s appeal. Its sales desks in the office at the corner of Hunter and O’Connell Streets were dominated by a big mural depicting Hong Kong harbour at night, painted, it was announced, by a Lebanese artist called Haider Hamaoui in six hours. Then Ken and Keith had another brainwave. Jim Macdougall, one of Australia’s best-known and respected daily newspaper columnists and a humorist to boot, was on the point of retirement. ‘What about a Cathay column?’ Land ell-Jones asked him over a drink. Macdougall was all for it and Ken swiftly negotiated prime space for a column in editorial type on page three of
The Australian
. All these years later the light-hearted Jim Macdougall column still runs on its merry way, informing thousands of readers of all sorts of goings-on in the Australian world of Cathay. A breezy court circular announcing the comings and goings in Cathay’s aircraft of what Macdougall refers to as ‘high achievers – kings, princes, presidents, potentates, people of fame and credit in a vast range of human activity’, the column brings an extra touch of personality to the airline. Apart from this, Keith Sillett can take credit for a number of publicity gimmicks including Cathay sponsorships of professional golf, tennis and other sporting events in Hong Kong. Far and away the most popular of these, though it owed its inception more to Jock Campbell than to Sillett, is the annual international seven-a-side rugby football tournament played in the Happy Valley stadium. It attracts competitors from France to Fiji and Korea to Sri Lanka, and is growing in popularity each year.

At first three days weekly, Cathay’s Australian service eventually became a daily one. And there was a further expansion. Urged on by Duncan Bluck,
Cathay introduced a three-day-a-week 707 service to the Arabian Gulf, first to Bahrain and later to Dubai as well. This too proved extremely profitable. The Gulf – thanks to oil – had become one of the world’s fastest growing trade areas. Even the poorest Arabs wore gold watches, rings and bracelets, many drove large cars and all of them shunned manual work like the plague. Asian labourers were thus much in demand and Cathay flew in thousands of them, mostly from Taiwan and Korea.

*

The 707s on their swept-back wings had sped Cathay into the wider world. Success fed ambition and in next to no time the Company’s thoughts turned towards a genuine wide-bodied, intercontinental aircraft – ideally, the
eye-popping
jumbo-sized Boeing 747, undoubtedly the Aircraft of the Age. The trouble was that the Jumbos were designed to carry about 450 passengers, and several airlines, including Cathay, were not sure that they could fill these monsters. There were, however, two other wide-bodied aircraft coming onto the market then with a 300-passenger capacity: the Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed TriStar, both three-engined aircraft. The DC-10 was powered by engines made by the American firm, General Electric; the TriStar’s engines came from Rolls-Royce. There seemed little to choose between them, so a team from Cathay set out for America to investigate at close quarters. They arrived at a time of desperate competition between Douglas and Lockheed with the big, long-range DC-10 well out ahead – in fact, already flying. Lockheed had also produced a superb aircraft – indeed the TriStar was something of a technical miracle – but was lagging behind Douglas in production and therefore in sales.

The Cathay team returned to Hong Kong with their recommendations and, in accordance with them, on 29 January 1974 John Bremridge and his directors unanimously agreed to go for the Douglas DC-10. And that normally would have been that.

But something quite unexpected occurred.

It had been agreed to defer for thirty-six hours any announcement of the Board’s decision in favour of the DC-10 to allow time for the British Government to be informed of it. This was an unusual procedure; but the involvement of Rolls-Royce with the TriStar had created a special circumstance. For Rolls-Royce just then was in crisis. Swires in London had an idea that the official reaction to their choice of the rival DC-10 with American engines might be … adverse. And adverse it was. So adverse in fact that the Minister responsible, Michael Heseltine, was moved to telephone in person to request the earliest possible meeting with John
Swire, Adrian being away in Hong Kong. When they met, the handsome and youthful-looking Minister was plainly upset and made no attempt to hide it. He felt let down, he said, by Cathay’s decision – indeed he had been ‘flabbergasted’ by its suddenness. Why had he not been given a chance to bring pressure to bear on Lockheed to give Cathay a better deal? Or ‘to have a word’ with Rolls-Royce, who were admittedly going through rather a difficult patch but who could no doubt be prevailed upon by government to provide cast-iron guarantees of all-out technical support in the future? As John Swire later reported, there was no table-pounding at the meeting; there was more sorrow on the Minister’s part than anger. Actually, calmly fingering his Brigade of Guards tie, Mr Heseltine was all ‘urbanity and sweet reasonableness’. He simply made it very plain indeed that he and his advisers needed an answer to one question: ‘Why, oh why – with nothing to choose between the two aircraft – had Cathay come down unanimously in Douglas’s favour?’

As everyone in Swires to do with aviation was in Hong Kong, John Swire was able to fall back on his genuine lack of technical knowledge, while admitting that, of course, all other things being equal, Cathay would have preferred an aircraft with a British component. At this Heseltine nodded and smiled. ‘Just so,’ he said, ‘yes.’ But, he went on, commercial decisions had to be made in their totality. Nevertheless, the British Government was very concerned to look after the interests of both Cathay Pacific
and
Rolls-Royce.
‘It would be much less embarrassing for me’ – he smiled again – ‘if those two interests had dovetailed.’ The Minister kept his most telling point to the last. Walking Swire to the lift, Heseltine gently slipped a final word into his ear: ‘I should perhaps tell you that one of my embarrassments is persuading other Asian airlines to buy British equipment at a time when one of the most successful operators in the area – British, at that – has gone elsewhere.’ He hoped Cathay would hold up their final decision to give him time to encourage Rolls-Royce to improve the package they and Lockheed were jointly offering.