Sometimes in the outback, you have to make do.
It would be ideal, Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) pilot Geoff Cobden said, if every station in Queensland’s remote northwest were equipped with flares to line the runway in case a medical emergency required them to land in the dark.
Most stations do, these days. But about 10 times a year, pilots need to organise an alternative form of lighting.
“Basically if we are going to a station that doesn’t have flares handy, dunny-roll landings would be the next best option,” Cobden said.
A dunny-roll landing is when the runway is lined with diesel-soaked toilet rolls – about 20 of them for a 1,000m runway, spaced 100m apart – which are then set alight.
“They burn quite well, actually, for about half an hour,” Cobden said. “Most places in the bush have got at least 20 toilet rolls.
“Outback Australians are pretty resourceful. You have got to use what you have got on hand.”
It is still considered a regulation landing, so long as the toilet rolls are correctly spaced. If toilet rolls are not an option, Cobden said, they can land using the headlights of four cars positioned at each corner of the runway, but that is not a regulation landing and can be used only as a last resort.
Flaming toilet rolls are better.
Cobden’s most recent dunny-roll landing was earlier this month at the airstrip at Bourke and Wills roadhouse in a place called Four Ways, so called because the road there goes four ways. It’s about 200km north of the RFDS airbase in Mount Isa, which is 1,800km north-west of Brisbane.
“I called ahead and explained what to do,” he said. “We get them to set them up and then light them when we are overhead.”
The RFDS had been called to help a station hand who had been critically injured and needed immediate medical assistance. She was flown back to the hospital in Mount Isa.
Each flight includes a doctor and a nurse, who can stabilise the patient in the field. The Mount Isa RFDS base covers 760,000sq km of very remote, isolated country. Road ambulances are no good over such distances.
Cobden said he and other pilots could get the plane “pretty well wherever you need us” within that patch, using a network of airstrips maintained by outback stations and, in a pinch, roads that had been designated alternative landing strips.
“You save someone’s life [working with the RFDS] in the bush – you have only got to walk around little town cemeteries to see what it used to be like before us,” he said.
