Read Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways Online
Authors: Gavin Young
While the champagne corks flew and the cheers of the carousing Hong Kongers jingled the chandeliers of the Dorchester, back in Hong Kong and well into the early morning Duncan Bluck held a jubilant press conference. None of the apparent injustice of earlier decisions mattered now. He broke out champagne for the blurry-eyed journalists and, raising his glass, announced that Cathay would start flying to London three times a week from 16 July. He thanked all sections of the Hong Kong community for
their support, and then went down to help Cathay staff slap brand-new posters onto the ticket office windows. It was as if he had known in advance what the Minister’s verdict would be: by first light those posters were already proclaiming to all who passed by: ‘
CATHAY PACIFIC TO LONDON
’.
It was a famous effort. And Cathay’s outstanding technical ability was soon on display when the Company actually ‘went into Air’ to London
ahead of
BCal. Furthermore, to confound the very basis of the CAA ruling, only a year later Cathay began a daily service between London and Hong Kong using the very planes – the Jumbo 747s – that the CAA had pooh-poohed as too big for the route.
*
On 16 July 1980, as the Hong Kong police band played once more, VR-HIA – Cathay’s second 747 – left Kai Tak for Bahrain, flown by Captain Len Cowper. At Bahrain Captain Geoff Gratwick took over. Duncan Bluck was aboard, and Stewart John, Cathay’s Director of Engineering, and David Bell, head of Public Relations. So was another Cathay pilot, Tony Dady, who was going home on sick leave. He had glimpsed Duncan Bluck in Hong Kong shortly after the CAA rejection of Cathay’s application and Bluck had grimly assured him, ‘BCal are not going to get away with this.’ For Dady, Bluck was the personification of Cathay Pacific. Now, as the 747 headed on its triumphant way to London, he watched Bluck across the aisle quietly sipping his whisky and soda as if nothing much had happened, as if there had not been a famous victory. As the plane’s wheels touched the ground at Gatwick, the passengers applauded and Bluck got up and made a characteristically deadpan announcement on the Jumbo’s loudspeaker system – ‘Welcome to London. We have worked hard for this.’ No one knew better how hard
Adrian Swire’s Spitfire was waiting at Gatwick to lead VR-HIA across the tarmac to the terminal building. There was a Chinese ceremonial dragon dance, a town crier ringing his bell, and several television teams. John Dick, Cathay’s Commercial Manager after Duncan Bluck, had emerged from retirement to serve as Traffic Manager, and after a while his Scottish impatience got the better of him. ‘Can you move this bloody circus on?’ he demanded of David Bell. ‘I’ve got to get this bloody machine turned round and on its way back to Hong Kong.’
An old man with a soldierly bearing, in an old trilby and an old overcoat, had stood peering out from the terminal’s big windows. Eighty-seven years of age, how can Jock Swire have believed his eyes? DC-4s, DC-6s, Electras, Convairs, they had all come and gone. But this monster with the Cathay
‘green-and-white sandwich’ tail and the familiar Taikoo logo – what was it doing here, so far from home, so far from Kowloon’s Lion Rock, from the green hills that rise towards China behind Stonecutters Island and the Lei Yue Mun Gap? Did this great aircraft, this Swire leviathan, beached so serenely here in Sussex, symbolize victory – or was it a mistake? No, surely not a mistake. He had seen so many changes since that first meeting with Syd and Roy – was it really thirty-two years ago? He had got used to them all. He would get used to this one too in time.
On 23 September 1983 Betsy came home to roost like some immortal bird out of legend. Cathay Pacific had sold her in 1955, and now retrieved her at last so that she could spend the rest of her life in Hong Kong, her home.
What had happened to Farrell and de Kantzow’s pet during the long years of obscurity? She had lived pretty rough since Cathay had sold her in 1955; she had gone then to the Sydney-based W. R. Carpenter & Sons. She had lost her Cathay logo and red lettering, been repainted in the colours of Mandated Airlines, and had spent the next twenty years or so bouncing about over the jungles and mountain ranges of wildest New Guinea. In 1973 she was bought by a young Australian airline called Bush Pilots Airways and transferred to the relative tranquillity of Queensland. There, in yet another livery (white upper fuselage; dark blue stripe at window level; yellow tail), she spent ten years carrying essential cargo to the outback – food supplies, building material, mining equipment and the like.
