Crash of ANA's Lutana 2 September 1948

On Thursday night, 2 September 1948, the Australian National Airways DC3 airliner Lutana clipped trees on top of Square Peak before crashing into rough country in the  Crawney Range about 16 miles from Nundle. The crash took the lives of 10 passengers and three crew members.Simon Bourke has the story.

Update 11 September 2018

Simon Bourke has a later podcast that provides much more detail on the crash. The dead were buried at the Tamworth cemetery but the location of the graves was lost. Now they have been rededicated. And here.    

New England aviation - Rex faces problems on the North Coast

One side-effect of the downturn in posting here is that I stopped reporting on New England aviation matters. I am not going to catch up in one hit, but a brief update on Regional Express' (Rex's) North Coast problems.

In Taree, conflict between Rex and the Council led to the termination of the service and Rex's replacement by Fly Pelican. I think that Newcastle based Fly Pelican is now the only remaining New England headquartered scheduled airline. This story by the Manning River Times Ainslee Dennis will provide you with some of the background.

Further north at Grafton there is a dispute, well a discussion at least, between council and Rex on the future of the Sydney-Grafton service.  The Clarence Valley News' Geoff Helisma has the story.

It's hard to believe that Grafton was once New England's second largest commercial centre challenging Maitland for primacy. Grafton's decline was due to many things, some local and cultural, some locational, some sheer bad luck. Now the relatively small population of Grafton and the Clarence Valley makes the maintenance of air services difficult.

One feature of the Grafton discussion that interested me was the concept of community airfares. I would like to address this later for it provides a possible path to improve the viability (and cost) of local air services. Meantime, the Council seems to to be making things as difficult as possible, accepting that (as appears to be the case at Taree) Rex is not especially subtle in negotiation.  

Fly Corporate's growing New England network

It's been interesting watching the growth of Canberra based airline Fly Corporate within New England.

Whereas most previous airline attempts have focused on the Sydney market, Fly Corporate has focused on the Brisbane linkage, progressively adding flights to Brisbane from Coffs Harbour, Armidale, Tamworth, Narrabri, Moree and Inverell. Within Queensland, they also added the Biloela (Thangool) service when Qantaslink pulled out, making Brisbane a key hub. Now the company has added Narrabri-Sydney to their route, marking their first Sydney connection.

There are a number of interesting features about Fly Corporate's growth within New England. Whereas there used to be connections between New England ports and Brisbane, they struggled to survive in the face of thin traffic and rising costs, including those imposed as a consequence of changing regulatory structures, ultimately closing. This had adverse effects. In Armidale, for example, it meant that Queensland students attending school or university did not have direct flight connections.

It seems the economics may have changed a little. It's always seemed to me that Brisbane rather than Sydney was a logical destination for many services, but it was one difficult to access because of uncertain connections. Now, once again, we have a Northern network to Brisbane.

It was also great to see Inverell again get an air service. This gives Inverell people a choice of Brisbane as opposed to an hour half drive to Armidale and then a flight to Sydney. In the days of East West Airlines, both Inverell and Glen Innes had Sydney connections.  

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Jetgo, Bredereck and the history of New England aviation

Paul Bredereck occupies a special place in the history of New England civil aviation. Now with Jetgo, he is having another go.

The new carrier is based in Brisbane rather than Tamworth, but Paul is still focusing on New England routes including the Tamworth-Brisbane service.

This post is just an entry post. I will add a little of the history and policy context later.

Can we have a New England civil aviation development plan? Please?

The NSW Legislative Council’s State Development Committee is presently conducting an inquiry into regional aviation services in NSW. The Inquiry was established on 13 December 2013 following receipt of terms of reference from Andrew Stoner, Deputy Premier and National Party Leader.

Just for something different, the photo shows Sunderland flying boats on the Clarence River when they were conducting a service from Grafton to Sydney.

You will find the entry page for the Committee here including terms of reference, submissions and transcripts of evidence.

  It’s all remarkably difficult. As the economics of flying shifts, fewer and fewer New England towns have access to air travel. Those that do, have to pay high prices. It affects every aspect of daily life and severely disadvantages tourism.

While there is no easy solution, if we had our own Government then we might have a chance of preparing a development plan. We could think of Newcastle and Coffs as international ports. We could look at limited selective subsidisation of services such as Tamworth or Armidale to Brisbane just to build base traffic. We could use our tourism promotion to build our traffic rather than being simply submerged in NSW.

It is unrealistic to think that we can have the services we once had, but we could do better if we didn’t have to accommodate all those NSW interests.    

