The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (29 page)

Just by the way of background, I’m the Director of Aviation and also the Chief Pilot of the Queensland Section of the RFDS, and I’ve been here for about seven years. This revolves around an event that happened some years ago. So let me just tell you the story as I’d tell it if we were sitting around having a beer.

It was some years ago, three or four, I can’t remember exactly, and, as a Senior Manager, I don’t fly all that often though I do try and fly occasionally, just to let the troops know that the ‘old man’ — that is me — can still do it.

Anyhow, I was flying a Super King Air aeroplane and it was the second job that we had for the night. The first job was a close one. I think it was Goondiwindi, in the south-east of Queensland. Then the second job was to pick up an old chap out at Cunnamulla, which is further out west.

When we left Brisbane it was a typical wet winter’s night, very, very cold, and it was also a typically wet winter’s night in south-western Queensland, and also very, very cold. Then to compound matters, while flying out there, at all levels there was a strong westerly. From the fuel-burn point of view for the Super King Air aeroplane, in the mid-20000 feet levels, where I would’ve liked to have been, the wind was about 120 knots on the nose. Even down in the mid-teens, where I was flying, it was still about 70 or 80 knots on the nose.

So it took an awful long time to get out to Cunnamulla and the fuel flow was high because turbines are more thirsty at low level. Anyhow, we eventually got there — by we, I mean myself and the flight nurse — and I remember I had to make an instrument approach because there was rain and a fair bit of cross wind. But we landed safely. By this time it was about two o’clock in the morning and, as you might imagine on a night such as that, I wasn’t at all too pleased with the world.

Then we always kept about half a dozen fuel drums in a shed at the airport at Cunnamulla and something about Cunnamulla is that you’ve always got to brave the brown snakes. The only saving grace to all this is the fact that the Shire out there is very, very supportive of the RFDS and their employees always gave you a bit of a hand to roll some fuel drums out, even if it was two o’clock on a cold, wet and windy winter’s morning. So I wasn’t bitten by a brown snake. I survived that and, after quite a deal of time, the ambulance came back with our flight nurse and, from memory, there was also a nursing sister — or perhaps it was a young doctor — from the Cunnamulla Hospital. They had with them this old chap who’d had what you and I would euphemistically call a cardiac event.

Now, quite often in the more remote parts of Queensland, particularly within that older generational group, you encounter people who have never been in an aeroplane before. It happens a lot, especially out in those places, and this old bloke was no exception because it was patently obvious that he’d never flown before. So the old chap’s there, looking a bit anxious about the whole thing, and he’s on the stretcher and
he’s all hooked up with these things that are beeping and carrying on. At that stage my flight nurse and the nursing sister, or whoever it was, from the Cunnamulla Hospital, were about 20 or 30 feet away doing the hand-over process.

I was preparing to load the old chap and I had the left-hand wing locker of the King Air open. Now the wing locker is the luggage compartment or an equipment compartment at the back of the left-hand engine. It’s exactly like the boot in a motor car and it’s where we keep our loading equipment and all sorts of things, like spare stretchers and that. Well, I had this wing locker, or luggage compartment, propped open with a stay, similar to the stay you use on the bonnet of your car.

So this old chap, he wasn’t in real good shape so he was pretty short of breath. But as I was preparing to load him, he beckoned with his gnarled finger for me to lean down to where I could listen to him. It was fairly windy, and he was obviously quite concerned about something so I put my ear as close as I could to his face and he sort of pointed towards the luggage compartment and he whispered to me, ‘You’re not gonna put me in there are yer?’

And I was quick enough, even at two o’clock in the morning, to see the humour in this. In fact, it was the only thing that had made me smile all night. So I called out to our flight nurse, ‘Nurse, if Mr so-and-so is well behaved and he promises not to put his arms or his legs out the windows, do you reckon we could let him travel inside the aeroplane with us?’

Now, for a start, you can’t put your arms or your legs out of the window of a pressurised aeroplane.
But she was a smart girl, the flight nurse, and she also still had her wits about her, even at two o’clock in the morning, so she replied, ‘Well, just as long as he behaves himself, I suppose we can make an exception, just this once, and put him inside with us.’

And this feller, oh, he was so very, very grateful, even privileged, that we’d allowed him to fly inside the aircraft with us. And we didn’t tell him any different so then we loaded him into the King Air and I closed the wing locker and off we went. Then other than that wonderful slice of humour, I suppose the only other good thing about that long, cold and wet winter’s night was that by going very high and taking advantage of the 120 knots of tail wind we got the old chap into Brisbane in pretty much record time, where he’d get better care for his cardiac event.

So that was the silver lining to the otherwise dismal cloud. It’s an interesting story, and a true story. I can’t remember the names, and I suppose I could reconstruct the date if I went back through my log books. But it was just one of those events in life that I always have a wry smile about.

It was about ten years ago this August, I suppose. We were living south of Broken Hill, on a property only about 15 kilometres out of Menindee. Do you know where the Menindee Lakes are? Well, we were there. I was actually out in the paddock cutting wood with a chainsaw and my wife, Margaret, she said something to me so I put the chainsaw down and I came inside and left it for a while.

Now, I didn’t have much fuel left in the can, hardly any at all. There was only fumes in it really, but I didn’t put the lid on it properly and I had leather-soled boots. Then after we loaded some wood, I went to pick the can up and the static electricity went from my fingers to the top of the can. And you know, as static electricity does, it just went zap and it blew the fumes up.

Then of course, when it exploded, flames blew up the length of my cotton shirt. The only trouble was, I’d been wearing the shirt beforehand, when I’d done some cleaning with kerosene, and I think there must’ve been some kero still on it because, next, the shirt caught alight. Then it went from bad to worse because it was a fairly new shirt and it was one of those that only do up to halfway down the front. You know what I mean; it didn’t have buttons right the way down. So then, when the shirt got on fire, there were flames everywhere and we — the wife, Margaret, and I — we just couldn’t get it off, over my head, and my wife had leather gloves on and all.

I even tried rolling around on the ground but that didn’t work either because the flames, they just seemed to be following me around. We got the shirt off in the finish but, you know, I’d been burnt pretty well by then. My chest was all burnt and my hands were burnt, and my face and under my face and my ears and my head, that sort of thing, down as far as my waist. Luckily I wasn’t burnt any lower than the waist.

Then once we got the shirt off, Margaret called on the UHF and somebody came on and she got them to ring the Flying Doctor Service. So then she got me back home and the ambulance came out and they took me to the Menindee Hospital. Then the Flying Doctors came out from Broken Hill and landed at Menindee and they took me down to Adelaide, and I ended up in the Royal Adelaide Hospital. And that’s about the last I remembered about it for about fourteen days or something like that.

But I don’t know what degree of burns they were. All I know is that some of the burns on my chest were pretty deep because, when I was in hospital, they kept on prodding around at me and I said, ‘Well, that can’t be burnt too bad because I can’t feel it.’

‘That’s the problem,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s burnt so deep that all the nerves are burnt, too.’

So they must’ve been pretty bad and then I got the infections and that didn’t help much, either. I suppose I was there, in the Royal Adelaide, for about a couple of months before I come out again. So the burns were bad enough but then that infection wasn’t too good either because the pain from the infections was worse than the burns.

But since then I’ve had about another fourteen operations; you know, patching parts up and more skin grafts and things like that. But no, it’s alright now. I’m alive, that’s one thing about it. The worst part is the hands, you know, because I’ve got to wear gloves all the time.

So that was one episode when the Flying Doctors took me down to Adelaide. The other one was with the motor bike accident and the lip. That was in October, not the same year though, more recent, it was. But this time I was out mustering sheep and I hit a stump in the grass and, when I did, the stump kind of catapult me into a tree. And although I always wear a helmet, I didn’t have a full-face helmet on so when I hit the tree, my face come down and hit the handlebars and it just ripped the skin from, oh, from the right-hand corner of my mouth and it just took the skin back, top to bottom, right down under my chin and right back to the teeth and gums.

Anyway, I knew I was in a bit of a mess so I picked myself up and got back on the bike. But then I had the thought, ‘Well, I’ve been out here nearly all day mustering these sheep so it’d be a waste of a lot of time and effort if I just let them go again.’

So I went and put the sheep in the yard first. Then after I’d done that, I rode the 15 kilometres back home again. And when I come in the back door, before she even seen me I said to Margaret, the wife, ‘Don’t panic.’ I said, ‘I just took a bit of skin off.’

And Margaret turned around and just took one look at me and she was nearly sick. Oh, there was blood everywhere and there were flies all stuck to it and everything by then. So Margaret rang the RFDS and
we drove to Broken Hill and the Flying Doctors flew me to Adelaide, and when I got into the Royal Adelaide Hospital they stitched all that up. I think I had about a hundred and forty something stitches in my face, and in the gum. I didn’t lose any teeth or anything but they had to sew the bottom of the gum, on the inside of the lip, first. Actually, I think they did more inside sewing than anywhere else, really, and then they finally sewed up the outside. Anyway, when the surgeon come back in and seen me the next morning, he said, ‘You certainly made a bloody mess of it, didn’t you?’

But, you know, it didn’t feel too good there for a while but it’s alright now. It’s a bit numb, but it’s not too bad. It’s going along alright. But that was only a little episode, that one.

Well, I don’t know if I’ve got any sort of real ‘feel good’ Flying Doctor stories because most of it was just day-to-day stuff, really. Stuff that goes on all the time. I was a pilot with the service for about twenty-seven or thirty years in South Australia. I was at Port Augusta for about fifteen years after the RFDS took over the air-ambulance side of things up there, then I came down to Adelaide and flew out of there.