Eight years later, Cathay’s Martin Willing, the indefatigable historian of the Company’s flying machines, discovered that Cathay’s first aircraft was still flying and indeed was the only one of Cathay’s fleet of DC-3s in existence. Betsy happened to be up for sale, so Cathay bought her back. What a long time she had been away! It was time for her to be led out to grass: she had earned a permanent retirement in familiar surroundings. Now she would go back where she belonged, and in Kowloon’s new Museum of Science and Technology become a noble monument to Hong Kong’s airline pioneers.
On 18 September 1983 Betsy waited at Kingsford-Smith Airport, Sydney, to take off on her long flight home. A Cathay 747 stood next to her; the two of them side-by-side before they both headed down the runway en route to Hong Kong, Betsy leading if only for a moment or two. An excited crowd included Company staff and many Cathay veterans, the oldest of them Captain Pat Moore who had been shot at by Karen rebels while flying
Betsy in the ‘Burma Campaign’. Now eighty years old, posing for photographers under Betsy’s nose in a white beard and his old Cathay officer’s gold-braided cap, and supporting himself with a stick, he looked as much like a retired sea captain as a grand old flyer of Cathay Pacific.
‘It was a choking moment,’ Jim Macdougall recalls. ‘An incredible sight, really. A warm day and sunny; not a cloud in the sky; hardly a stir of air. There they were – Betsy decked out once more in her out-of-date style of red lettering and the old CPA logo with the yellow map of the Far East and South East Asia, and the giant Cathay 747. Then the two of them moved off, little Betsy, the fragile little thing, with the great roaring of the monstrous giant behind her. The little one revving and trembling and the 747 rushing after her. We watched from the observation lounge. Pat Moore was wiping his eyes and there was total silence except for our choking. Betsy took five days of flying to reach Hong Kong. The 747 took eight hours.’
Betsy was flown by an Air Queensland pilot, Reg Perkins, and the flight took in stops at Coolangatta in Queensland (first day), Cairns, then Wewak in New Guinea (second day), Davao in the Philippines (third day) and Manila (fourth day). Betsy’s interior was the same un-upholstered military khaki it had been during her war years, although a few modern instruments had been added. At Manila Adrian Swire was waiting with Cathay Pacific’s Director of Flight Operations, Brian Wightman, and flew Betsy on the last leg to Hong Kong. Before they took off two retired Cathay engineers, Felix Manguerra and Ricardo Dominguez, pointed excitedly to a skin repair they had carried out on Betsy in 1949. Adrian wrote later:
According to my log book, the Manila/Hong Kong flight took 6 hours 20 mins, with take-off at 06.15 hours and arrival at Kai Tak at 12.35 hours…. I was at the controls for the whole of the last period. It was a beautiful clear sunny day, and we flew at around 1,000 feet along the south of Hong Kong Island and then, with permission of Kai Tak control, within the Western Harbour and Port Shelter. The final approach and landing at Kai Tak was made from the Kowloon end past the chequerboard, and happily I managed a smooth touch down…. Australian pilots aboard, all from Queensland, were amused to see that even in the heat the reception committee were wearing formal dark suits and ties.
Duncan Bluck was there, the Hong Kong police band playing ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’, and a splendid array of Cathay cabin attendants in uniforms of the past from bush jackets to miniskirts. Cathay’s Managing Director, Michael Miles, cut a cake
decor
a
ted
with a replica of Betsy in icing sugar, specially baked by Cathay’s chefs. It was a pity Jock Swire was not there. He had died earlier that year.
A year later I visited Betsy at her temporary resting place in a HAECO hangar at Kai Tak. Martin Willing went with me and I took some notes:
Huge hangar at HAECO you feel you could make a movie in. A notice on a wall that says ‘Keep Your Hangar Clean’ in large red letters. Betsy crouches beside a long-range TriStar with Chinese engineers all over her, painting United Airlines colours. She is like some great sleek beast (pig? armadillo?) being manicured and groomed by a Lilliputian army of beauticians. Next door is a Gulf Air TriStar with men crawling inside her engines while other men in white overalls open little doors in her mighty tail section and delve about like surgeons probing a giant’s insides.
With all this activity around her, little Betsy points her nose to the hangar roof, almost snootily. She gleams there in her aluminium armour – though she could do with a good rub down, it seems to me. The Union Jack on her tail looks fresh, so does the old registration – VR-HDB. Betsy has two large outward-opening doors – these C-47s were freighters not supply droppers. You couldn’t open these doors in flight. Supply doors opened inwards, or you took them off altogether. Martin says: ‘They’re the sort of ramshackle door you might have designed, Gavin. Thrown together, eh? Of course these planes were made in the hell of a hurry. The US Air Force wanted them at once.’
Inside, the wooden floor is painted drab military green. There’s a loo in the rear – wooden seat and lid – and behind that an open door reveals what looks like piano strings controlling the rudder and elevators. A document on a holder on a bulkhead says 4423 – which means Betsy is the 4423rd plane ever made by Douglas. I have to duck and squeeze into the cockpit which is grey except for two red levers that raise the undergear and two white ball-like knobs that control the pitch (the angle of the propeller blades). The pilots’ seats are the old bucket type – very comfortable – and Martin thinks they are the original ones. The control column bar in the right-hand seat branches awkwardly out from the right across a tall man’s knees (like mine) and restricts them very comfortably. The windscreen wipers are oddly stubby. You can lean out of the windows; the cockpit windows slide back.
It is impossible not to think of the old days even not having seen them. From ancient photographs of Kai Tak I can imagine a field with grass patches and puddles of rain. A tower like a prison watchtower … a windsock … a tiny runway… low ridges beyond…. And those slow, old propeller-driven aircraft. A senior Cathay Engineer, Ken Barnes, has told me, ‘Often after several hours of flying from Sydney to Hong Kong, I’ve groaned to myself “God, how many more hours?” But then I think Betsy would only have reached Brisbane by now – and we’re already over the South China Sea.’
With Chinese mechanics looking on, I sit in Betsy’s cockpit and Martin takes my picture. I feel I am sitting in an ancient monument as exciting as Noah’s Ark or the throne of a pharaoh.
It is time to take a last look at Cathay Pacific, the airline that Roy and Syd built all those years ago.
Perhaps there should have been more in this history about errant individuals, unseemly incidents, all the bric-à-brac of gossip. I doubt it. If there is one sense in which Cathay is no different from other airlines it is that its history contains the usual quota of drunken pilots (not many), seducers of air hostesses and company wives (rather more), and the like. One or two people have suggested that a few early cases of gold smuggling on the part of pilots and air hostesses were actually an important part of Cathay’s history. Of course that is not true. The smuggling incidents took place decades ago, involved very few people (and nobody in management), and were irrelevant to the main story of Cathay’s struggle for success, and above all, banal.
On the other hand, more needs to be said about the Hong Kong Chinese contribution to that success. That
is
relevant. I have mentioned Η. Η. Lee, for years CPA’s manager at Singapore who in the early days spent many hours at the airport helping Chinese passengers ignorant of English with the baffling rituals of immigration and customs. Recently I visited Chester Yen in Vancouver, where he has lived in retirement since 1972. Chester joined Butterfield & Swire in Shanghai in 1933, and became Cathay’s Chinese Sales Manager in 1952 at about the time Sydney de Kantzow retired. He looked after Chinese passengers coming from Amoy – labourers and migrants mostly. ‘There were delays at the airport and you had to go out there to help the passengers or they’d go and fly with someone else. In the old days most passengers were Chinese and they came to feel Cathay cared for them.’
