It was December 24, 1974, and a very young husband and father of three was eyeing his new pride and joy. His first home for his family, just settled on it a couple of weeks earlier, located at the up-and-coming suburb of Nakara on the coast just a few miles from the city of Darwin itself.
The radio has been actively barking warnings about a cyclone growing in intensity over the Arafura Sea. Slightly unnerving, given his wife was nursing a baby girl of just a few months, but all their thoughts were focussed on Christmas arrangements, dinners with friends and turning his quarter acre of dust and gravel into a garden.
He had planted a few saplings and the breeze was putting a little too much pressure so he went looking for some string and pieces of timber to use as support for them. The family loved Darwin, he loved his job as an air traffic controller and they now had a brand new house.
The loud bell of the house phone calls. He runs up the stairs of the new house on concrete stilts to cope with occasional tropical flooding and picks up the phone. SATCO was on the line.
SATCO was the boss, the most senior air traffic officer in that region. The message was clear and unequivocal. The cyclone is changing course on radar and we are concerned. I know you were on a day off today but one of the boys has pulled a sickie so you get on your horse and do a night shift on the transcontinental sector.
The young controller’s heart sunk. They had other plans for Christmas Eve but you don’t say no to that sort of command from SATCO. He broke the news to his wife and advised her to call the family of another air traffic control officer who was also rostered on that night and arrange to spend the night over there with his family.
With that the young man with his Southern European flock of black hopelessly curly hair and the must-have 1970s sideburns grabbed his briefcase and disappeared down those stairs towards his car.
It’s hard to believe these days but Darwin then was one of the busiest airports possibly in the entire Southern Hemisphere. Normally, military flying operations, flying schools and what used to be called general aviation operations were organised at different locations. Darwin was not.
Every form of aviation was located at the same airport. It was not unusual to see a tiger moth taxing out among a bunch of Skyhawks DC9s and 727s. That was the nature of Darwin. In addition to all of that Darwin was responsible for control of all of the outbound and inbound traffic overflying to and out of Asia.
It was crowded air space, at a time when digital navigation aids had not yet been largely developed. The control tower itself was 90 per cent solid reinforced concrete and nothing was going to shift that, but the top 10 per cent was just timber, some steel and glass. That was a problem.
The young man enters his office, greets the off-going shift mates, signs the book, puts his headset on, takes his place at the console and now he’s in charge of many hundreds of lives crisscrossing the oceanic and transcontinental airways over the entire continent of Australia and beyond into Indonesian air space.
The cheeky almost irreverent look that was in the young man’s eyes is now replaced by intensity and focus as he studies the strips of coloured cardboard decorating the face of his console. Each one of those strips represents an airliner with up to a hundred souls on board.
The wind indicator in the young man’s console was out of control and nudging 200 miles per hour
Not much chance of airlines wanting to fly into Darwin tonight, he thought. As he watched his wind speed indicator stridently rise slowly but persistently, conversely matched by a plummeting atmospheric pressure gauge. It soon occurred to the young controller that this was likely to be a night to be remembered.
He kept glancing at the old antiquated GCA weather radar to his left and could easily see this massive clenched fist of dense cloud heading for his home and his office and a thought about his family briefly skipped through his mind.
The two controllers on duty were working feverishly relaying control instruction to long-range HF radio operators working from a different building to provide secure separation between aircraft safely cruising two or three miles above the storm, out of nature’s harm way but certainly exposed to human error risk working under pressure cooker conditions.
In those days there was a requirement to ensure there was physical vertical separation between aircraft before they departed Australian airspace and into Indonesian airspace. The minimum vertical separation needed in those days was 2,000 feet. Given their operational parameters was between 28,000 (and no jet pilot wanted that at that stage as it was too fuel consuming) and 39,000 feet we were running out of levels pretty quickly.
Usual longitudinal separation standards with no closing airspeed was not allowed. In any case controllers were also mindful of the growing reality that those HF radio masts were soon going to blow away and then no contact with their traffic. It was a race between nature doing its utmost to nuke man’s technical systems and these two controllers shepherding their flock of metal tubes crowded with human beings into safer airspaces.
The wind indicator in the young man’s console was out of control and nudging 200 miles per hour, atmospheric pressure was in dramatic drop now low 900mbs and still dropping. Under the wind’s enormous pressure the glass windows were furiously pumping water inside our control room.
Smoke was rising from the floor boards indicating that the ingress of water was shorting the high voltage cables under the floor. As the water level started to increase the risk of electrocution was very real. The young controller with the curly black hair looked at his mate and deliberately swung his eyes towards the source of rising smoke.
He was about to suggest moving onto the furniture when the whole place exploded. The two men were blown physically out of the tower in a shower of splintered glass. The ground was like custard after well over a metre of rain. The young man was stunned momentarily and he called for his mate not too far way. The two men agreed to remain low to avoid the tsunami of debris flying in the 200 miles an hour hurricane.
So there they stayed until the eye of the storm arrived. Both men were injured but given the circumstances not gravely. Suddenly the wind stopped abruptly and the two controllers covered in mud and blood crawled through the brown muddy custard to the base of the solid concrete base of the control tower.
They scrambled inside a small cupboard full of turps and paint pots. They were safe there. Waiting for the second phase gave them time to reflect. Their two families out there were being cut to pieces and probably murdered by the elements. The young controller had once been a devout Christian but he was at that point angry with God. This was God’s doing and he had no business doing this to his family.
After an eternity of dark thoughts about what these two young men were going to be faced with that Christmas morning, the brain-piercing screams of wind and thousands of tons of debris flying around suddenly stopped. It was over.
The two men emerged slowly and watched the early tropical sun light up the skies of Darwin with a warm pink hue turning to scarlet. The nightmare was over. The curtain had just dropped on Australia’s worst natural disaster. Cyclone Tracy was now part of Australia’s history.
The two young controllers eventually found their respective families huddled together among the debris of their demolished home. The young man with the tussled black hair was Tony Trevisan, proudly born and bred on the island of Malta. Much later in life he founded a successful business which he called The Transcontinental Group, after his last position in that tower prior to getting blown out. He is still very proud of that name.
Tony Trevisan is chairman, Transcontinental Group.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece