Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (17 page)

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To return to 1954: Cathay’s skies were brightening after the infusion of P&O capital. The DC-4 (VR-HEU) was flying seventy-one hours a week, close as usual to her limits. There were two DC-3s in reserve – although Betsy, Roy Farrell’s ‘baby’, had been sold to Mandated Airlines at Lae in New Guinea in 1955. But the airline’s history was not, the reader may by
now have realized, a smooth, unimpeded, upward-soaring flight to success.

That year VR-HEU was shot down, Captain Phil Blown achieved
worldwide
fame – and Cathay faced extinction once again.

There was no radioed challenge; no warning shots. The Chinese fighters moved in on the Cathay Pacific Skymaster at 9,000 feet and opened up from both sides with cannon and machine-guns at about 150 yards range. They were cream-coloured, propeller-driven planes, each with a full red star on the side of the fuselage and a red nose. The Cathay co-pilot, Cedric Carlton, was the first to see the one on the starboard side. Captain Philip Blown glimpsed the second fighter immediately afterwards, just before the DC-4’s No. 1 engine burst into flames. After that the aircraft was full of flying
50-calibre
bullets, and the Radio Officer, Stephen Wong, began to yell out an emergency signal – ‘Mayday! Mayday! Losing altitude, engine on fire!’ Then the No. 4 engine and the No. 4 main fuel tank were ablaze, the radio aerial was shot away too and no one could hear Wong any more, though he continued to clutch his mike and shout his message to the world until the plane hit the water.

VR-HEU was carrying six crew and twelve passengers from Singapore and Bangkok to Hong Kong, passing as usual eighty to ninety miles south of Hainan Island in the international air corridor regularly used by all civilian aircraft on that route. There was never any doubt that the Chinese fighters came from the military airfield on Hainan. Nor that they intended to destroy the aircraft and everybody in her. Phil Blown’s immediate concern was how to ditch a DC-4 from 9,000 feet with two engines and a wing in flames while all around him, as he told me many years later, the explosive heads of
50-calibre
shells blew holes a foot and a half wide the length and breadth of the aircraft, with a deafening noise. Survivors said they had had no doubt that this was it. Mr Peter Thatcher, a Connecticut American, told reporters at Kai Tak how Leonard Parrish, of Iowa Park, Texas, travelling from Singapore with his wife and three children, was sitting with him at the rear of the plane, and the first he knew was when he saw fire on one of the
engines. Mr Parrish got up and went over to take a better look. ‘When he returned,’ said Thatcher, ‘I asked him what had happened and he replied: “We have had it. There is nothing to be done.” I got up from my seat and was immediately hit by something on the inside of my left thigh.’ The last he saw of Mr Parrish was him crouching over his son to protect the boy from the bullets that were streaming into the plane, cracking and roaring.

Phil Blown’s cool thinking in that mad outbreak of explosion, flame and disintegrating DC-4 strikes one as something miraculous. He began to take evasive action, swinging the plane from side to side. Each time he did so the fighter on the side opposite to the way he was heading fired bursts of heavy machine-gun bullets into the plane, which was going down at about 350mph. At 5,000 feet the aircraft’s rudder control was shot off; at 2,000 feet the right aileron went and Blown checked the plane’s automatic right turn by shutting off Nos 1 and 2 engines and fully opening No. 3. He yelled to Cedric Carlton, to his Engineer, George Cattanach, and to Stephen Wong to brace themselves ready to ditch.

Looking at it calmly all these years later, I could see that Phil Blown is the sort who would deal with what followed as well as, if not better than, the next man. That is, when I could find him; it was not easy. I had to drive out of Sydney to the fringes of what seemed like the outback. A sign on a tree actually said ‘Road Ends’ by a red mailbox, and it did end, running off to expire in a gully full of trees.

Phil Blown is still a stocky, square-shouldered man of medium height, neat and soft-spoken, not unlike James Cagney with glasses. ‘There are only two Blowns in the phone book here,’ he said, ‘myself and my son. I think the name must be German by origin, or Dutch.’ His father had been a Yangtze river pilot for Swires and Phil was born in Tientsin, so he grew up among the China Hands. He and his wife Bunty, like Sydney and Angela de Kantzow, married in the cathedral in Shanghai. Since he retired as Cathay’s Chief Pilot, Phil and Bunty have lived in the bungalow in which I found them on the edge of a far-flung township with a close-cut lawn and a dark red prunus tree and a small forest of blue gums that rise like a barrier between them and the open spaces of New South Wales. Phil had started flying with the RAAF, and after the Second World War got a job in the Deccan with a fleet of DC-3s belonging to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Then he answered a Cathay ad. With CPA he piloted the first DC-3 flight to Kuching in Sarawak where Syd (who was on board) ‘had fixed up this publicity thing with a bunch of Dayaks. They wore feathers and had plugged padlocks through their earlobes. Beautiful.’ A few years later
VR-HEU
was corkscrewing down the sky off Hainan, barely under control, and
later still, here was Phil opposite me in an armchair holding a beer and chatting about it.

‘The angle was pretty steep. The quicker I could get her down onto something solid or semi-solid the better. I saw Stephen Wong lying on the floor braced against the bulkhead talking into the mike. Luckily I was able to level her out. But still we came to the water at about 260 knots and it was hard to wash out [reduce] that speed. We had no flaps, you see. We just had to wait patiently, bouncing on the rough water like ducks and drakes. Then the starboard wing hit. It clipped a wave and sheared off and we waited – the seconds seemed like hours – for the real impact. And that was a hell of an impact at 160 knots as our nose ploughed into a huge roller somewhere near the top of it. The port storm window was shattered and the starboard window by the second and final impact. Ced and I were thrown forward very hard against the rubber crash guards above the instrument panel, the safety harness snapped, a lot of green water poured in, and I scrambled out of the front window with Ced after me.’ Phil smiled. ‘I think a little angel was sitting on my shoulder. And Cedric’s.’

That corkscrew from 9,000 feet to sea level had taken about two minutes, and the Chinese only stopped shooting at 1,000 feet. One of the two Flight Hostesses, Rose Chen, was killed in the stream of fire on the way down; so was a Mrs Finlay; and Leonard Parrish, the son he had tried to protect, and one of his two little daughters. It was a stroke of luck, Phil Blown says, that only five months before he’d seen the Mae Wests all lying about on the luggage racks, looking pretty frayed. He’d suggested to Dick Hunt they should be put into a canister, and Hunt had agreed. ‘And when we hit the water and the tail broke off, the Mae Wests floated clear. And a life raft, a yellow thing, bobbed out too, near the wreckage, and Ced Carlton grabbed it.’

VR-HEU started to sink almost at once. Nose-down, she was soon gone.

‘I saw Mrs Parrish clinging to some wreckage with her daughter, and then Mr Thatcher in a Mae West swimming around about thirty yards away, supporting a woman with a deep gash in her throat. She was grey. Beyond I saw Ced Carlton and Mrs Thorburn [a Singapore passenger] clinging to something. Ced called to me that the Mae Wests were over where he was. I was hanging onto a mailbag and I swam over in his direction. I noticed the bodies of three more people and one was Mrs Finlay, another Rose Chen and the third was one of the Parrish children. I felt all three and found no sign of life. By this time the rubber dinghy was inflating and Ced was helping Mrs Thorburn and Esther Law [a Flight Hostess] into it, and I climbed in myself and dragged other survivors to safety.’

Ced Carlton had noticed, just before the ditching, Stephen Wong and George Cattanach lying side by side on the floor at the rear of the step leading into the cockpit, braced for the terrible shock to come. Neither of them was seen again. Carlton, too, was almost trapped in the cockpit, finding himself under water ‘like a goldfish in a bowl’. He spotted a vague glimmer of light in the nick of time and made for it. Surfacing, he grabbed a Mae West, found the life raft and inflated it. Then he and Blown began searching for the others. As the last survivor scrambled on board the raft, he happened to glance at his watch. It showed 9 a.m., which meant that thirteen minutes had elapsed from the time of ditching to the time the last of the living was hauled safely into the life raft.

It was lucky that the Chinese fighters left the scene once they had seen VR-HEU disappear under the water. It was also lucky that Stephen Wong’s prompt call on the high-frequency radio telephone – ‘Losing altitude engine on fire’ – was heard at Kai Tak. The position was calculated from the last report and a Search and Rescue operation got under way at once – an international effort of considerable scope. The first plane on the scene was an RAF Valetta, diverted from her Saigon–Hong Kong route, and her signals drew back two RAF Hornets which had previously missed the tiny life raft. They, in their turn, sent urgent signals. An hour later a British Sunderland flying boat arrived and was ordered to keep the raft in sight whatever happened. Wanting to do more, the Sunderland pilot looked around for a possible place to land, but seeing eight-to ten-foot waves below him decided not to risk his giant aircraft. Shortly after this, two amphibious Grumman Albatrosses of the US Navy from Clarke Air Base, north of Manila, reached the scene and were guided to the life raft by the ebullient captain of yet another aircraft, a French privateer from Tourane (later Da Nang), who clearly wanted to go after the Chinese but who restrained himself long enough to drop a marker flare with great accuracy near the raft.

What happened next is best told in the deadpan words of the American pilot of Grumman Albatross AF 1009, Captain Jack Woodyard, who now displayed a degree of airmanship that filled all who saw or heard of it with admiration and wonder.

There had been some anxiety that the Chinese might send yet more aircraft
to disrupt the rescue, but Canton air control said that civilian aircraft could help with survivors, while warning that all military planes should leave the area immediately. To the last part of that message Captain Woodyard in his Grumman Albatross returned the most perfunctory of acknowledgements. Later in the day he landed with the survivors at Kai Tak and taxied in watched by a great throng of people, some of whom had had relatives aboard HEU but as yet had no firm news of who had survived and who had not. In fact a passenger from Bangkok, Miss Rita Cheong, who was badly hurt in the crash, died on the rescue plane. A great cry of anguish went up when only eight survivors were taken off; next day newspaper reports of the outrage and pictures of Valerie Parrish, aged six, being carried down the steps of Captain Wood yard’s plane started a furore that was not confined to the Colony, but spread to Westminster and Washington DC as well. ‘C.P.A. Airliner Outrage. Wanton Attack Made Without Slightest Warning’ was the
South China Morning Post’s
front page headline above Captain Phil Blown’s account of what had happened. The United States denounced the ‘brutal’ Chinese attack on VR-HEU that had killed three Americans and wounded three others, and almost at once two American Skyraiders and one Corsair from the aircraft carrier
Philippine
Sea
shot down two Chinese fighters off the China coast, Admiral Felix B. Stump, the Commander-
in-Chief
of the US Pacific Fleet having warned everybody that the crews of his ships and aircraft had orders to be ‘quick on the trigger’. In London, Mr Anthony Eden told the House of Commons that the attack was ‘savage and inexcusable’ and the Opposition leader, Mr Clement Attlee, who most embarrassingly was to visit China the following month, repeated that it was ‘absolutely inexcusable’. However, the heat was taken out of the situation somewhat by prompt expressions of regret from Peking and an immediate promise to pay compensation and damages. It was a handsome apology, contained in a letter to the British Government from the Chinese
Vice-Foreign
Minister, and it read: