Small world Lewis. Yeah Connair had a nickname of the Canary Coloured C carriers, a nick that would be disallowed today. I remember the first aircraft into Darwin and communicated with him from Katherine Flight Service, his description of the scene at the time was quite vivid. We had to get a special dispensation for him the fly in, man what a crazy time that was, never worked so hard in my life. There was no ATC as such and we did all the comms via HF on the ground in Darwin as obviously all the facilities were wrecked. This made for a nightmare when the actual evacuation started, traffic was a nightmare, and flight plans were submitted ad hoc over the radio as aircraft were taxying and getting airborne. It was continuous flights to and from Darwin to points south and east, and the airforce had all its C130's doing their stuff as well. How there were not mid-air incidents was amazing, obviously we got the traffic right and the pilots did the right thing. It certainly was a baptism of fire for me as I had only been doing the job for 4 years. I actually opened up shop at Katherine on Xmas day 1974 to the sound of a F27 circling the town at 5.00am trying to attract attention as he had tried to get into Darwin from Alice Springs and could not, for obvious reasons, and there was no stations opened to communicate with. It was just the fact that I was due to start at 5am and heard an aircraft circling the town an hour or so before, that I smelt a rat and raced out to the 'drome and opened up. The F27 was on fumes when he landed at Tindal which was the alternate for Darwin. There was no Pilot activated lighting then or at least none at either Katherine or Tindal.
From memory we took over 200 flight plans via both VHF and HF on one day when the evacuation got into full swing, not bad for 4 staff I reckon.
I still have the tape transcript for the first 2 days after Tracy, it makes for very interesting reading, it is a couple of hundred pages long
