The RAAF is pensioning off its trusty Hercules C-130H aircraft. Photo: Wolter Peeters
I ONCE flew from Townsville to the troubled and steamy island of Bougainville in a Toyota Landcruiser. The chunky four-wheel-drive was riding aboard a Royal Australian Air Force Hercules C-130, a lumbering warhorse of the sky. If you were going to fly comfortably within the belly of a Hercules, you needed to be creative. The seats slung along the walls of the fuselage were fashioned from criss-crossed webbing attached to metal tubing, and there was no way to lounge in any form of ease. The webbing cut circulation, there was never enough light within the plane to allow you to read, the bellowing motors made it difficult to hold a conversation and if you managed to nod off, you'd be guaranteed cramps and a sore bum on awakening.The Hercules, however, had a cavernous interior and its four big motors driving giant propellers were powerful enough to lift astonishing loads.
On this flight in the late 1990s, apart from mountains of equipment required by the Australian military for its peacekeeping mission on Bougainville, there sat a big white Toyota Landcruiser lashed to the deck.
Surreptitiously eyeing my fellow passengers, I inched over to the vehicle and discovered it was unlocked. I slid in, laid the passenger's seat back as far as it would go and promptly fell asleep.
It seemed ever after a splendid idea, never exploited, to sell this small triumph to Toyota as an advertising campaign. Travelling off-road? Why, this was off the planet!
Recollection of the flight, and many others, came this week when the RAAF began bidding farewell to the last of its trusty old Hercules C-130H planes. They're being pensioned off and handed to Indonesia for use in disaster relief. There would be a few sentimental tears shed in RAAF mess halls over the last few days, though the air force retains a fleet of larger and newer Hercules, the C-130J.
Quite a few old journos would share the sentiment of the C-130H crews. There was a time when quite a lot of us hitched rides all over the place on these planes.
In 1992, a few colleagues and I cadged a ride aboard a Hercules from Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where we'd been reporting on the UN force trying to put back together that fractured land, to Sydney. It took two days with a stopover in Darwin. A mate, the photographer Michael Bowers, was canny enough to pack hammocks. We slung them in the cargo bay and swung and snoozed our way home - the first time I'd experienced creative comfort on one of these beasts of burden.
The Hercules was never the most beautiful aircraft. It had none of the sleek lines of a fighter jet. But it was loved for plenty of other good reasons. It was all muscle and could land and take off from messed-up airstrips that would leave the pilots of lesser planes desperately looking elsewhere.
It has safely ferried prime ministers, the governor-general and troops into and out of trouble-zones from Iraq to Afghanistan and has flown aid to disasters across the Asia-Pacific and Africa. The medical airlift from Bali following the 2002 bombings was essentially a Hercules operation. John Howard went into shaky Aceh after the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami aboard a Hercules.
I once hitched a ride on a Canadian air force Hercules flying emergency medical equipment from Nairobi in Kenya to the hilltop capital of Rwanda, Kigali.
It was 1994, Rwanda was a spooky open graveyard and Kigali's airport tower was all shot up. A ragtag bunch of international media correspondents had piled aboard and another Land Rover was chained in the loading bay right behind us.
The Canadian pilots seemed a bit edgy about landing at Kigali and employed a technique known as a ''corkscrew landing'' that dates at least from the Vietnam War. From about 5500 metres, directly above the airport, the pilot dropped the big plane into a shrieking downward spiral. The idea, employed in conflict zones everywhere, is to avoid missiles that might be fired from the ground. Only a few months before, the Rwandan president's own plane had been brought down in Kigali by a missile.
The Land Rover appeared to have been shackled too loosely, and began bouncing alarmingly on its springs. Because we were in something approaching a dive, the vehicle teetered above us. For a few minutes, we correspondents confronted the irony of being crushed in the sky by a runaway four-wheel-drive inside a plane bringing aid to a disaster. But the Hercules landed safely, its passengers and load were expelled onto the hot tarmac in a rush, and it was gone.
Apart from the pilots high up in the nose, the most important member of the Hercules crew has always been the loadmaster. He - and increasingly, she - is in charge of getting the load down the back balanced and lashed tight.
It's skilled work. Complex calculations have to be done about weight and centre of gravity, the number of passengers and crew and and even how the plane's balance will change as fuel is burnt off in flight. A loadmaster's figuring makes it possible for a transport plane to actually fly.
In the long history of Hercs in Australian skies, no period was more unusual than late 1989. Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, the former ACTU president, decided to crush a strike using the military. Commercial airline pilots were refusing to fly, and Hawke ordered the RAAF into the breach. More than 170,000 stranded passengers were flown around the country by ''Air Force Airlines'', and a lot of them found themselves loaded into the bellies of the C-130H Hercules fleet.
The sheer novelty of flying in a warhorse made the big noisy Hercules the most popular form of strike-breaking transport, despite the discomfort. Hawke got away with it by painting the striking airline pilots as spoilt and overpaid, and hundreds of them remain embittered. Warplanes, in short, had been recruited for class warfare.
Now the old Hercs are gone, it is unlikely there will be a military aircraft quite as fondly regarded - and as well-known to the posteriors of so many ordinary Australians - as the C-130H. And I rather doubt I'll get another opportunity to fly above the ocean in a Landcruiser.
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