CA 15
AFTER more than five decades sifting through the history of Australia’s aircraft manufacturing industry, Keith Meggs says the thing that always surprises him is the ineptness of government decisions.
He believes government inaction has robbed the nation of multiple opportunities to develop aviation manufacturing and make Australia a major player on the global stage.
He cites examples ranging from a lack of government support for the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation to aborted plans to build Douglas DC-3 and Fokker Friendships in Australia. And after more than a century of aviation, he argues, nothing has changed.
While the federal government is prepared to spend millions propping up the car industry, Meggs says organisations such as Gippsland Aeronautics are unable to get funding and Boeing (Hawker de Havilland) has been laying off people.
“Turn some money away from cars, of which we have plenty, and put it into aeroplanes,” Meggs says.
“While the car industry employs people, so does the aircraft industry and they are more skilled than car people.
“That was one of the benefits of the wartime and post-war aeroplane industry. The skills that were built up to very high standards found their way back into the car industry and every other industry in Australia.”
The 81-year-old Melburnian, who this year was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his research efforts, has just published the first of four, two-book volumes on Australian-built aircraft and the industry.
The meticulously detailed first volume, available from Victoria’s Finger-Four Publishing, contains a wealth of information, rare photographs, plans and drawings of aircraft built or proposed from the 1884 experiments of pioneer Lawrence Hargrave to 1939.
It is the culmination of a lifetime fascination with aviation and more than 50 years combing the country for every scrap of information about Australian-built aircraft he could find.
He was only six when he saw the 1934 Centenary Race and his penchant for collecting all things aviation followed soon after.
“Every time we went out shopping in the city, mum or grandma would buy me an aviation magazine or book and I’ve still got those with me,” he says.
In 1943, Meggs went straight from school to work at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factory at Melbourne’s Fisherman’s Bend and stayed five years. He joined the RAAF in 1948, flying Mustangs, then Meteor jets in the Korean War, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal, and later to Vampires. He rejoined the CAC and worked on Sabres and the Ceres crop duster before becoming an air traffic controller, then starting a 25-year career as a charter pilot.
This took him all over Australia as he called on people, visited libraries, museums, factories and aviation collections to gather his material, much of which is no longer available.
He also amassed a huge collection of correspondence over 55 years that he believes will be a goldmine for archivists.
“The people I was talking to and visited, who of course were building aeroplanes in 1909, 1910, 1911, are all gone,” he says. “But I’ve got some of the original material from them.
“I visited archives for years and years and any place where there was any receptacle of aviation material.
“And of course with CAC, where I worked for eight years altogether, I went back to them to go through their archives.”
Meggs says the most common reaction to his books is amazement at the level of detail packed into the weighty volumes.
His stunning achievement is made even more surprising by the fact that he wrote them in long hand. Someone else loaded the project on to discs. “I haven’t got a computer, in other words,” he says. “People say you should get one but if I got a computer now the time taken to learn how to use it would detract from my completing the work of getting the other volumes into print. That’s the priority.”
Those volumes will deal with the history of CAC and the Government Aircraft Factory through to wartime and post-war designs and proposals for home-built aircraft of the 1980s.
And why stop with in the mid-80s?
“Well, originally it was going to be in the mid-60s,” Meggs laughs. “Things crept up on me.”
Meggs article from http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,26054634-23349,00.html