Because he was a much respected figure in the Chinese world of Hong Kong, Chester Yen was responsible for recruiting Chinese into Cathay’s staff. In 1961 he brought in Patrick Tsai. He says: ‘We had to take great care of the Chinese commercial agents, too; in fact we had to spend days and nights with them, entertaining them. Speaking to them in Chinese, of course. I had air timetables printed in Chinese. And I made sure Chinese newspaper reporters were well entertained, too. We gave them Chinese meals and so on.’
In San Francisco I found the Company’s first Purser, Marcel Lin, born in Mauritius. He had started flying with Cathay on the Hong Kong–Bangkok–Rangoon run in DC-4s.
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ His face lit up. ‘DC-4s were so reliable. We had a wonderful time.’
He had risen to Assistant Supervisor of Cabin Attendants when Jo Cheng
was Supervisor. In 1954 Marcel had set up Cathay’s first ‘charm school’ for its oriental air hostesses, and he is convinced that Cathay’s oriental cabin crews continue to contribute enormously to the airline’s success now that Cathay flies to those great Chinese population centres, Vancouver and San Francisco.
As for the engineering side of things, Stewart John believes the Chinese were, and are indispensable: ‘Without HAECO’s enthusiasm and pride in work – the Chinese “work ethic”, call it that if you like – Cathay would be nothing. Strong words, but I mean it. HAECO is the envy of the world. Do you know HAECO has about four and a half thousand people working at Kai Tak and of those only about seventy or eighty are expatriates? Chinese are coming to the top in very senior positions.’ He pointed to a name on a list on his table. ‘Take P. K. Chan – he’s running a small army of sheet metal workers, painters, upholsterers, carpenters. An exceptional man, a real dynamo. And there are so many more…. Believe me, our Cathay engineers are the most professional going – highly skilled and totally trained by us.’
John himself is a ‘real dynamo’ from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. A gigantic, genial figure with a voice and laugh mighty enough to stagger the most experienced Welsh choirmaster, he never seems to stop moving or talking. In Hong Kong I have seen him driving through the night exchanging technicalities on the car telephone to his men at Kai Tak. Despite the hour, he was keeping ‘a finger on the pulse’.
‘Well, Gavin, you’ve got to keep a finger on the pulse. You’ve got to keep up the best commercial standards and operational standards. Good aircrews must have the best service – it’s no good giving a fantastic driver a car if the door falls off when he comes to get into it.’
Stewart John’s office at Kai Tak is just about big enough to contain a large painting of his hero, the Father of the Jet Engine, Sir Frank Whittle (whose son is a Cathay pilot), a good-sized desk and Stewart John himself. He starts and finishes his day on the telephone. ‘Every evening before bed –
every
evening, mind – I call the shift superintendent at Kai Tak. He’s a chap running several hundred engineers – Chinese or European or a mixture. I discuss the incoming defects, things that’ll need doing when an incoming Cathay plane arrives. We know what these are because they’ll have been computered in already. At seven in the morning I’ll call again to see what he’s got through during the night – any problems, like. Once a day
wherever
I am I call into my office or to my excellent deputy director, Roland Fairfield, who ’s been with me for years. Just checking.’
He grins: ‘Perhaps it’s wrong to interfere. But you have to keep the finger on the pulse, don’t you?’
*
In 1987 Cathay was voted ‘Airline of the Year’ by
Air Transport World
, a much respected aviation magazine based in Washington, DC. Cathay will soon be flying a new longer-range Boeing (the Boeing 747-400) and flies to America and Canada as well as several cities in Europe. By 1991, at the present rate of recruitment, Cathay Pacific should have about a thousand pilots.
How has an airline with such a small colonial base achieved its present size without subsidy or government participation? Air is a notoriously hazardous business; one in which small private airlines like British Eagle, Laker, Continental and Braniff have foundered; and one in which even major world airlines like Pan Am and BOAC have suffered appalling losses. What was the unusual characteristic of the local soil which enabled the little Cathay plant to grow so vigorously? Adrian Swire has attempted to answer this question: