Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 119 Qantas at War. By Sir Hudson Fysh. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1968. Pp. xii-j-244. $6.75 (Australian). This is the second volume of the memoirs of the man who was from 1920 to 1966 managing director and then chairman of Australia’s over­ seas airline. The first volume, Qantas Rising (reviewed in Technology and Culture, VII, 4 [Fall 1966], 560-61), carried the story essentially to 1934. In those first fourteen years the Queensland and Northern Ter­ ritory Aerial Services grew from a makeshift into a scheduled airline. The new book opens with the story of the expansion overseas of Qantas Empire Airways in conjunction with Imperial Airways. This was first accomplished with the four-engined DH86 with which Austral­ ian operators experienced a number of troubles, due, according to some, to a weak fin kingpost and according to others to the fact that the aircraft required a finer touch and more watching than the older and more stable machines in use. At any rate, the effect of accidents and the problems they create is one of the continuing themes of Sir Hudson’s story. Not until after the war did Qantas, or for that matter many other airlines, have enough spare aircraft to take over when the schedules were disrupted by losses. The DH86 was a fine aircraft, built to rigid economic tolerances. It is interesting to recall that it carried ten passengers, mail, freight, and two crewmen, for a total weight of 9,200 pounds; with four 200-horsepower engines, it cruised at 145 mph for a still-air range of 746 miles. And even so, it had a disposable lift of 3,680 pounds. This is sharp con­ trast to the modern long-range jets, such as the Comet I, half of whose take-off weight was fuel. Much of the prewar period covered deals with the inauguration of the Empire flying-boat services from England to Australia and eventually, in 1940, on to New Zealand. This was then the longest air route in the world. Flying boats were used because they required fewer expensive landing facilities than land planes. The story is often strongly political, though the whole of the running fight between Qantas and the Royal Australian Air Force and the Civil Aviation Department is but hinted at in these chapters. The situation became considerably worse as war approached, and the Australian authorities, who had done little in the interwar years to prepare their country for defense, tried to grab every­ thing in sight for war use. In this middle section of the book, there are some useful insights into British problems, for Fysh was in London in the winter of 1938-39 and again in early 1943, at both times when the British “chosen instrument,” first Imperial Airways and then BOAC, was undergoing drastic changes with new managements taking over and planning first for nationalization and then for peace. Nevertheless, much of the story, correctly, from Fysh’s viewpoint hinged about equipment and crews. Neither the Australian nor the British authorities understood air transport until the middle of the war. Both Qantas and BOAC were nearly put out of action by the shortsightedness of the 120 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE authorities in calling up their crews and requisitioning their machines as well as in canceling aircraft under development in Britain. The war did not hit Qantas, apart from assisting BOAC in 1940 on the Horseshoe Route, until the Japanese bombing of Singapore in De­ cember 1941. Within months war and accidents had reduced Qantas to a few internal services. Various political and commercial combinations would have been glad to see the whole enterprise shattered. But the board held firm, and Qantas gradually developed new roles for itself in evacuating refugees in New Guinea, repairing engines and parts for the RAAF, and finally, the most significant chapter of all, the operation of the nonstop Perth-Ceylon service, which was extended to Karachi. The only direct link with Britain after the Japanese took Indonesia was via North America, and this was not a British service. Increasingly it was felt that there was a need for a...