Goony Bird was a name given to the large and apparently goofy Albatross by American servicemen on Medway Island in WWII. The name became attached, again by US servicemen, to the DC3. This was a type of aircraft which first flew in 1935 – the year I was born. In its guise as the C-47 Skytrain by the Americans or the Dakota by the R.A.F it carted freight and passengers about during WWII. DC3s were still carrying freight and passengers around when I was living in Libya and later in Papua New Guinea.
For a while I caught the regular DC3 flight from Benghazi to Marsa Brega on Friday mornings and back to Benghazi on Friday evenings. Approaching Benghazi in a DC3 of an evening you would see the whole city below you as the aircraft made a tight turn to line up with the airstrip. The white salt pans stood out as did the inner lake where the flamingos fed, and the mosquitoes bred and sent squadrons of their kind at night to disturb our sleep. You could see the floating crane moored by the sailing club in the harbour and my bitumen pipeline on the big breakwater. The Cornice stretched its way from the British embassy to the dock gates and in the old Italian town, the cathedral and the venerable Berenice Hotel remained behind after the Italians had long departed.
The ‘Goony Bird’ was recruited into service by civil airlines across the world. Sometime in the 1960’s I had been a burden on the hospitality of East African Airways in Nairobi who were not paying me quickly enough. I suspect they booked me on a day safari to the Serengeti so that they could get a little rest. It may have been the reason I joined a group of tourists heading for Tanganika in a DC3.
We disembarked by a Landrover and a lorry somewhere in the great expanse of the Serengeti’s grassland, and I joined the queue of my fellow passengers filing past a gentleman with whom we all shook hands. The man was Louis B Leakey the paleoanthropologist who needed the money from we tourists to finance his work in the Olduvai Gorge and to help support the notable research by Jane Goody, Birutė Mary Galdikas and Dian Fossey on primate behaviour.
A few years later the Goony Bird played a part in my short career in Papua New Guinea. It flew freight and passengers where roads were impossible and airstrips short.
My wife, our daughter and I thumbed a lift on a DC3 loaded with building supplies from Lae to Mount Hagen. There were only two seats, so our daughter sat on a pile of ‘fibro’. The airport for Mt Hagen – Kagamunga – is at an altitude of 5,400 ft. To get from Lae to Mount Hagen the Goony Bird gained height to top the Owen Stanley range. As it did so we saw the cloud waterfall rolling off the mountain. I believe this phenomenon is known as orthographic clouds.
Later in New Guinea I thought I had hired a DC3 to take tourists on a day trip from Lae to Woodlark, one of the Trobriand Islands some way off the east coast of New Guinea. The DC3 failed to show, and the tourists were less than pleased and clamoured as only angry Australians can for a refund.
If you are a student of sociology, you may well have come across Bronislaw Malinowski the founding father, so it is said, of anthropology. He lived as what is called a participant-observer in the Trobriand Islands when WWI was raging in Europe. He developed the notion that the main function of religion was to help individuals and society deal with the emotional stresses which occur during life crises. More relevant to my frustrated prospective tourists in Lae, he also made some interesting observations about the sex lives of Trobriand Island ladies.
After a long life and many mistakes, the failure of the DC3 to turn up at Lae recurs in my memory at inconvenient times. Especially at dawn in England’s deep midwinter.
FLYING HOME TO BERKA II IN A GOONEY BIRD
Sometimes the oil company let me fly in the DC3s they hired to carry people between the old WWII airfield near Benghazi to and from the airstrip near their oil terminal at Marsa Brega on the southern shore of the Gulf of Sirte. I would go there to meet British expatriate workers who wanted to fly to UK and back by East African Airways for their regular home leave.
We would do our days’ work around the oil terminal and make the trip home in the old veteran aircraft in the late afternoon. It could be hot, and the humidity could climb to make you sweat so fine dust would stick to you.
To make his approach to the old potholed airstrip the captain would make a steep turn over Benghazi city. You could look down from your seat and watch the wing tip pointing at the city and the flat calm sea. Sharply in focus for a while were the white salt pans, the huddled old city, the cathedral dome, and the flat calm harbour with the ramshackle floating crane tied up near the sailing club. The silted inner harbour always had a small flock of pink flamingos feeding in shallows.
DON'T KILL ME NOW 