What went wrong
BEFORE: A highly experienced, distinguished crew who’d been without sleep for 21 hours; a poorly maintained plane; no navigation aids onboard; compass errors; maps that were useless when flying in cloud cover; a lack of lights at night on route to use as points of reference; changing weather.
The aircraft controller added in his last transmission with the cockpit: ‘Cleared to 5000 feet, or 4000 if you wish’… thinking they were on approach to Brisbane, not nearing the 1375 metre (4500 ft) Mount Superbus.
AFTER: Civilians had accessed the site before Police; a local resident advised that all souls were lost – information that should have been released by the authorities. Police and RAAF personnel arrived on the scene ill-equipped to stay in the field overnight, though Inspector Ian Stanley Currey showed dedication to duty by keeping vigil on Mount Superbus that night to guard the dead.
HINDSIGHT: A sick baby that could have been transported hours later in safety at first light.
The Crew
RAAF No. 10 Squadron’s Commanding Officer, Wing Commander John Costello was like his chosen crew, a highly decorated WW11 Veteran. Amongst his war stories was battling a shark after ditching at sea. In peacetime his career rose as he added Commanding Officer of RAAF Canberra, Director of Recruiting, Deputy Director of Operations and Assistant Commandant of RAAF College Point Cook to his resume. He re-joined No 10 Squadron on 9 August 1954 with a tally of 3484 flying hours and 287 flying hours in the Lincoln A73-64 bomber.
It was the Easter break and most of No 10 Squadron were on leave. Costello roused the crew from their homes at 10.45 pm – Squadron Leader Charles Mason, MBE, the base’s senior engineering officer; Flight Lieutenant William Cater, a senior radio officer; and the fourth crew member, Squadron Leader John Watson Finlay, the navigator. He had recently qualified as a specialist navigator in maritime operations when he joined No 10 Squadron on 14 December 1954. His tally was 3,138 flying hours including 262-night flying hours at the time of the fateful flight.
They had worked that day, but the Court of enquiry deducted that the RAAF flight crew had not engaged in arduous activity and therefore had no grounds to refuse the mission based on fatigue. (Court of Enquiry, 1955; Heffernan, 1955, Williamson, 1955; Daley, 1955).
Last contact with the plane was made at 4.05 am when the crew had little or no sleep in 21 hours…could their judgement have been impaired?
The Plane
Headlines cried, SIX LIVES LOST IN BOMBER WITHOUT NAVIGATION AIDS.
The Lincoln A73-64 was the only RAAF aircraft available that night, the rest were grounded by abacklog of inspections and unavailability of spares. It did not carry equipment for an instrument approach to Eagle Farm…. though the flight plan would have lead air traffic authorities in Brisbane to believe that the plane carried a radio compass.
The bomber’s last recorded compass swing was on 2 August 1954, nearly eight months before. The instrument is critical for determining and reducing the deviation coefficients that ensure an aircraft remains in the correct heading… and is known to be notoriously unreliable.
The plane was seen to fly obits over the town of Bell, about the same latitude as Caboolture, 80 km east. Peter Finlay, son of Squadron Leader John Watson Finlay who died in the crash, stated that, ‘When a pilot does an orbit, it means they’re confused’.
The plane crashed under controlled flight with wings level, the throttles were in the forward position… the aircraft was attempting to climb.
Why were they so far off course?
The Weather
At the beginning of the flight, the weather was fine with a cloud base at 11,000 feet. By the end of the flight, there was oktas stratus cloud cover at 3000 feet over the Border Ranges. Winds on route had been slightly more easterly than forecast, which, if not corrected, could have blown the aircraft to the west.
National Serviceman, Sergeant Alan Reed, had been offered a seat on that fateful flight to Brisbane. He elected to sleep in comfit on the RAAF Townsville Airbase instead of a noisy fuselage. Alan Raymond Reed OAM went on to enjoy a long, successful career with the RAAF, retiring in 1990 as Air-Vice-Marshall. He passed away in August 2021 and was quoted in an obituary as saying, I lived a very fortunate life…
Fortunate and lucky!
In Conclusion
No actual cause of the crash of the Lincoln A73-64 bomber on Mount Superbus in 1955 has been cited, but an RAAF report at the time stated:
‘It appears that the exact cause of the accident will never be revealed,’ it said, ‘but …. it is disturbing to note the number of irregularities, of greater or lesser degree, which have occurred in relation to the preparation of aircraft, flight planning and the conduct of the flight.’
Should you wish to hike Mount Superbus and explore the crash site, follow the well-marked trail in pink ribbons from the Emu Creek Trailhead. The colour ‘pink’ is a poignant reminder of baby girl, Andrea Robyn Huxley, who perished on that ill-fated flight so many years ago… and the four men and one woman, all dedicated to duty on a mercy flight, who perished with her.
This story was researched and written by Museum Assistant Debra Austin using the resources of the Queensland Police Museum which includes reminiscences of retired police officer Keith Loft in his article ‘Misericordiae Antemortem – The 1955 Mount Superbus Crash (Published in Australian Policing and A Journal of Professional Practices and Research). Keith Loft was a Coronial Support Officer whilst serving part time with the Disaster Victim Identification Squad. He meticulously researched the Mount Superbus Air Crash disaster from a DVI perspective, to explore the methodology used to positively identify the victims in 1955. Research was also gathered from historical Coronial files, Royal Australian Air Force files, Court of Inquiry documents and newspapers accounts archives.
The Police Museum is open 9am to 4pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 3pm on the last Sunday of the month (Feb-Nov) and is located on the Ground Floor of Police Headquarters at 200 Roma Street, Brisbane.
Contact: E: museum@police.qld.gov.au
“Easter 1955 – Air Crash on Mt Superbus – Part 3” by the Queensland Police Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode