Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (10 page)

Mox to Mike (in an exaggerated whisper): ‘Michael, don’t you think the cylinder-head temperature on the port side is a little high?’

Mike: ‘Yes, John old boy, I do believe you are right. What would you like it to read?’

Mox (after considering the matter): ‘Well, Michael, the starboard engine is reading 190 degrees. What about making them even?’

Mike (having adjusted the output reading to the desired figure and beaming at his commander): ‘I do hope that is satisfactory, John, old chap.’

Mox: ‘Ah, thank you, Mike. That’s much better. I feel happier now.’

And it was Bob Smith – although few had thought he had a syllable of poetry in him – who put Rudyard Kipling in his place on a world-famous point of literary geography. Chic Eather tells the story well.

Bob Smith has told me: ‘I don’t wish to seem too harsh about this, but the flight to Moulmein story is a complete fable.’ He adds: ‘There is in Kipling’s poem “Mandalay” a line, “An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay”. During a rather “liquid” discussion at the CPA mess one evening I remember arguing that this could not be so. East from Moulmein lies Thailand (Siam).’

By 14 April 1950, by which time Roy and Syd’s CPA had come under the management of Butterfield & Swire, the government of Burma looked set to nationalize all domestic air travel. Accordingly Mr Charles Collingwood Roberts, Swires’ Chairman, told a meeting of his directors in Hong Kong that Cathay’s Burmese days were at an end.

On 16 July 1948 the violence that underlies the pleasant face of the Orient had come to pay Farrell and de Kantzow a visit much nearer home. At six o’clock that evening, high above the water ten miles from Macao, a Chinese criminal called Chio Tok fired a .38 bullet into the base of Captain Dale Cramer’s skull, and the CPA Catalina flying boat he was piloting with twenty-six passengers and crew nose-dived to the bottom of the Pearl River estuary. The Catalina’s name was ‘Miss Macao’.

Miss Macao was one of two Catalina amphibians recently bought in Manila by CPA and chartered to the Macao Air Transport Company (MATCO), a subsidiary company that Roy and Syd had set up in conjunction with P. J. Lobo, the successful Macao-born trader who owned Cathay’s Chater Road office. ‘See the beauty of Hong Kong from the air,’ the new MATCO advertisements urged readers of the
South China Morning
Post
. ‘Fly to Macao next weekend. You will see so much in twenty minutes.’

MATCO had been started up for a specific purpose. When Hong Kong Airways ploughed a plane into the Peak – the highest point of Hong Kong island – scattering gold bars far and wide with much publicity, the shouts of ‘Gold!’ had struck a resounding chord in Farrell’s always active
imagination
. Roy, Syd and Millard Nasholds were soon rapping excitedly on the door of P. J. Lobo’s son Roger (now Sir Roger).

‘I told Roger,’ Roy explains, ‘that the importation of gold into Hong Kong would be stopped as Britain was a signatory of the Bretton Woods Agreement which forbade its signatories from trading in free gold. I also pointed out that Portugal – which owned Macao, of course – was not a signatory and therefore not bound by the restrictions. I asked Roger to go to Macao, see his father and start the paperwork for our joint importation of gold into Macao.’ Syd was enthusiastic, too: ‘The shortest hauls pay best,’ he assured Roger Lobo. The Lobos, father and son, soon agreed and the four of them shook hands on the new deal.

There was a small problem. Where were Cathay’s DC-3s to land in Macao? The Portuguese colony – a mole on China’s cheek so tiny as to make Hong Kong look like a great wen – had no airstrip. But, as Roger Lobo remembers, Roy and Syd had an interesting idea: why land at all, they asked. Why not simply pack the gold into barrels covered with gunny bags and kick them out of the doors of the DC-3s over the Macao racecourse – a method they had used most effectively in wartime Burma when delivering rice supplies to Chiang’s beleaguered troops? Unfortunately gold weighs more than rice – the heavy barrels of gold disappeared into several feet of Macao mud. Next idea?

‘We decided to pay for the racetrack to be cleared for landings. This was done in a day, and our glorious inaugural flight was to be received by the Governor of Macao and every notable in the place. Really posh. The red carpet was out. Speeches were to be made. Very grand.’ Hong Kong’s civil aviation authorities and the press came aboard at Kai Tak, and peering down as the DC-3 (in fact, VR-HDA alias Nikki) approached Macao, they could see not one but
two
bands playing on the racetrack. Roy and Roger Lobo and his wife were also on board, Syd was co-pilot, ‘Pinky’ Wawn was at the controls – and they zoomed in with all the slapstick dignity and meticulous execution of the Marx Brothers in
Animal Crackers
.

‘Trouble was,’ says Roy, ‘the sea wall had not been knocked out and as we neared it I felt sure were were too low. Darned right, we were. As we passed over it two struts stuck noses up through the right and left wings. Wawn made a good job of a belly landing with no landing gear left, and we made a skidding halt directly in front of the reviewing stand…. The crowd was stunned by the brilliance of it all and the bands stopped in the middle of a bar. We didn’t have to climb down from the plane, we simply stepped out.’

