Australia's Flying Kangaroo: a history of Qantas

Three men believed that aviation could benefit the outback commun­ities of rural Queensland. They were Hudson Fysh (1895-1974), Paul McGinness (1896-1952) and Fergus McMaster (1879-1950). Based on their air force experience in WW1, McGinness and Fysh surveyed an air route across northern Australia in 1919 using a Model T Ford. A fourth man, Arthur Baird (1889-1954) later established the company’s reputation for engineering excellence.

Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services/Qantas was formed in Nov 1920, centred in Winton, Queensland. The very next year they moved the company’s headquarters to Longreach in Queen­sland. And in 1922 the first scheduled Qantas mail and passeng­er flight flew from Charleville to Cloncurry, Queensland.

Qantas didn’t build its own aircraft until 1926, once again based in Longreach.

In 1928, a Qantas DH50 aircraft was leased to John Flynn and the Australian Inland Mission; it was the first flying ambulance for the Australian Aerial Medical Service. And right in the depths of the Depression (1930), Qantas established its headquarters in Brisbane. From there, Qantas carried airmail to Darwin, as part of an exper­imental mail service to the UK.

The flying kangaroo helped revolutionise long-haul travel

Jim Eames' book The Flying Kangaroo: Great Untold Stories of Qantas (Allen and Unwin, 2015) reminded us why Qantas remained such an im­portant part of Australiana. But I wanted far less on the tech­nical issues and near accidents, and far more on nationalism, ad­vertising, colours and symbols. For example the Australian car­rier adopted the flying kang­aroo only in 1944. The symbol was itself adapted from the Australian one penny coin, back in those pre-decimal days.

Qantas supported the war effort from 1939 on, evacuating personnel who risked being captured by advancing Japanese forces and dropping supplies to troops in New Guinea. The airline pioneered history-making flights of 30+ hours in Catalina aircraft between Perth and Ceylon, maintaining a crucial link with the Allied Forces. Endless pilots and engineers led a very large workforce, maintaining and flying DC3s, Catalinas and single-engine bush aeroplanes.

Post-war aircraft appraisals in the airline’s most formative years saw Qantas leading in fleet decision-making. Eames recounted the way Qantas steered itself through or around political pressures to maintain loyalty to the UK. The book shared new insights into the ever-shifting ground surrounding Qantas’ ownership, mergers, management inter­actions and its ultimate privatisation.

What were the crises? In Aug 1960 a Constellation crashed and burned when an engine failed on takeoff at Mauritius (with no fatalities). The handling of this accident was later hailed as a model of safety management and a credit to Qantas’ crew training. Nonetheless Jim Eames gave a painful and honest version of how all on board escaped alive. 

In 1966 a Boeing 707, en route from Sydney to Brisbane then Honolulu, violently started to porpoise up and down. So concerned were the pilots that they ordered an oceanic return path lest the problem return and cause them to crash over inhabited land. The cause was a fault in the horizontal stabilisers in its tail.

In Feb 1969, there was a temporary loss of control in a Boeing 707 high over the Persian Gulf (with no fatalities). It suddenly dis­played incon­sistent flight information in the cockpit and was put into a 5 km spiral dive so stressful that the airframe nearly ruptured. The post incident analysis offered major lessons that improved the safety of the newly booming industry across the world. In 2010 near Singapore the most fam­ous of all of Qantas’ heroic saves was QF32, when an Airbus A380 was very damaged by an uncontained engine failure.

Jim Eames' book, 2015

The air traffic controllers were also learning quickly, including a near-collision over Thailand in Sep 1990. A giant US Air Force C5A Galaxy air transport JUST missed a Qantas B747, in civilian air­space. The US military seemed to have suppressed the evidence.

Eames highlighted the leadership role that Qantas developed through its history, partially because its route distances were among the world’s longest and most demanding. The distance fact­or went right back to the 1920s when Qantas had to build its own biplanes in Long­reach to keep its fleet well-maintained with distant spare parts.

The book also documented the tyranny of seniority in the flying ranks; the entire hierarchy of humiliation that applied to law, pub­lic administration, the ABC and the strong manufacturers and ship­ping lines of post-war Australia.

The Flying Kangaroo also revealed much of the score settling that characterised the merging of Australian Airlines/TAA and Qantas in mid-1995. The book discussed the polit­ically complex factors of Bob Hawkes personal friendship with Sir Peter Abeles at Ansett and the abandonment of the late 80s infat­uation in Canberra with a three way merger of Qantas, Australian and Air New Zealand. One wonders what might have otherwise happened? 

**

The publishers noted the brilliant risk takers who made Qantas the safest airline in the world, the special demands of flying VIPs, the hazards of overseas postings, and the ever present dangers of the skies. But above all, these were the stories of how a uniquely Australian style shaped the best airline in the English-speaking world.  November 2020 should be a time of great celebration at Qantas!