It's great to be alive’

Press, 27 August 1979, Page 1

It's great to be alive’

PA Palmerston North “It’s just great to be alive,” said Flight Lieutenant Alan Curr, Royal Australian Air Force, as he recalled the aborted Fill take-off at Ohakea Airbase on Friday. Flight Lieutenant Curr, aged 33, the navigator, and his pilot, Flying Officer Mark Kelly, aged 22, of the R.A.A.F. No. 1 Squadron, escaped death by ejecting the cockpit capsule only seconds before the swingwing fighte r-bomber careered off the end of the runway and exploded. Flight Lieutenant Curr was shocked but not injured in the crash. Flying Officer Kelly is still in Palmerston North Hospital with a fracture of the lower back. “It is a classic fracture

of the type expected from an ejection, and he will be okay,” Flight Lieutenant Curr said as he relaxed in the No. 75 Squadron crew quarters at Ohakea. The cause of the crash would be determined by a team of experts who arrived at the base from Australia on Saturday evening. The S6M Fill was taking off with three others on the last sortie of exercise Tasmanex when “we suddenly lost power.” “We were about 1000 metres down the runway when we realised we had a drastic loss of power. The after-burners had gone out and we were aquaplaning on the wet runway like a duck on a sheet of ice,” he said. He said the pilot tried to re-light the burners.

“I called to Mark that we’d better eject, and he said okay,” Flight Lieutenant Curr said. The Fill was almost at the end of the runway when he pressed the button that sent them soaring 140 metres in the capsule.

“It was frightening as hell with a terrific sense of acceleration as the nose pushed itself into the air.” He said he had heard reports about ejections from the crew of the R.A.A.F. Fill which crashed in the Hauraki Gulf 10 months ago. “They said it was like sitting in a chair and falling about 20 feet. I prepared myself inside the module and stiffened when we were about three feet off impact. It wasn’t so bad,” he said.

Moments earlier he had looked from the capsule and seen the blazing wreck of the plane below. “1 was petrified. I thought we were going to land right in the middle of it. We were lucky we landed about 40 metres away.” A court of inquiry into the crash might conclude in Australia. An Ohakea spokesman said last evening that Flight Lieutenant Curr would probably be interviewed “on and off” for at least the next three days in the base’s conference room. The official inquiry team has been visiting the crash site and is expected to continue piecing together information when it returns to Australia.