The story of civil aviation in New England

Today’s post on my history blog, History revisited – introducing a flying history, starts the dramatic story of civil aviation in New England. I will bring the full set up as a special post when finished.

Later: I have added links to the three later columns at to bottom of the introductory post, link above, so that you can follow the story that way.

New England's Air Wars

The following Rigby cartoon provides an insight into another element of New England's past, the air wars that dogged our skies from time to time.

The then Menzies Government had a two airline policy. There was no room under that policy for Tamworth based New England carrier East West Airlines as a separate airline.

In 1961, Civil Aviation Minister Shane Paltridge told EWA founder and Chairman Don Shand that EWA must merge with Ansett Airlines. When Shand revealed this, Paltridge denied that the conversation had taken place.

  David Drummond as MP for New England had been present at the discussions. Drummond was then 71 and in his final term. The Government had a wafer thin majority of one. Drummond tried to see PM Menzies to warn him, but without success.

White and shaking, Drummond rose to speak to an almost empty house. The house filled as he spoke, confirming Shand's versions of events. Given Drummond's reputation for honesty, no one doubted his words. The NSW Labor Government then came in in support.

Minister Paltridge and the Government hastily backtracked. EWA remained as an independent New England owned carrier. The cartoon captures the drama of the moment.   

EWA & the death of Alec Shand

Barrister Alec Shand has died. His colourful life is well covered in Mark McGinness' obituary.

Outside the Northern Rivers where he had a farm and practiced in his later years, Alec Shand was not well known in New England. Yet he occupied a niche in New England history.

I don't know what it was about the Shands, but they were all larger than life. This was certainly true of Alec's uncle Don Shand.

John Athison's piece in the Australian Dictionary of Biography draws out some of the colour of the man. In 1947, Don founded East West Airlines, the airline seen by so many New Englanders as their airline. Alec's father, John Wentworth Shand, became a board member.  

Now what I had not realised is that Alec later became a board member. There is actually in my mind a degree of confusion here. Mark's obituary refers to Alec as Don's cousin. He was in fact Don's nephew. So I'm not quite sure how father and son fitted together in the history of East West.

I have written a number of posts on EWA. I will do an overview post at a later point.    

Moree gains Brisbane air service

I see from the Northern Daily Leader that Brindabella Airlines has launched it's Moree-Brisbane flights.

The photo shows pilots Captain Shane Carr and Captain Todd Kristenson welcoming Brindabella chief executive officer Michael Rasmussen on board the historic Brindabella flight.

I have written a fair bit on this blog about both the history and current position of civil aviation in New England. I really hope that this service succeeds.

Moree's location as the largest centre on the western side of New England creates problems for the town. It's not actually all that far west, about 428k or a bit over five hours driving time from the coast, but its far enough west to create service delivery problems with the way services are now structured. For example, it is a bit over three hours drive to the big base hospital in Tamworth. The time is much worse if you have to rely on public transport.

The service will allow Moree people to access Brisbane services. It will also give Brisbane people better access to Moree.

Inverell's problem with air services

I suppose that I have written a fair bit on this blog over time about both the history of civil aviation in New England and the problems involved in maintaining regional air services.

Part of the problem lies in the way economics works: every new requirement placed upon airlines and airports, every increase in charges at major airports, affects the economics of regional operations because the passenger base over which the costs and charges have to be spread is relatively small. I do wonder how much the latest safety requirements will add to the problem.

In recent years, Inverell has had a special problem.

Inverell is a moderate size town by New England standards. At the 2006 census the LGA population was 15,510 , the town population 9,749. For many years and when the town was a lot smaller, New England carrier East West Airlines maintained a daily Sydney service by linking Inverell and nearby Glen Innes (LGA population 8,780 at the 2006 census). Problems for Inverell really began when East West was taken over by the bigger and now defunct Ansett.

Inverell Council finally responded to the decline in air services by combining with Gunnedah Council further south to help create Big Sky Express as a community airline. Sadly, in 2006 Big Sky collapsed as a consequence of mismanagement in Transair, Big Sky's managing airline.

Early in 2007, Council persuaded another New England carrier, Newcastle based Aeropelican, to fly to Inverell. Aeropelican, itself an airline that had been almost destroyed via Ansett acquisition, was looking to expand its northern routes. The traffic wasn't there, and Aeropelican retreated, leaving Inverell without an air service.

Inverell's problem lies in part in its size, in part in its location. Inverell is an eight hour drive from Sydney. The nearest airports are at Tamworth (3 hours away), Armidale (1 hour 50 minutes) and Moree (1 hour 50 minutes). There are no services now to nearby Glen Innes. Brisbane at 5 hours 40 minutes driving time is far closer than Sydney, but state structures mean that Inverell people generally have to deal with Sydney.

