BUSH PILOT HUGH PRYOR
STAY OF EXECUTION I am the youngest of six children. My father was killed during World War II leaving my Mum to bring us all up.
T
HE extraordinary thing about my childhood was that it was jam-packed with the happiest of memories. Days spent exploring or climbing trees or swimming or boating or fishing, followed by evenings sitting captivated by stories of high adventure, read to us by Mum or one the uncles or aunts. In other words, a childhood of pure magic punctuated by memorable Christmases. Childhoods just don’t come any better. The only drawback to an otherwise magic existence was that I had to share a room with my elder brother and we used to fight like cat and dog. These were not friendly ‘rough and tumbles’, they were all out war. During one particularly intense encounter, which I was winning, he looked at me with hate-filled eyes and through gritted teeth he spat the words that no aspiring pilot would wish to hear. “You will die in an air crash before you reach the age of twenty-one!” That caused me to loosen my grip round his neck and release him. Some years later I went for two years’ service in the remote jungles and mountains of New Guinea. To get there, I signed on, aged seventeen, as an apprentice on a ‘Tramp ship’ called the ‘Cedarbank. My choice of transport had nothing to do with the death threat issued by my brother. It was just the cheapest way to travel. In fact, I was
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FlightCom Magazine
actually paid £42 per month, which covered my bar bill back in 1963. It was after I had disembarked in Madang that my brother’s death sentence suddenly came back to haunt me. I had a two-week course of briefings before being sent to work among the Pigmy people of the Karem ethnic group up in the Simbai valley, on the border between the Madang and the Western Highland Districts. It was brand new country for the colonialist Australian Government and the first Europeans had only penetrated this far into the mountains some four years previously. For me it was the fulfilment of boyhood dreams. To be the very first European who most of the local population had met was the stuff of pure adventure. Then Tony Austin was killed trying to get into Simbai in a Cessna 180. The sources of the Ramu River may be found in five valleys which lead down from the forested mountains like the fingers of a hand. The palm of the hand is a large bowl, from where the mighty river meanders through the fetid coastal plains into the sea. The valleys are steep sided, narrow and covered with thick rain forest. The Kompiai, the Kaironk, the Tembiump, the Simbai and the Aiome valleys are confusingly similar when viewed from the cockpit of an aircraft. In New Guinea the weather deteriorates very quickly after midday. The clouds come down over the mountains with vicious thunderstorms threatening anybody brave or stupid enough to attempt to fly
amongst them. New Guinea has a horrific safety record in the air, because of the lethal mixture of mountains and weather. The rains had been so severe that there had been a landslide in the Simbai Valley which had killed twenty-three people. Tony got the wrong valley and being inexperienced, flew up the middle of it. He was forced lower and lower into the ‘V’ until the only way out was to climb through the storm and that is when the C180 met the mountains. The last few moments of Tony Austin’s life must have been unimaginably terrifying. Two weeks later it was my turn to brave the trip in the slightly beefier Cessna 185. I lost sleep for three nights knowing that these would be my last ones on Earth before I became a little pile of charred bones high in the undiscovered remoteness of New Guinea. The morning of our intended flight, I arrived at Madang Airport. The aircraft belonged to a start-up company called ‘Talair’, the pilot was a chap called Max Parker and my fellow passenger was a tiny lady called Margaret Kibikibi. She and I were seated on the minimally cushioned bench seat attached to the rear bulkhead. Access to the cabin was via a small luggage hatch, because the cabin had been piled from floor to ceiling with supplies to the extent that Mrs. Kibikibi and I were carrying boxes on our knees. Max Parker’s Pre-flight Briefing consisted basically of an instruction to keep our seat belts fastened during the whole flight and if anything went wrong, we were to wait for him to sort things out before we tried to get out. We felt the plane rock as Max climbed in. We heard him mutter his litany of prestart checks, then there was a loud click and mechanical groan, followed by a vehement Australian expletive, followed by another click and a groan and an even more vehement