Groucho could not have timed it better. Some onlookers even clapped. Few realized what had happened, Mrs Lobo merely remarking in sweet ignorance to her husband, ‘I say, that was a short landing.’ But Syd looked at Roy in a meaningful sort of way and murmured ‘Sea planes’ – and next day Roy flew to Manila. He knew where to find sea planes, having already started a local air service there, Amphibian Airways, which used Catalinas to bring fresh fish to Manila from the provinces, and now he bought two of them.

From that day those graceful, snub-nosed amphibians with the two large overhead engines carried passengers and gold from Hong Kong to Macao – gold that had been shipped from South Africa, the United States, Great Britain, France and elsewhere to Hong Kong by the giants Pan American World Airways, BOAC, Air France and KLM, who were all prevented from
flying to Macao by the lack of airfields. A lot of that gold went strange ways, though most of it was, no doubt, pocketed by Chiang Kai-shek in China. But many ordinary Chinese had a hankering for gold, too: mistrusting postwar paper currency, they stored it like squirrels preparing for a harsh winter – underground, under their beds or even in their teeth. Among those who ached to get their hands on some of the golden loot were four Chinese from the island village of Nam Mun, south-west of Macao – and they made a plan.

On 16 July Miss Macao’s outward evening flight from Hong Kong to Macao was uneventful. So was her stopover and take-off from Macao for the return to Hong Kong. Then something went terribly wrong.

It was some time, however, before the authorities in Macao or Hong Kong became aware that anything was amiss, for those were days when communications between even such short distances were primitive. There was no means, for example, by which Cathay’s representative in Macao could have been in radio or any other touch that night with Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong or with marine police patrols. All the same, the Catalina’s failure to arrive at Kai Tak was noted by Roy Downing, air traffic control officer there, and at 7 p.m. he alerted Hong Kong’s Water Police that the plane was overdue with twenty-three passengers aboard. Vera Rosario, in the CPA sales office at the Pen, remembers that she said uneasily to Bob Frost’s deputy, Tommy Bax, ‘Odd, Miss Macao’s not back yet.’ And they telephoned Syd de Kantzow. However, with night coming on nothing very constructive could be done. Next day at dawn, instructed by Syd de Kantzow, Captain Dick Hunt flew the other Catalina to Macao to assist if necessary in a search. There he learned the worst.

The first sign of disaster had been the appearance in Macao harbour at 9.15 p.m. the previous night of two fishermen in a motorized junk with the waterlogged body of a half-drowned Chinese, still breathing but incapable of speech. Police swiftly identified him in hospital as one Wong Yu, a twenty-four-year-old rice farmer from Nam Mun. For the moment he could tell them nothing, but one of his rescuers related that shortly after 6 p.m. he had seen an aircraft passing over his boat towards Hong Kong, that it had made a sharp turn to the left followed by a turn to the right and had then dived directly into the sea. The aircraft, he said, had hit the sea with a great splash and exploded. The second fisherman described an exactly similar phenomenon, though without the explosion. According to him the erratically turning aircraft had been making a strange ‘popping noise’ in the air. Then he had seen a man – Wong Yu – in the water, supported by a seat cushion. Neither fisherman was able to pinpoint exactly where the plane had
hit the water. ‘No accurate picture can be gained of what happened,’ Syd told the Hong Kong press in an early statement, for Wong Yu, recovering in hospital, remained silent and bad weather delayed a serious search operation.

The first body was sighted near the breakwater at Macao two days later; it was of a passenger, an oil company executive called Stewart. But this time search equipment had been brought up and sweeping operations had begun over a wide area between Macao and Lantau Island. Dick Hunt flew a second CPA Catalina to Macao, this time bringing Syd de Kantzow, Uncle Moe Moss, Roy Farrell (who had flown in from Manila) and Roger Lobo.

Roger Lobo recalls: ‘We had a floating crane, a fleet of barges and a couple of motor launches out there trying to locate the wreckage. A typhoon held us up at one point. Always full of ideas, Roy had us all spread out over the area with pieces of cord with weights on the ends of them methodically probing down trying to make contact with metal. Well, we found the wreck in the end.’ The Catalina was lying in four fathoms of muddy water not far from an outcrop of rocks called the Nine Islands, west of Lantau Island. The divers were hampered at first by fast-running tides and silt, but at high tide the clear ocean water flowed into the Pearl River’s mouth and they were able to recover some bodies and debris.

Moss’s initial report began with a series of bare melancholy facts: ‘Aircraft: PBY 5a “Catalina” VR-HDT. Engines: Two Pratt and Whitney R-1830/43. Owners: Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. Pilot: Capt. Dale Cramer – missing presumed killed. First Officer: K. S. McDuff – killed. Flight Hostess: D. da Costa – missing presumed killed. Passengers: 23 – 10 killed, 12 missing, 1 survivor.’

