Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways by Gavin Young Page B
Authors: Gavin Young
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flew to Singapore via Bangkok, a long haul which meant leaving Hong Kong at crack of dawn in order to get back next day. (There were no flights in or out of Kai Tak after dark.) ‘A bloody awful time to get up,’ the flight crews moaned, but no one challenged the necessity for Syd’s gruelling work schedules if the line was to blossom for the benefit of all.
‘Only one crew did the entire Hong Kong–Singapore–Bangkok flight,’ wrote Chic Eather, a veteran of it. ‘That meant a duty period of some thirty hours. One got a rest when one could – the aircraft being as good a place as any other until the close, humid atmosphere and the inevitable bugs and mosquitoes of Singapore’s airfield drove the would-be sleeper out for a walk and some fresh air.’
Even in Hong Kong, their home base, the exhausted CPA crews had to doss down on camp beds in a couple of almost bare rooms in the Peninsula. Flight-time limits, palatial hotel accommodation and interesting stopovers lay in some distant and almost unimaginable future. The lordly aircrews of today wouldn’t begin to tolerate the schedules which for Syd’s fliers became routine. In any case, modern regulations quite rightly forbid them. TakeEather’s work period in the final two weeks of 1946, and imagine any pilot undertaking it today. One day he was in the air for eighteen hours and twenty-five minutes. He had two days off in the fortnight and muses wrily, ‘I wonder how they managed to forget me for those two days. Perhaps they had no spare aircraft.’
Syd de Kantzow drove his pilots with an almost evangelical zeal, but pioneers are zealots and Chic’s conclusion is fitting: ‘Such a rat-race operation could hardly be justified, but the general dedication and willingness to do more than one’s share must have contributed to the future fortunes of the company. It could be argued that if this attitude had been absent there would have been no Cathay Pacific and none of the comfortable flying jobs of today.’
Another de Kantzow-inspired step forward was the recruitment of CPA’s first air stewardess. After all, any new air service in which passengers were more highly considered than woollen goods, Chinese silk hats and even oysters must have stewardesses. In Syd’s opinion, stewardesses were a sure sign that an airline had ‘arrived’.
One of Cathay’s first and prettiest stewardesses lives now in happy retirement near Surfers’ Paradise on the Queensland coast, having moved there after marrying Jack Williams, one of Cathay’s Australian engineers. The smart little bungalow she shares now with her second husband sits back from the sea in a garden suburb that in its peacefulness is far from the roaring days of Syd’s Dakotas. Though not really so far for Vera: ask her about that time and you realize you have started something; she laughs, runs to bring you a chair and a beer, dashes for her photograph album and in no time is acting out what they were like, the endless days and nights inside those rattling, bouncing, propeller-driven crates, as if she was playing a delightful game of charades. What had it been like to stagger about with trays and cups of tea on a heaving aisle hour after turbulent hour all the way from Hong Kong to Sydney – and then back again? Vera makes it sound as if those were the happiest days of her life – and perhaps they were.
Her album shows the young Vera, dark-haired with a big white smile, at the top of the steps at Betsy’s open door. She is cool and petite in a dark blue double-breasted uniform, the long open collar of a white blouse flopping casually over its lapels, and a soft round hat gold-embroidered with the initials CPA enfolded in a pair of wings. Her high heels must have been the least ideal footwear for carrying babies’ milk and airsick pills up and down the narrow aisle of a tossing aircraft, but she certainly added a welcome touch of beauty to the austerity of flying.
For there was no luxury in flying
‘Only one crew did the entire Hong Kong–Singapore–Bangkok flight,’ wrote Chic Eather, a veteran of it. ‘That meant a duty period of some thirty hours. One got a rest when one could – the aircraft being as good a place as any other until the close, humid atmosphere and the inevitable bugs and mosquitoes of Singapore’s airfield drove the would-be sleeper out for a walk and some fresh air.’
Even in Hong Kong, their home base, the exhausted CPA crews had to doss down on camp beds in a couple of almost bare rooms in the Peninsula. Flight-time limits, palatial hotel accommodation and interesting stopovers lay in some distant and almost unimaginable future. The lordly aircrews of today wouldn’t begin to tolerate the schedules which for Syd’s fliers became routine. In any case, modern regulations quite rightly forbid them. TakeEather’s work period in the final two weeks of 1946, and imagine any pilot undertaking it today. One day he was in the air for eighteen hours and twenty-five minutes. He had two days off in the fortnight and muses wrily, ‘I wonder how they managed to forget me for those two days. Perhaps they had no spare aircraft.’
Syd de Kantzow drove his pilots with an almost evangelical zeal, but pioneers are zealots and Chic’s conclusion is fitting: ‘Such a rat-race operation could hardly be justified, but the general dedication and willingness to do more than one’s share must have contributed to the future fortunes of the company. It could be argued that if this attitude had been absent there would have been no Cathay Pacific and none of the comfortable flying jobs of today.’
Another de Kantzow-inspired step forward was the recruitment of CPA’s first air stewardess. After all, any new air service in which passengers were more highly considered than woollen goods, Chinese silk hats and even oysters must have stewardesses. In Syd’s opinion, stewardesses were a sure sign that an airline had ‘arrived’.
One of Cathay’s first and prettiest stewardesses lives now in happy retirement near Surfers’ Paradise on the Queensland coast, having moved there after marrying Jack Williams, one of Cathay’s Australian engineers. The smart little bungalow she shares now with her second husband sits back from the sea in a garden suburb that in its peacefulness is far from the roaring days of Syd’s Dakotas. Though not really so far for Vera: ask her about that time and you realize you have started something; she laughs, runs to bring you a chair and a beer, dashes for her photograph album and in no time is acting out what they were like, the endless days and nights inside those rattling, bouncing, propeller-driven crates, as if she was playing a delightful game of charades. What had it been like to stagger about with trays and cups of tea on a heaving aisle hour after turbulent hour all the way from Hong Kong to Sydney – and then back again? Vera makes it sound as if those were the happiest days of her life – and perhaps they were.
Her album shows the young Vera, dark-haired with a big white smile, at the top of the steps at Betsy’s open door. She is cool and petite in a dark blue double-breasted uniform, the long open collar of a white blouse flopping casually over its lapels, and a soft round hat gold-embroidered with the initials CPA enfolded in a pair of wings. Her high heels must have been the least ideal footwear for carrying babies’ milk and airsick pills up and down the narrow aisle of a tossing aircraft, but she certainly added a welcome touch of beauty to the austerity of flying.
For there was no luxury in flying
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