The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories Read Free Page B

more, the road looked a bit iffy for landing on account of both its condition and its lack of length.
    Anyway, even though Jan had to negotiate some short shrubbery on his way in, he still managed to put the plane down safely. Then Tony and Rhonda set to and attended the injured. And they did a wonderful job. They really did. Especially given the conditions — the heat, the dust, the flies — and taking into account that a couple of hours had passed since the accident had occurred. And under all those external pressures they didn’t miss a diagnosis: fractured hips and fractured ribs, dislocations, punctured lungs, the lot. Of course, that’s excluding the usual head and body injuries and so forth that go with such a horrific collision. What’s more, all the accident victims survived.
    But there was still one major hurdle to overcome. With so many people being injured, there was no possible way that they could fly everyone out in the Queen Air. Now, as luck would have it, the Army was conducting manoeuvres in the area and they had a Pilatus aircraft. Now the Pilatus is just a small thing so it could only evacuate two of the injured, three at a pinch. But it had one great advantage over the Queen Air in that it was a short landing/take-off plane which made it ideal for those sorts of conditions.
    By the time the Pilatus arrived, about half an hour later, Tony and Rhonda had all the patients organised and ready to be flown out. Then, lo and behold, who should jump off the army plane, none other than one of Tony’s old mates from his medical student days. But this was no time for grand reunions, not on your life. It was a quick handshake, a hello, then they got stuck into loading the patients into both the planes.
    Now, as I said, the Pilatus was a short landing/take-off aircraft so it got out with no problem at all.Now came the scary bit. The Queen Air had needed every inch of the road-strip to land and, with the extra weight of the patients, things looked grim. As Jan prepared for take-off he calculated that he needed to reach a speed of at least 90 knots just to get the thing off the ground.
    ‘Here we go,’ Jan said to Tony.
    Then he gunned it, and they went thundering down the road. The trouble was that by the time he got to 70 knots they were rapidly running out of straight road.
    ‘Jan,’ Tony asked, ‘do you reckon we’ll make it?’
    ‘A piece o’ piss,’ replied Jan.
    But Tony reckoned that Jan wasn’t looking anywhere near as confident as he sounded. He’d gone a fearful whitish-grey colour. His face had set like concrete. He was sweating profusely, and his eyes had taken on a fixed glassy stare.
    ‘Go, you bastard, go!’ Jan called, and gunned that Queen Air like it’d never been gunned before.
    At 75 knots Tony knew that they were done for. At 85 knots they’d run out of road. That’s when Tony ducked for cover. Then as Jan attempted to lift the plane off the ground there came the horrible crunching sound of the propellers cutting the low shrubbery to shreds.
    The next Tony knew, they were in the air.
    ‘There,’ called Jan. ‘I told you so. A piece o’ piss.’

A Stitch in Time
    We were up at Mintabie one time, Mintabie being a small opal-mining town in the far north of South Australia. Anyway, we’d just finished doing a clinic there and we were about to pile into the car to go out to the airstrip when this ute came hurtling down the road.
    ‘Oh, my God, something terrible’s happened,’ I mumbled.
    ‘Obviously some disaster or other,’ replied the doctor.
    Anyway, somewhere among a cloud of dust and spitting gravel the ute skidded to a halt beside us, and out from the ute jumped this bloke. He was in a blind panic, we could see that, and he starts calling, ‘You’ve gotta help me, doc. There’s been a huge fight, an’ Igor’s had his chest cut open. There’s blood an’ guts everywhere.’
    ‘Okay,’ said the doctor. ‘So where’s Igor?’
    ‘I brung him along,’ this