The absence of air connections creates a real problem in attracting business to Inverell. This had led the Mayor to propose that Inverell should actually buy its own aeroplane to operate services. This has come under attack from some rate payers for reasons I understand. Yet without an air service, Inverell will continue to suffer disadvantage.

Inverell's size and particular location could well justify a Sydney Government subsidy on regional development grounds. This is not going to happen. In its absence, Inverell Council is going to have to continue to search for solutions.

Aeradio and the 1949 Kempsey Floods

In Belshaw's World - Kempsey disaster – six killed, huge damage, I tried to tell the story of the 1949 Kempsey floods. In doing so, I drew from the story of Kempsey Aeradio.

This photo shows the submerged Aeradio facilities at Kempsey aerodrome. You can seethe extent of the flooding pretty clearly. 

Following a series of crashes especially along the east coast aviation route, the stations were established to try to improve safety by providing radio contact with pilots.

The next photo shows two of the Aeradio team (Charles Peddell (left) and J Pickles) operating from temporary headquarters in the Kempsey police station. Communications was a major problem during the flood, phone lines and the local radio station were both down, so the Aeradio people's radio skills came in handy. Charles Peddell was later awarded a Certificate of Merit by the NSW Commissioner of Police for his work on restoring communications during the flood.

New England's aviation pioneers

Kind of side-tracked this morning writing Stories from the barnstorming days of Australian aviation. I wonder how many North Coast people know that pioneer aviators used to barnstorm along the coast, that the early aviation industry landed on beaches, open paddocks and sometimes roads?

I have written a number of posts on this blog about the history of aviation in New England, including New England Airways and East West Airlines. Time to update and consolidate the story, I think. But this will take a little while!

New England Story - Leslie Hubert Holden and the DH 61 Giant Moth Canberra

John Caling kindly sent me this photo taken by Leslie Henderson, his mother's step-brother and a keen amateur photographer.

John wrote:

Hi Jim,

The above attachment is a scan of a pic of a de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth taken at Armidale. I am afraid I do not know where or when. My Mum told me that this was the first passenger aircraft to land in Armidale. I do know that QANTAS purchased two of these aircraft but withdrew them from service in 1935 because of unreliability problems. These two aircraft operated out of Longreach so the one in the pic is obviously not from QANTAS.

The picture made me curious. If you look at the clothes, you can see it's quite early. Men's hats remained relatively constant. However, the women's and especially the girls' hats suggest late twenties or early thirties. So I started doing some digging.

The plane in question - VH-UHW - was purchased by Leslie Hubert Holden in 1928.

L H Holden was very much in the tradition of the early fliers well summarised in the song:     

Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines.
They Go Up, Tiddly, Up, Up.
They Go Down, Tiddly, Down, Down.

According to Carl Bridge's entry In the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Holden enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in May 1915 and went to Egypt as a motor driver. In December 1916, now in France, he was one of the first batch of 200 volunteers to train in England for the Australian Flying Corps.

Carl suggests that Holden's mechanical sense and his calm but adventurous nature made him a natural pilot and he quickly won his wings as a lieutenant. Flying a D.H.5 in No.2 Squadron, A.F.C., he saw the first Australian air action of the war over St Quentin on 2 October 1917.

Throughout the battle of Cambrai in November he strafed the enemy front line from a height of fifty feet (15 m); three of his machines were 'written off' under him. In one encounter, the famous von Richthofen fired at him from below; the bullets ripped up through the floor and tore his leggings. Holden nursed the badly damaged plane home, losing a wing on landing. His ability to return alive in wrecked aeroplanes earned him the nicknames of 'the homing pigeon' and 'Lucky Les'.

After returning to Australia in June 1919, he became Sydney manager of Holden's Motor Body Builders, the Adelaide company formed by his uncle H. J. Holden, with his son (Sir) Edward W. Holden. However, bitten by aviation bug and with financial support from friends, he bought a D.H.61 biplane in 1928 which he named Canberra.

Flying the Canberra, Holden operated charter flights from Mascot, Sydney. In April 1929, he was engaged by the Sydney Citizens' Relief Committee to fly to north-western Australia in search of (Sir) Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm who had disappeared while flying to England. Holden found them on a mud-flat on the Glenelg River near the Kimberleys and returned a hero. However, when newspapers accused Kingsford Smith and Ulm of a publicity stunt, the Sydney committee refused to cover his expenses!

In 1926 gold was discovered at Wau in the then Australian mandated territory of New Guinea. A rush began. Attracted by the aviation opportunities, in September 1931 Holden and the Canberra made what was probably the first flight from Sydney to New Guinea to begin a successful air-freight business.  

Returning to the Armidale photo, if we look at the dates it must have been taken between 1928 and the September 1931 flight to New Guinea. My feeling is that the photo may actually have been taken on the flight to New Guinea.

In 1932, Holden returned to Sydney to purchase extra aircraft and to form Holden Air Transport.  Tragedy now intervened.

In September 1932 Holden joined a New England Airways plane in Sydney to fly to Brisbane. He was killed on Sunday 18 September 1932 when the New England Airways Puss Moth crashed near Byron Bay.

This was not quite the end of the story. In New Guinea, the locals raised 25,000 pounds to continue Holden Air Transport.

And what happened to the Canberra itself? On 2 November 1934, it hit a building in Rabaul and was destroyed by fire.

Notes:

This story is drawn especially from Carl Bridge's entry on L H Holden in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The Australian National Library has a number of photos of the Canberra. A fascinating picture of aviation in New Guinea at the time can be found here. You can see a Holden Air Transport badge featuring the Canberra here. The De Haviland archives have details of the fate of all DH planes. For posts on New England aviation including New England Airways click here.      

Belshaw sans words - New England aviation series

I have established a new blog, Belshaw sans words, simply to consolidate with a few words of text photos and other visual material that I have discovered in my travels. As you might expect, the blog has a particular focus on New England.

I have decide that the best approach to the new blog is to run photos in series. That way people get to see a story.

New England aviation is the current series focus. Here I have been having a great deal of fun searching round for photos of planes with a New England connection. I have not looked in this type of very focused way before, and I have found a lot.

Do visit and enjoy.

East West Airline's first Focker arrives at Tamworth

I just wanted to get this photo down of the arrival at Tamworth of EWA's first Focker ferried in under the command of James Swan.

New England's East-West Airlines - Introduction

Graphic: East West Airlines travel advertisement. Especially in its early days, the airline depended heavily on tourist promotions to support its scheduled services with their sometimes low and variable traffic.

Last September I wrote an introductory post on Don Shand, the founder of East-West Airlines.

An interesting introductory history of the airline focused especially on the Hudson connection and written by Roger McDonald can be found on the adastron site. I quote from the introduction:

East-West Airlines Ltd., formed at Tamworth NSW in late 1946, commenced operations between Tamworth and Sydney on June 23, 1947.

The company had one of the longest and safest associations with civil Lockheed Hudson aircraft compared with any other operator of the type in Australia. The company went on to operate DC-3, Fokker F-27, F-28, BAe-146-300 and B727-200 aircraft on a route structure that at one time, crossed Australia from north to south and east to west.

In August 1982, control of the company passed from many small shareholders, the majority of whom were from the Tamworth region, to a new controlling shareholder. The company was subsequently re-sold twice before it was acquired in July 1987 by Ansett Transport Industries Ltd who maintained its identity with a vastly different route structure.

Following substantial losses, all services and aircraft were integrated into Ansett Airlines effective October 31, 1993 with the company officially ceasing to trade on December 31, 1993 although the company structure remains as a registered identity.

The East-West story is a fascinating one and deserves to be more widely remembered. So this is a note to myself to write more about it.

New England Airways - two more photos

My thanks to Bruce Robinson for sending me some more photos of New England Airways, New England's first major airline. For those interested in the history of New England Airways, a list of previous posts on NEA can be found at the end of this post.

I normally compress photos to save space and speed loading. However, if I load the full photo you can then see the detail by clicking on it, so that is what I have done in this case. Later: This does not appear to work in this case. Not sure why.

Photo: The following photo shows a Shell tanker fuelling the Ryan. Bruce advises that the vehicle is a Crossley and was converted from the limo that was used by the Duke of Gloustershire during his visit to Australia.The guy in the seat of the Crossley was Ralph Virtue (Keith's brother) who was killed in the Puss Moth crash near Byron Bay.

Photos: The first photo shows the Ryan outside the NEA hangar, the second shows a Stinson flying over Sydney.

Previous Posts

11 September 2006. New England Australia - Aviation introduces the story of the founding of New England Airways by George A Robinson.

12 September 2006. New England Airways - Postscript provides access to some very good early photos of NEA passengers.

14 September 2006. New England Airways - Follow Up contains some further musings plus photos.

17 October 2006. New England Australia Aviation Pioneers - the Virtues introduces another pioneering New England family closely associated with the history of New England Airways.

4 January 2007. Transport Pioneers - The Robinson Family; a further note outlines the early story of the Robinson family as transport pioneers in the Macleay Valley.

Aeropelican - Anthony Lawrence's poem

On 15 January I outlined the history of the New England airline Aeropelican originally established to fly between Sydney and Belmont, Newcastle. I mentioned that I had flown this route, one of the most beautiful in Australia.

I see that the New England born poet Anthony Lawrence has written a poem, Aeropelican, that describes this flight. The plane takes off:

All seats on this fourteen-seater have windows,
the portside view a brief slideshow
of Sydney's northern beaches and beyond --
Broken Bay with its sea-going lion's headscrubbed green with altitude,
then to an entrance of lakes,
where silt makes a dye-fed film of arteries threatening closure

The plane comes in to land:

The rest of the flight is unfocussed
as a Newcastle skyline when Newcastle smoked.
The landing, like takeoff, is all loom and fade.
Coming in over Belmont, three boys stand by their rods
to wave from the end of a breaking wall.

Aeropelican - a classic New England airline case

Apology: My apologies to anybody whoreceived multiple feeds on this one. I ran into some editing problems.

Photo: Aeropelican Metro 23 19 passengers

In an earlier post I mentioned that Newcastle airline Aeropelican was to begin services between Inverell and Sydney, with connections also to Newcastle at the weekend.

Now I see from the Northern Daily Leader (Tamworth) that Aeropelican is thinking of establishing a service linking Tamworth, Armidale and Newcastle.

The Aeropelican story is a fascinating one that is in many ways typical of the story of civil aviation in New England, although this story is perhaps most remarkable in that Aeropelican came back.

In 1957 the late Keith Hilder operated a DH90 aircraft out of Broadmeadow aerodrome, an inner suburb of Newcastle, which was also the home of the Royal Newcastle Aero Club.

Following advice to the Club from the Australian Department of Civil Aviation that the Broadmeadow field was to close, a search began for alternative sites, with a final choice between Rutherford and Pelican.

The Club chose to go with Rutherford, but Keith decided to develop an alternative site at Pelican around 20k south of Newcastle that he hoped might be used as a base for Sydney-Newcastle air services in competition with the existing service using the RAAF base at Williamtown to the north of Newcastle.

The 27 acre site lay between the sea and Lake Macquarie, was swampy and covered with tea trees, cabbage palms and general scrub. In 1959 after a series of complicated moves Keith obtained a 25 year lease over the site and began development. The land was cleared, drains dug, and thousands of tons of chitter from the nearby mines brought in to provide fill. Soil was then added and grass planted, forming a grass strip.

While all this was in process, Keith applied for a Flying School and Air Charter Licence. After long delays, this was finally granted in July 1962. With flying training and charter operations underway, Keith turned his attention to obtaining a license to operate scheduled services between Sydney and Pelican. Again there were long delays, with a full license not being granted until June 1971.

Services began using an 8-passenger Cessna 402 aircraft. Then in April, 1976 Aeropelican introduced its first DHC-6 Twin Otter Series 100 aircraft to its fleet of Cessna 402's. However, Keith Hilder never really saw the DHC-6 in scheduled operation, as he was admitted to hospital 2 days after the arrival of the aircraft, dieing 3 June, 1976.

The Hilder family continued developing both the Flying Training School and the scheduled air service. The first DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft proved ideally suited to the short sector high density flying demanded by the route, with a second Twin Otter purchased in 1977 and a third in 1978.

In 1980 the Hilder family decided to sell the entire Aeropelican operation to Cootamundra based Masling Airlines, then owned and operated by Jack Masling, another pioneer of regional aviation. Then in August 1981 Aeropelican was acquired by a company jointly owned by TNT and News Limited, ultimately becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Ansett Australia.

To this point Aeropolican's history, growth followed by merger or sale, had conformed to the traditional pattern of New England's airlines. However, it was to avoid the final stage, disappearance.

Aeropelican operated in a specific market niche and Ansett maintained it as a separate identified operation. Following the collapse of Ansett, Aeropelican was placed into voluntary administration. It was then sold in April 2002 to International Air Parts Pty Ltd, allowing the company to resume its independence as a specialist niche operator between Newcastle and Sydney, although flights now go to Williamtown rather than the old pelican field.

This Newcastle-Sydney route, one that I have flown in fact landing at the Pelican strip, is one of the most visually beautiful in Australia.

Now Aeropelican is spreading its independent wings, hopefully avoiding the problems that others have experienced.

Newcastle's Aeropelican to fly to Inverell

I was pleased to see from the Inverell Times that Newcastle based Aeropelican will start services between Inverell and Sydney in February, replacing the services previously provided by Big Sky Express.

Weekday services will go direct, with weekend services via Newcastle.