A Tale Of Two Aircraft

By Capt- GIHAN A FERNANDO

Since Mannar is frequently mentioned in Parliament these days, it reminded me of a flying story. In 1977, immediately after the General Elections, riots broke out in the south of the island. The authorities decided to fly many of the affected citizens to Jaffna aboard Air Ceylon’s Hawker Siddeley (Avro) HS 748 aircraft. I was a First Officer with the airline at the time, and we were committed to fly almost round the clock, sometimes operating three return flights daily (six sectors) between Ratmalana and Kankesanturai/Palaly (KKS), back to back.

With fatigue accumulating as the days dragged on, we became exhausted both mentally and physically. But we were permitted to extend our maximum flight duty time beyond legal limits by the then Director of Civil Aviation, Mr Bandaragoda, who was often at Ratmalana personally supervising the evacuation operations at the behest of the new President JR.

Air Ceylon HS 748

Eventually, the volume of northbound evacuees became so great, Air Ceylon began operating ‘mercy missions’ with its Douglas DC-8 international jetliner from Katunayake-BIA to KKS and back. Of course, compared to the HS 748 the DC-8 flew much faster and higher.

Air Ceylon DC-8

One afternoon we were cruising along in the Avro at 12,000 feet en route to KKS when we heard the DC-8 call the KKS Air Traffic Control tower. The duty Air Traffic Controller, ‘Bala’, had been overworked over the past few days and had stood himself down. Colombo wouldn’t send a relief controller, so ‘Bala’ handed over controlling duties to the duty Radio Officer, who wasn’t qualified to control air traffic.

As we were carrying out multiple sectors and the only operator in that uncrowded airspace, we were OK with that arrangement. Besides, ‘Bala’ had informed us that he “couldn’t take it anymore”. All the Radio Officer had to do was see whether the runway was unobstructed when an aircraft’s arrival was imminent, and say “Cleared to land”.

 Unfortunately, having that second aircraft in our airspace was going to cause a problem. The DC-8 requested clearance to descend, and was promptly granted it by the duty Radio Officer. While becoming mindful of a possible conflict of traffic, I thought I recognised the voice from the DC-8 as that of Capt. Cosmos Von Bonaman, a ‘flying Dutchman’, and queried: “Hey Skipper, we think we are ahead of you. Where exactly are you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied the Dutch pilot.” We are close to that outcrop of land pointing westwards from the coast.”

My Captain on the Avro, the late Capt. Sydney de Soysa, and I realised that Capt. Cosmos was referring to Mannar. We too were in the vicinity of Mannar, and suspected that the DC8 was descending through our cruising level. Capt. Sydney immediately turned left, out towards the ocean, and I quickly got on the radio and told Capt. Cosmos to turn right and descend over land. In fact, knowing the ground situation in KKS, we were doing our own air traffic controlling!

We never even saw the DC-8 pass. When we arrived at KKS it was already on ground disembarking passengers!We came back and reported the situation to the officials at Ratmalana. They in turn sent a relief controller to KKS to relieve ‘Bala’.We were grateful that on that day 45 years ago we narrowly escaped being “chiselled in the rear” by the DC-8, as the late Navigator Roy de Niese would have said.Sadly, Capt. de Soysa was lost with entrepreneurial business tycoon and aspiring politician Upali Wijewardene in the crash of the latter’s private Learjet in February 1983.For the record, Air Traffic Control procedures at Ratmalana still separate air traffic with respect to flying over land and over sea.