Pandora’s box

In 1949 when I was 6 years old we moved to Australia. We lived first in Melbourne and later in Hobart, Tasmania where, because my Dad worked with the Government Housing Department, we were given a brand new house on the estate at Warrane (or ‘the Warren’ as it was known locally).

When we first moved in we had electricity but the roads weren’t finished and we had a fair hike to get to the nearest bus stop. Most significantly there was no mains sewage. That didn’t arrive until a couple of years later.

In the back garden of each house was a combination outside toilet and garden shed. The ‘facilities’ consisted of a wooden bench with a hole in it under which was a 20 gallon metal can partially filled with creosote to keep the smell down and to discourage the flies. The cans were replaced through a flap at the back of the building. In Australian parlance this was ‘the Dunny’.

The local council provided a weekly sewage collection service using trucks that looked not unlike a brewers dray but carrying something a lot less savoury than barrels of ale!

These were ‘Dunny Carts’ and the stalwarts who manned them were universally known as ‘the Dunny Men’.

There was a song around at the time called ‘The Butchers Boy’

Mama dear come over here
And see who’s looking in my window
It’s the butcher boy and oh
He’s got a bundle in his hand

(Written by Paolo Citorello and sung by Rudy Vallee)

I hasten to add that the song goes on to better explain what the ‘bundle in his hand’ actually was – something to do with sausages I believe.

Of course it was parodied to

Mama dear beware beware
Just look who’s passing by the window
It’s the Dunny Man and
He’s got a Dunny Can up on his back

At the first sight and sound of the Dunny Cart careering round the corner and into your street festooned with strings of flying toilet paper and accompanied by it’s own personal swarm of flies, doors and windows banged shut, children were dragged unceremoniously into the house and the area went silent as the populace collectively held its breath.

God help you if you were actually on the Dunny when these guys arrived. No quarter was given.

The cans were designed with lids for sanitation and the protection of those handling them but the lids were seldom used. It took too much time to fit them and the men were on piece work. The more cans they dealt with the more they earned hence the flying paper and a certain amount of spillage.

After the Dunny Cart had departed and after a decent interval to let the air clear, doors and windows were cautiously re-opened and life returned to normal.

The depot for the sewage operation was by the river in North Hobart where the waste was loaded into a specially designed barge that took it out into the Derwent River estuary to be dumped. The barge made the trip two or three times a day accompanied by a huge flock of seagulls as it made its way down river.

Warrane was on the other side of the river from Hobart city. There was a regular ferry service from Bellerive but if you went by bus or car it was across a floating bridge with a lifting span on the city side to allow ships to pass through. The sewage barge was a regular disrupter of bridge traffic.

A ship passes through the lifting span of Hobarts floating bridge

In the foreground work has begun on the replacement bridge

If you were unfortunate enough to be caught when a vessel needed to go through the bridge then you were in for a 20 minute or so wait as the span was lifted, the ship passed through and the span lowered again. My school was on the Hobart side but the excuse that ‘the bridge was up’ if kids were late for school was seldom accepted.

‘Yer should’ve left home earlier’ (thump).

However, if you just said ‘the Pandora’ then you got a sympathetic nod and no further questions asked.

Why? Guess what the sewage barge was named?

A real Pandora’s Box!

Some memorable flights

My first (ever) flight was in an Ansett (Australia) DC3 from Hobart to Melbourne via Launceston in January 1953. My father had been crew on a yacht in the Sydney Hobart Race and we’d gone over to Hobart to spend Christmas and to meet him when he got there. They were late finishers and because he was late back at work in Melbourne we took a plane rather than the train from Hobart to Launceston (about 120 miles and it took a whole day) and then the overnight ferry ‘Taroona’ from Beauty Point, 30 miles from Launceston, across Bass Strait to Melbourne.

The ferry ‘Taroona’ leaving Melbourne

The forward end of an Ansett DC3 cabin. Compare that to today!

The ‘Taroona’ would roll on a wet towel and we’d had a very rough crossing on the way over from Melbourne. This may also have influenced my parents decision to fly back instead.

To say that I was gob-smacked by my first flight would be an understatement. I was 10 years old and I can remember to this day every detail of that flight right down to a rivet popping out of the overhead air trunking and landing in my mother’s lap. The trip was made all the more memorable when my kid sister sprayed the forward end of the cabin with projectile vomit just as we landed at Essendon – Melbourne Aerodrome (they weren’t called airports then). The stewardess was not impressed!

My next flight was 10 years later and whilst I was at sea. During the ships’ call at Sydney I had the opportunity to drive to Wagga Wagga stopping in Canberra for lunch and seeing some really impressive scenery along the way. The return was with Airlines of New South Wales in a Fokker F27 Friendship. The most memorable part of that flight was arriving over Sydney Harbour. Many years later I was able to revisit the memory in a Piper Cherokee from Bankstown Airfield. The intervening years had not diminished the experience in any way.

Sydney harbour – breathtaking! (photo courtesy Airliners.net)

I next flew in 1973 on Playboy Club business with BEA to Belfast, out in a Trident and back in a Britannia. The most memorable part of that trip, apart from escorting the Bunny of the Year, was spending a night at the Maze Prison as a guest of the British Army.

In 1976 I moved to live and work in Saudi Arabia arriving on a BA VC10 and I seem to have spent a considerable portion of my life sitting in aeroplanes ever since.

The first of many memorable flights was my first return on Christmas leave from Dhahran along with 180 or so other wine, women and song starved oilmen fresh from several months in the desert. In those days aircraft were lined up nose to tail in two rows across the front of the terminal. Our aircraft was in the outside line waiting to depart when another aircraft from the inside line tried to cut between us and the aircraft parked in front. There wasn’t room and a collision was narrowly averted.

A call was put out for the only pushback vehicle at Dhahran but it’s regular driver had taken it home! It was three hours before the offending aircraft could be pushed back and we could be on our way.

We couldn’t be disembarked – there was no room inside the terminal so, in order to quell a rising tide of dissent, the crew took the brave decision to close the doors, shut the blinds and open the bar. The result, three hours later as we took off, was a Tristar full of happily inebriated oilmen. The party continued flat out until we reached Athens where we had to stop to pick up more fuel (and more beer – we were in danger of drinking the plane dry) then on to Heathrow where it continued in the bar at Terminal 1 whilst we all waited for our connecting flights.

If the Saudi’s had found out we could all have spent Christmas in jail.

Other memorable flights in no particular order:-

• Arriving and departing the Maldives (the short runway) – flight deck jump seat Air Lanka B737
• My first seaplane flight, again in the Maldives (see picture below)
• The snow covered Alps on a crystal clear moonlit winters night – flight deck visit Air France (Airbus A310 I think)
• Flying low level along a desert runway to scare sleeping camels off it so we could land – Saudi Aramco Fokker F27 1976
• Hong Kong Kai Tak – sadly not the ‘chequer board’ approach to runway 13 that I’d hoped for but the almost as impressive approach to 31 – Cathay Pacific B747 jump seat.
• Legging it across the tarmac between connecting flights as artillery shells started dropping on the airport boundary – Middle East Airlines Beirut 1979
• A Hajj flight to Jeddah in an ancient Saudi B707 in 1977 – open sided luggage racks – it was that old
• Arriving in Baghdad from Amman in 1980 as one of only 12 passengers on a B747 – seemed odd at the time
• Trying to get out of Baghdad to go back to Amman and realizing why there were only 12 passengers on the 747 coming in – 5,000+ in the departure lounge with only 1,500 aircraft seats available that night (Iran Iraq war)

The Afghan highlands. Not quite as good as the moonlit Alps but still impressive

Sun Express Twin Otter on floats – Maldives

But my most memorable flight of all has to be my first solo when I was learning to fly – December 12, 1977 .

Over the years since, the magic, the excitement and the pleasure of flying with the airlines has faded. The ‘pack ‘em in – screw as much as you can outa them’ business model has done that for me. Indeed, I view my next trip to London with so much trepidation that I’ve decided to fork out for Premium Economy.

The best bits, as always, will be take-off and landing when the pilot in me listens to every sound, feels every movement and knows exactly what is happening.

But now, thanks to American inspired ‘terrism’ paranoia, airline Captains are no longer allowed to invite passengers onto their flight decks thereby giving up a major aspect of their authority to lesser people (i.e. politicians and sundry erks) to the detriment of enthusiasts like me.

And that’s really sad.

A flight of fancy

I have long been a fan of airships.

The ones we remember most are the German Graf Zeppelin and the ill-fated Hindenberg. Britain built the R100 and then the R101 which crashed and burned in France on her maiden voyage. America had the Akron, Macon, Shenandoah and Los Angeles among many others. The Norwegians and the Italians were also into airship technology.

