By John Laming 

John Laming was only a teenager when his father moved the family to Australia to take up a job at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947. Only a few days after arriving in this new country, John was marched down to Camden to begin working for the SMH flying Services. This was the beginning of a flying career that spanned more than forty years.

At the aerodrome I was shown my room in an old flight hut. It had wooden floors, a rusty spring base bed and a straw filled mattress and pillow. In one corner was a chest of drawers, a thread bare carpet left over from wartime days and an electric heater with a long frayed chord that looked positively lethal. Someone gave me a pair of blue overalls and now this was my home. When most of the ground staff went home to Sydney at weekends, I had little choice except to stay at the aerodrome, although occasionally I would hop on the train to Double Bay where I would stay the weekend with my cricketing friend Tony, and his aunt and uncle. Their house was very small, and I didn’t want to stretch the friendship too much.

At Camden Aerodrome I soon made friends amongst the ground staff while Harry Purvis quietly kept a watchful eye on my welfare. He knew my father had left Australia for good and that, at age 16, I lacked the maturity to be living without some sort of father figure around. There were five or six ground staff that stayed in my flight hut, including the foreman, a chain smoking character called Arthur Bone. The storeman Cecil Amey, also lived in the flight hut during the week. Both had served during the war in the Pacific. Amey was a good cook and we would have an enjoyable breakfast of sausages and fried eggs cooked over a Primus paraffin stove. After the breakfast dishes were washed and work would start at 0800.Occasionally one of the pilots would bunk down in the vacant room in the flight hut, usually when required to crew a Lockheed or a Douglas for an early morning flight.

After work, we would drive into Camden village where, after a few beers at the local pub (except me because I was not allowing in the pub), we would drive another few miles to Narellan village. There we would eat a wonderful home cooked dinner at a roadhouse called Ma’s Cafe.

My jobs included helping out with basic maintenance, cleaning spark plugs and engine cowls, sweeping the hangar and standing by as fire guard when aircraft engines were ground run. When a few months later I reached the age of seventeen Harry Purvis arranged for me to be taught to drive the jeep. My instructor was Neville Topliss – an aircraft fitter. Driving lessons were on the runway where I was also shown how to lay a flare path using goose-necked paraffin fired lamps. Neville was an excellent instructor and within a week or so I drove the jeep solo into Camden where a policeman gave me a driving test. Fortunately he omitted to ask why I drove to see him solo without first obtaining a driver’s licence. Things were so relaxed those days. From then on I drove daily into Camden village to run errands and pick up the lunches for the engineers and pilots.

After receiving my driver’s licence I was given the job of loading the duty Hudson or Dakota with bundles of newspapers destined for Northern NSW – some being air-dropped from a specially designed chute, while larger bundles were off-loaded after landing at Dubbo, Tamworth, Casino, Coffs Harbour and Evans Head.

Loading duty meant arising at 0200 to prepare the aircraft departure. This involved removing engine and tyre covers, connecting a battery cart, switching on the tarmac floodlights and preparing the flight plan information for the pilots. At 0300 truck would arrive from Sydney with bundles of Sydney Morning Heralds securely wrapped in hessian bags. The truck driver would sling the bundles into the aircraft where I would load them right up to the cockpit door. These were carefully loaded in order of air delivery with the heaviest bags up front. The pilots would then complete a load sheet.

While the pilots phoned the flight plan through to Sydney ATC, I would load the jeep up with 20 flare pots and head across the grass airfield until I found the runway – often hard to find if there was fog. Once the threshold was located it was a case of every 100 yards, stop the jeep, lay down a flare and ignite it with a flaming taper. In strong winds the flares would sometimes go out and on several occasions there were only four or five flares alight for a mile long runway. Leaking paraffin would drip from the flares onto the floors of the jeep and on several scary occasions I was forced to use an extinguisher to put out a burning flare.

After the flare path was laid I would drive back to the tarmac to prepare for the engine start. For this a large CO2 fire bottle with an extendable nozzle was required, along with a ladder.

This was the scary part of the dispatch process and I dreaded it. An arc light high up on the hangar bathed the darkened aircraft with brilliant light, throwing a shadowy outline of wings and fuselage on the coal black tarmac. It was like a scene from a creepy movie and often, if I was tired, my imagination would run wild. Who knows what silent apparitions were watching from between the hangars, just waiting for the aircraft to taxi away, leaving me alone to close up shop and douse the flare path.

Then at 0400 after receiving the all clear, the pilot started the first engine. Seconds after, gouts of angry red flames licking from the exhaust pipe heralded a rich mixture start. From the startled look on my face and the reflection of the flames on the tarmac the pilot guessed the problem and immediately opened the throttle wide. With a bit of luck, the engine would soon catch and run normally. That was the easy part.

If, prior to start, the throttle was cracked too far open, there would be backfiring through the carburettor followed inevitably by a dull red glow deep inside the engine air intake signifying an intake fire. The pilot would stop turning the propeller, switch off the magneto switch, and call for the redoubtable fireguard to do his stuff. One would duck carefully between the now stationary propeller blades and the leading edge of the wing, lean the ladder against the wing, at the same time praying that the pilot’s finger did not inadvertently actuate the started switch again.

From there it was a simple case of lugging the CO2 bottle up the ladder on to the wing, scrabbling over the top of  the engine cowls, and leaning over the edge of the air intake to direct a squirt of CO2 at the flames deep inside. It did not help that the intake lip was by now dammed hot, and for some reason, it never occurred to me that I would have worn gloves to protect my hands. The risks were just part of the job, while the hooded ghosts of my imagination, skulking between the darkened hangars, would sense my fear, and move closer.

Thank goodness it was only the Hudson’s engines with their cantankerous Ceco carburettors that caused all the trouble with starting – and not the Strombergs of the Dakotas.

Once the fire was out I would clamber back down to the relative safety of the tarmac and give the pilot the thumbs up for another go. I don’t think anyone thought of topping up the CO2 bottle after using it and I wonder now at the panic that would have occurred if the bottle had run out of puff during this little exercise. After all, we averaged a fire a week.

With both engines now throttled back to idling, the pilot would signal for me to disconnect the battery cart and remove the wheel chocks. More often than not there would follow much feverish kicking and profanity, because I was slow to learn in the early days that you don’t place chocks against the wheel, but rather an inch away, to allow for the oleo compression with weight. The slipstream was considerable even at idle power and if the tarmac was wet from rain, it was easy to slip over. The whirling blades of the propeller were a mere few inches from the chocks.

At 800 rpm idle power, the rich fuel –air mixture would ignite in the exhaust stack and, at night especially, the yellow glare of the flames as they licked hot over cowls next to the battery lead was quite blinding. I hated that job and more so if the battery cart plug was jammed too firmly into the socket pins requiring much pulling and still more profanity.

With the ladder and fire bottle well away from the wing tip, and after a thumbs up from me, the Hudson would taxi slowly away from the hangar and its bright arc lights would disappear around the corner of the flight huts into the night. On cold misty mornings it was an eerie sight to watch the navigation lights vanish into the fog, leaving behind just the throaty sound or rough idling engines in the still night air.

Minutes would pass, then across the frost covered airfield, the howl of engines being run-up to high power would carry over the reaches of nearby Camden Weir. A mile away to the southeast, the people of Camden village asleep in their beds, would wake and curse the Sydney Morning Herald for disturbing their sleep.

Then the night would grow silent except for the quiet idling across the airfield of the big radials. By now the pilots were carrying out their pre-take off vital action cockpit checks. Harness, Hatches, Hydraulics, Trim tabs, Mixtures, Pitch controls – I knew them by heart.

The take-off would begin, the noise of the engines amplified in the still of the night. In the early morning mist, I could see nothing but I knew that soon the noise would fade away as the aircraft climbed towards the north. Thirty minutes later it was time to drive out to the runway, there to douse the hot cans of the flare path and return them to their storage shed reeking of burnt paraffin.

This is an excerpt taken from John Laming’s book, ‘Tall Tails of the South Pacific’ available at www.lulu.com