The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories by Bill Marsh Read Free Book Online

hammering at times but it was the safest way to go.
    On this particular night we wound our way through the thunderstorms, the down drafts and severe turbulence for nearly two hours. It was a pretty horrendous ride for everyone concerned. Not even the doctor or the nurse had much to say to me. Either they were too scared, or they were sick, or they just figured out that I had a few other things on my mind, which of course I did.
    See, other than negotiating the foul weather there was also another problem I had to be wary of out in that area. It’s what’s called ‘jump-up’ country, a flat mesatype landscape where high steep-sided rock plateaus just jump up in front of you. Balgo Hills Mission is a typical example. Balgo sits on top of a rocky plateau. It’s quite impressive really. The only thing is that if you undershoot you’ll fly straight into the side of a cliff.
    So I got close to Balgo. But I still couldn’t see it. They’d radioed and said they’d have the basketball court lights on but I couldn’t even find them. Then as luck would have it, when I flew over where I thought the place should’ve been, I caught a glimpse of the mission down through some broken cloud. So I did acircuit, came back round, and lined myself up on final approach.
    Now, on final approach, a pilot’s technique is to look at the end of the runway and if the lights are getting further apart it means that you’re getting too high and if they start to join together then you’re obviously getting too low. And it was pretty important that I got the approach right this night because, as I said, if I didn’t I could well fly smack-bang into a cliff face.
    I set myself up on final approach all right. There was some pretty severe turbulence. The windscreen wipers were belting away, and I was sitting there glued to the lights along the runway. Then as I prepared to land I noticed that the runway appeared to be getting shorter, and I’m thinking, ‘What am I seeing here?’
    So I tried to analyse what my brain was telling me and, while that was going on, the runway’s getting progressively shorter and shorter and more and more lights are disappearing up ahead of me. Suddenly, only about half of the lights were visible. Then less than half.
    ‘To hell with this,’ I thought. ‘I’ve come this far, I’ve got to land.’
    So I thumped the aeroplane across the threshold, banged it on the runway and as I did, the remaining runway lights completely disappeared. I couldn’t see a thing. Not a thing.
    Then it struck me. What was happening was that a thunderstorm was sweeping in and a torrential wall of water was working its way down the runway. By the time we were rolling to a stop, the runway lights on either side of the wings had vanished. You couldn’t see them. That’s how heavy this sheet of rain was.You couldn’t have heard yourself scream inside the aeroplane from the intensity of the rain.
    So we just sat there in the middle of the airstrip waiting for a slight break in the downpour and I called the doctor up and I put it to him. ‘In view of the intense nature of this trip,’ I shouted, ‘if there’ll be no dramatic improvement by transporting the patient back to Derby tonight, we should look very closely at overnighting here in Balgo and seeing how the weather is tomorrow morning.’
    Well, that was duly noted. Then when there came a bit of a break in the rain, I managed to turn the aeroplane around and taxi back to the holding area where the doctor and the nurse disembarked and were rushed off to attend to the patient. After they’d gone, I did the things that I had to do then waited until someone came back and transported me into the mission.
    So there I was, as it happened, in a little room at Balgo Hills Mission. The very same establishment that was run by Father Hevern. I suppose, in retrospect, it must’ve been a small dining room or something. I was totally by myself. By this time, it was around eleven o’clock at