Back then, Port Augusta was considered as a place where the, so called, traditional Royal Flying Doctor Service work happened; you know, stuff like going out on clinic runs and that. It was a fair time ago now, so, when I started, it was pretty basic, well, very basic, actually. The hot ship of the day was a Beechcraft Baron. Then they went on to the Chieftains and the Navajos, which served us well for many years. They were beautiful planes but they weren’t pressurised. So then it was time to move on to pressurised planes, which improved the comfort levels for the crew and, of course, the patients who would arrive in a much better state. It’s just progress so you simply go along with it. Nowadays, I don’t think people wouldn’t even get in a Beechcraft Baron.

With the flying side of things, I’d say that, mostly, it was more difficult back then than what it is now. Nowadays the aeroplanes have heaps better instrumentation and navigation equipment. So while we were still doing the same things, now you don’t
have to work at it too much. I mean, we didn’t even have radars or altimeters and GPS (Global Positioning System) wasn’t even thought of. So, basically, it was watch and compass stuff; just time and distance, really.

It’s like a seeing eye dog, now. You just look at the GPS and you know exactly where you are. Yeah, we had a few nav (navigation) aids around the place, to get some sort of cross-reference, but out in the backblocks there’s nothing much there so you really had to work at it, especially during the night. So to find some of those more remote places we relied on a decent amount of good luck, a bit of good management and a hell of a lot of local knowledge. You know, sometimes you’d be flying out in the middle of a dark night and if you saw a light you’d say, ‘Oh well, that must be it.’

From Port Augusta we’d regularly do clinic runs up to Oodnadatta and Marree. We used to do Tarcoola and Cook and all the other settlements out along the Transcontinental Railway Line, right out to the Western Australian border. Nowadays just about all of those little settlements are closed down. Then I think they still go out to Maralinga and Hope Valley Aboriginal Settlement and Yalata Community, of course. Coober Pedy was always there. Mintabie, they still go there, and the other opal fields like Andamooka.

But we also used to do a lot more station people back then too, as far as clinics went. We’d go to all the station homesteads up the Birdsville Track and those places. We’d even overnight at Birdsville, sometimes. They just had RAD phones — radio telephones — in
those days. The RAD phones were the only real means of communication, actually. That’s what they had the medical sessions and the famous ‘Galah Sessions’ on. All that came through Port Augusta. They had the main transceiver there, at Port Augusta, for all of South Australia. But now they’ve got telephones or satellite phones or whatever.

So that was the basic day-to-day stuff and then, of course, you’d occasionally get called out on emergency retrievals. They could happen any time of the day or night though, for some odd reason, most of the worst ones seemed to happen at night. The retrievals were always the urgent missions, like road accidents, and so we’d have the entire crew plus all the retrieval gear on board.

But they were pretty full-on and, as I said, a lot of it was road accidents. You’d see some tragic circumstances, say, where you’d have the father down the back of the aircraft on the stretcher and you’re trying to fit the mum and the kids in as well and you’d try and screen them from what they might see as far as the father’s condition went. We never used to like to do it but sometimes we’d have to put some of the family members up the front, in the cockpit. But we only did that when it was really necessary, like when one of the family members down the back had died and so you were trying to keep the others well away from view.

Over my time we had a couple of major accidents. I don’t remember what year it was, but there was a big bus smash up north, between Coober Pedy and Mount Willoughby. That was a major smash where we actually landed on Mount Willoughby Station airstrip, which was right next door to the accident site. I don’t
know how many fatalities there were but it was like a war zone. The doctor at the time was a New Zealander and he just sort of lined everyone up and, basically, we crammed as many of the injured as we could into the aeroplane and flew them back to Coober Pedy. Then we spent the next few days ferrying people from Coober Pedy back to Port Augusta Hospital or down to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, depending on their severity.

Then in later years there was another big bus accident up near William Creek; same type of thing, you know, it was a rollover. School kids, I think they were, on an excursion from New South Wales, somewhere. The bus ended up upside down. The only people that were there before us were the ambulance officers from Coober Pedy. They’d driven straight out as soon as they got the news and they reckoned there were kids just thrown all over the ground.

I was in Adelaide at the time. We had King Airs then and it was one of the worst nights as far as the weather went. We were flying the retrieval teams up to Coober Pedy and there were thunderstorms all over the place. It was horrific. Just getting to Coober Pedy was terrible. I was up flying around the 29000 feet mark, trying to dodge the thunderstorms all the way. For that one we also had planes coming in from Broken Hill to help out as well and they were experiencing the same weather problems.

Then, once we got to Coober Pedy — we used Coober Pedy as our base — once we landed there, we went up by road to the accident site to help pull out the most severely injured. Then it was just a mad scramble to get them back into Coober Pedy Hospital. And again, we
spent the next few days ferrying kids from Coober Pedy back to Port Augusta Hospital or down to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, depending on how bad they were.

So yeah, that was a bit of a long night, too. But as I said, most of the time it was pretty much just day-today stuff.