The Americans held the upper hand as far as airship development was concerned because they controlled the worlds (then) only supply of helium gas leaving the rest of the world forced to use hydrogen. Whilst helium wasn’t quite as good a lifting agent as hydrogen it was a zillion times safer. Look what happened to the Hindenberg and the R101.

There are some excellent websites with photographs of the passenger experience aboard the great airships. Try www.nlhs.com/interior.htm or just Google (Images) ‘airship cabin’. Weight was a major factor in airship design but the largest carried around 100 passengers and crew and provided private cabins to sleep in, a dining room, promenade decks, in one case a grand piano and (since everyone smoked in those days) a smoking room despite the fact that they were surrounded by something like 7 million cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen!

The sheer size of the airships was breathtaking. The USS Shenandoah was just under 800 feet long (3 times the length of a Boeing 747) and 130 feet in diameter. She could carry, launch and recover a fighter aircraft.

The idea of lighter than air flight hasn’t gone away. The Good Year blimps carrying up to 12 passengers on sight-seeing trips have been around for years. A company called Aeroscraft in America is planning a gigantic airship where 2/3rds of the lift is achieved by 14 million cubic feet of helium whilst the remaining lift is provided by engine power and forward motion. They are talking about a 500 ton payload. See http://www.aerosml.com/main.htm

The proposed Aeroscraft airship built to carry a 500 ton payload

My own theories are much more modest. I envisage a 150 foot long by 40 foot wide gondola half of which is taken up by 50 small 2 berth cabins for 94 passengers and 6 crew while the other half comprises dining/lounge/bar and promenade areas.

A rigid frame gas envelope would be around 400 foot long with an oval cross section 60 foot high by 120 foot wide. The envelope would contain no machinery or moving parts leaving it capable of being quickly detached from the gondola for easy maintenance. The envelope would contain a number of oval, doughnut shaped ballonet’s filled with helium with a separate air bag running through the central core of the ‘doughnuts’ where air will be heated to increase or decrease lift as required.

Construction of the envelope frame and the gondola would use light weight carbon fiber composites.

Power would be provided by two light weight, high speed diesel generators using bio-fuel and driving 4 independently gimbaled ducted electric fans attached to the sides of the gondola to provide a combination of lift and thrust, steering and trim.

The rigid frame construction of the envelope will allow operating speeds up to 150 knots at 12,000 feet with the shape of the envelope providing additional lift.

150 knots means London to Sydney non-stop in 48 hours or so or London to New York in around 18 hours and for a fraction of the cost and environmental damage that a jetliner creates. It takes 20+ hours to get to Sydney using an airliner today. Add at least 24 hours for rest and recuperation. An airship taking the same time in total but offering proper sleep, relaxation and space to move about during the flight must surely be a viable alternative particularly when it comes to cost and passenger comfort.

A flight of fancy? I wonder?

Lucky man!

I have a friend who visits his daughter in Australia every couple of years or so. In the past that journey has been by air and with the least expensive ticket he could find. Inevitably that meant a three or four sector flight each way with no opportunity to break the journey en route and thereby make the experience more palatable.

He’s retired and increasingly he finds that the flights to and from Australia leave him ‘wrecked’ for several days when he steps off the plane at each end of the trip.

So, for his latest visit to Australia, he chose to go by sea. Not in an ocean liner (because there are none) but as one of 12 passengers on a container ship leaving Tilbury (London) and reaching Sydney 35 days later.

From the e-Mail I received after he arrived it seems he’s been blown away by the experience. The ship called at Hamburg, Rotterdam and La Spezia with time for brief visits ashore then the Suez Canal which, for a first timer, is an experience not to be missed. 12 days at sea to reach Fremantle after transiting Suez might seem a bit daunting but when you have the run of a large ship with a swimming pool, a comfortable cabin, sun, fresh air and three meals a day what’s to really complain about?

The sort of accommodation you get.

He’s arrived fit, relaxed, sun-tanned and ready to go – no jet-lag, no DVT, no aches and pains – just one very happy traveller.

I don’t know what it cost but he probably paid around 80 Euros a day or (in total) about the same as ‘premium’ economy class on an airline.

I accept that there are many for whom a journey time of 35 days is totally out of the question. It’s only retirees and those who do not have jobs to go back to who can afford the time.

But given the choice I know which I would choose!