First Officer McDuff was stated positively to have been killed, since he was the only one of the crew whose body was recovered. (He lies today in the cemetery in Hong Kong’s Happy Valley.) The fact that he was
comparatively
unmarked meant, said Moss, that he could not have been in the pilot’s compartment at the time of the crash, for the compartment was completely wrecked. But that did nothing to explain why Miss Macao had dropped out of the sky. There was no sign of fire or explosion. Everything looked as if the plane had been flying normally. What on earth had happened?

The beginning of an answer came while the main portion of the aircraft was being examined in Macao Naval Yard: a discharged .38 calibre shell was discovered. Then, in the mud and silt inside the aircraft, three more exploded shell cases were turned up and two other shells that had misfired. That was enough for the Hong Kong press: ‘Fantastic Air Piracy Attempt,’ announced the
China Mail
after a few guarded remarks from Mr Paletti, the
Macao Police Commissioner, and that was what it turned out to have been. To be precise, Miss Macao was the victim of the first act of piracy for gain in the history of aviation.

The key to the unravelling of the complete story was the confession of Wong Yu, the survivor, and the Macao detective force went to imaginative lengths to get it. At first he was incoherent, so a recording device was concealed near his hospital bed. In addition police officers disguised as patients were placed in neighbouring beds, and from time to time elderly ‘relatives’ came to sit by them and hold their hands. In time Wong told all he knew, and from his confession and from papers taken from the Al
Capone-style
clothing of his three confederates, whose bodies were also recovered, Captain Paletti and his men were able to round up six or seven other Macao Chinese for questioning. Between them, the Chinese told a remarkable story.

There were four chief conspirators in the plot, which had been some time in the making. The leader of the four, Chio Tok, for example, had taken the trouble to learn to fly Catalinas in Manila, and together with the others had studied the flight paths of the Cathay amphibians as they flew regularly back and forth between Hong Kong and Macao. Of course, like everybody else they had heard the mouth-watering reports of cargoes of gold bullion – and Tok had had a thought. Why not hold up a Catalina crew at pistol point, take over the controls in mid-flight, and divert the aircraft to some obscure place – a hidden bay near Nam Mun perhaps – where it could be looted at leisure? The Nam Mun villagers were relatives or friends of the plotters; the Catalina’s passengers and crew could be held on some neighbouring island and with any luck ransomed for an additional chunk of coin. It must have sounded a pretty good idea. On the appointed day the conspirators bought three handguns and boarded the flight at Macao, fortified with a last-minute cup of coffee at a restaurant near the harbour. All four were neatly dressed in new, if cheap, wide-lapelled suits and broad-brimmed hats of the kind familiar to fans of Edward G. Robinson in
Little Caesar
or James Cagney in
White Heat
, and thus attired they scattered themselves strategically about the interior of the aircraft. Chio and a companion, Cheong, were careful to sit just behind the pilot, Captain Dale Cramer, and Keith McDuff, his First Officer. McDuff’s fiancée, the Flight Hostess, Delca da Costa – Vera Rosario’s friend – took her usual place on a hinged seat near the boarding door. The only other Cathay employee aboard was Robert Frost, the Company’s Sales and Traffic Manager from Hong Kong, who at the last moment had asked if he might come along for the ride – to kill time, actually, while his wife was having her hair done.

Soon after take-off, with Miss Macao soaring smoothly into her heading to Hong Kong, the gangsters drew their guns. While two of them shouted at the astounded passengers to move to the starboard side, and with Cheong covering McDuff, Chio Tok pointed his gun at Cramer’s head and told him to get up and hand over the controls. Dale Cramer was a war veteran, a former US Navy pilot, who had been with Cathay nearly a year. He had taken the place of the original pilot, Dick Hunt, who had bad earache. A couple of Chic Eather’s photographs show him to have been a
friendly-looking,
blond man, smiling on the wharf of Macao ‘after another successful gold delivery’ and drinking with friends on the penthouse roof of the Banque de l’Indochine, the Cathay pilots’ home-from-home in Saigon. Obviously a good-natured man, and one with a strong jaw signifying resolution – enough resolution, at any rate, to destroy all Tok’s careful plans. For Cramer looked down the barrel of Tok’s .38, heard Chio’s command ‘Get up!’ – and refused to budge. At the same time, McDuff swiftly stooped for the Catalina’s iron mooring-pole near the co-pilot’s seat and cracked Cheong over the head with it.

At that point all hell broke loose and bullets flew. In the whirl of astonishment, panic and confusion, it seems probable that one of the passengers, a Chinese millionaire who had started life as a gangster in Macao and was well known for his short temper, tried to grab the pirate nearest to him; at least his body was found with a bullet through it. Those who knew them thought that both Bob Frost and another passenger, Major Hodgman, a noted Hong Kong amateur jockey, would certainly have intervened. At any rate it is not difficult to imagine the pandemonium in that confined space: the cries of anger and the screams, the shots, the smell of cordite, the struggling bodies in the aisle. The essential thing about the desperate mêlée inside Miss Macao that evening was that during it, Tok, appalled that Cramer had not instantly handed over the controls according to plan, panicked and put a bullet into the back of the captain’s head and several into his body too. Cramer’s dead weight slumped across the yoke of the control column, pushing it forward, and Miss Macao put her nose straight down and dived into the sea.