the bennymay story: chapter 2

teen

1991 – 1994

On Monday 16 September 1991 I began my very short aviation career at East West Airlines, at Tamworth Airport, NSW. The following day, the boss instructed all the East West employees at the airport to assemble in the main hangar on Wednesday morning. So we did. Thus, on 18 September 1991, not quite sixteen years old, and with only two full days in the aviation industry, I was sacked. Old Sharky asked me if I was happy with myself, having taken only two days to shut down the whole organisation and to get over one hundred staff sacked. His joke nearly masked his pain. I pushed out a laugh.

My dad was good friends with a Warbird restorer, pilot, businessman, named Col Pay. One of Col’s favourite and most precious aircraft was a WWII fighter aircraft, the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk. This was the only flyable P-40 in Australia at that time. Teenage girls watching Aussie TV in the early 1990s saw a cute guy putting on Levis jeans in a 30 second ad’, while aviation enthusiasts saw Col’s P-40, in American war-paint and an aggressive cowl full of tiger teeth.

A year after East West gave me a real work experience, I was 16, in school, and not yet licensed to fly. Col’s son, Ross, took me flying in the P-40 over dad’s cotton farm, and we committed aerobatics for about an hour. We crossed the Namoi River, joined crosswind, and all was well on downwind. Turning base we gave way (yielded) to a lower aircraft on long finals. We extended base, rather than descending, (this is similar to ‘right-of-way’ in the road-rules) and intended to circle the airfield to try a second time to land. Polite pilots in noisy fighter aircraft circumnavigate towns instead of unnecessarily annoying the citizens; and thus we flew toward Wee Waa golf course and a billabong, bypassing a town, showground, and electrical station.

A puff of smoke snorted past the glasshouse canopy, and the engine coughed.

Jet engines are very simple. Your aircraft’s jet inhales a 3-bedroom-house-sized gulp of air. Ridiculously powerful fans squeeze it ludicrously tight and hot. Add a fire-hose of kerosene and an industrial sized cigarette-lighter and you get a nice little explosion going, which you push out (the back) and it pushes you the other way (forward). Remove a bit of that energy with a fan spinning on a stick, so we can power the front bit, and you realise there is only one big moving part. Jets are really quite safe, and reliable, and I think I mentioned, safe—and especially the new ones. But we weren’t in a jet.

The little engine up the front of your family car is just like a modern aircraft’s jet engine in basically no way at all. Well, theoretically they treat the air the same way—suck, squeeze, bang, blow—but where the jet is a set of big spinning fans, your car engine is a symphony of chaotically jolting metal parts readying themselves to bend, break, overheat, explode in one great exgurgitation of steel out of the front end of your vehicle, and generally stop working in some inexplicable way after your dental appointment and before your holiday, and if your mechanic was to explain it he would probably add another inexplicable $200 on your bill anyway. In sum, if something is going to go wrong, it should happen in your car, not in the jet you fly to Adelaide. The main problems with the latter situation is figuring out why you’re now in Adelaide, what you’ll do there, why they use a different measuring system for beer, and how you will escape (yes Tim; you say it’s great, but you did move to Sydney!).

The main problems with this situation at 4:04 pm on 5 September 1991 were as follows: in front of me was the 1940s version of the little engine that just couldn’t; it was quickly replacing its likeness of Roger Ramjet for the semblance of a wheezing, grey-haired, arthritic publican smoking from his tracheotomy tube; it was unquestionably thirsty for fuel; it seemed suddenly more interested in performing a rendition of a tantrum by a perturbed, asthmatic smoke-snorting dragon with a bowel problem and rather uninterested in keeping us speeding through the air; and that I was not now comfortably sitting at a bar in Adelaide.

Ross made an excellent decision: rather than slowing down so much that we would stop, and thus make like Douglas Adam’s pet sperm whale and bowl of petunias, he chose instead to point the P-40 at the ground. The problems with the latter option were that there was very little chance we could glide all the way to the lovely, big, green, grassy field on which he wanted to land; that not landing on it would involve choosing where to crash—e.g. into the trees of a billabong, the trees of a golf course, the electrical distribution station, the smiling faces and happy homes of the township, the large ditch, or the levy ban—and that since we were not in a Douglas Adams’ book the likelihood of missing the ground was not worth considering. I imagine that one remaining option probably seemed preferable to Ross since all the other options would most likely involve the death of at least two persons (and since he was one of those persons).

Amazingly, Ross slid 3 tonnes of aircraft, piercing the air at a couple of hundred kph (kilometres per hour), neatly in between numerous visible obstacles—lots of big, hard trees on the right; houses, people, fences and a large bank on the left—as well as invisible hazards—pointing the nose lower would mean we would have hit faster and would have hit a levy bank, pointing the nose higher would mean we would have flipped upside down. What an awesome pilot he is!

The three, thundering jolts on impact where from the undercarriage (the wheels and leg-bits) and then the propeller and gearbox (that big fan out the front) wrenching themselves from the aircraft, and then us stopping.

And so we made our terrain-assisted-recovery; or what pilots call a forced landing; or what us common folk call a crash. Ross thought his knee injury was quite minor. My back was hurting, but it was not unbearable. But the P-40, sadly, lay buckled, bent, dead. The town raced out to spy her corpse.

I was able to smile for my friend’s photograph, but that forced landing had damaged my spine fairly significantly. Within a week, the discomfort had increased to severe pain. I soon learned I had compression fractures in my thoracic vertebrae, T-10 and T-11.

My years of (often excruciating) back pain had just begun.

[In recognition of Col’s generosity—with his counsel, his planes, and his aerobatics instruction—I dedicate this chapter to him.]

© Benjamin May 2009

Go to chapter 3.