We’re going to hit the water: it’ll be a splash

WHEN the army told journalist DD McNicoll he and Chris Pavlich would be flying in a DC-3, alarms bells started ringing.

Photographer Chris Pavlich caught the rescue operation in full swing after the DC-3 went down in Botany Bay. Picture: Chris Pavlich

WHEN the army told journalist DD McNicoll he and photo­grapher Chris Pavlich would be flying to cover the Anzac dawn service on Norfolk Island in an old DC-3, alarms bells started ringing.

“We assumed we would be taken out on a Hercules, as the army normally does,” said the former journalist for The Australian. “But they rang a couple of weeks before and said, ‘We can’t get a Herc. We’ve chartered a DC-3’, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be bloody joking’.’’

The day before the service at Australia’s most easterly point, McNicoll and Pavlich joined a handful of other passengers and 16 members of the pipes and drums band of Sydney’s Scots College, who were part of the celebrations, in loading the 50-year-old South Pacific Airmotive twin-propeller aircraft at the city’s Kingsford Smith airport.

“If you’d seen the amount of gear going on this plane you would have been staggered: kilts, drums, bagpipes and God knows what else, and 25 people, as I ­recall,” McNicoll said. “We went shuddering down the runway, took off and got to about 500 to 600 feet above Botany Bay and the kid sitting in the window seat next to me said, ‘There’s smoke coming out of the engine’.

“I said, ‘Don’t worry it’s a DC-3, they blow smoke and carry on’, and he said, ‘Now there’s flames’.’’

Pavlich was sitting across the aisle. The student next to him caught his ­attention. “I said, ‘What’s up mate?,” Pavlich said.

“He motioned over to DD and DD’s leaning over this kid, looking out the window.

“And I thought, ‘Far out, he must have done this take-off a millions times and yet he’s leaning over this kid, and then in the way only DD could, he leans over to me and says, ‘That’s the left ­engine on fire already’.

“How do you react to that? I didn’t believe him and then I ­notice the plane started to ­descend … I saw a co-pilot look back and he just shook his head.”

McNicoll said it quickly became apparent they were going to slam into the water.

“I was in the first seat right up against the bulkhead at the front,” he said. “I turned around and said, ‘Everybody hang on, we’re going to hit water’.

“Unlike Hollywood movies, DC-3s don’t skip along the surface. They hit the water and just about everything rips off the bottom of them, and they keep going on towards the bottom.

“We went straight down ­towards the bottom of Botany Bay and we didn’t stop until we had flattened the nose of the aircraft on the sand at the bottom.’’

Pavlich vividly remembers the moment when all those on board realised they were about to crash.

“The thing which sticks out to me the most was the complete and utter silence when everyone realised what was happening,” he said. “Then the window was underwater and there was water coming in through the ceiling vents of the plane.”

McNicoll thought his time was up. “At this stage there was water pouring in through every bloody orifice of the plane and we thought we were going to drown,” he said. “Then slowly the plane started to shake and shudder and lifted itself back up and broke the water and we managed to get a the rear door open.

“The hostie who had been thrown the length of the plane had a very nasty broken wrist — the impact was so great that half the seats in the bloody plane had been ripped out of their runners.

“We picked up the life vests and started pushing people out.”

Pavlich climbed over the seats and luggage to get his camera gear from the back of the plane. “The bandmaster was the hero. He was looking after the kids. His wife didn’t know how to swim so he was digging out the life raft,” Pavlich said. “I started taking photos — I was one of the first off. I jumped into a life raft and started shooting people getting off. I was in one of the biggest news stories I’d been in and I didn’t want to not shoot it.”

Pavlich’s series of photos earned him the Nikon Kodak Press Photographer of the Year Award for 1994-95.

McNicoll said that when he ­finally got to the back door the sight ­before him was “amazing”.

“I looked out and all I could see was a sea of tinnies surrounding the plane and people just hauling kids and other passengers out of the water,” he said. “I think I was the last passenger out of the aircraft and there was some kid from this band saying, ‘I don’t want to get my Nikes wet’, and I swear he’s probably still got the imprint of my boot in his back.”

An investigation found left-engine failure and pilot error were the main factors in the crash, with weight a contributing issue.

If the plane had followed its original flight plan it would have refuelled at Lord Howe Island — the same accident at the end of that runway and things would have been a lot worse. As it was, apart from a few bumps and bruises, the only injuries were the hostess’s broken wrist and a ­broken thumb for McNicoll. “Busted thumbs aren’t all that bad,” he said. “I had it strapped up and I walked back into the newsroom at about midday, nonchalantly dripping with water with my life jacket slung over my shoulder, and wrote a story about it.”

When the plane was hauled out of Botany Bay a couple of weeks later, a gift McNicoll had bought for his host on Norfolk ­Island, author Colleen Mc­Cullough, found its way to someone else. “We were able to reclaim our luggage and the bottle of Grange Hermitage was still intact,” he said. “So I sent it to the bloke who had lifted me out of the water and on to his boat.”

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