By Nick Dent
The airport was shrouded in fog when Trans Australia Airlines Flight 538 from Rockhampton reached Mackay at 8.40pm on Friday, June 10, 1960.
The captain reported they would hold over Mackay Airport until visibility improved. Two approaches were aborted, but at 10pm the fog had eased, and the captain advised they would approach the airstrip a third time.
The recovery operation carried out by the HMAS Warrego recovers the tail of TAA Flight 538.Credit: Stuart MacGladrie
At 10.10pm, communication was lost. Flight 538 had crashed into the sea with the loss of all 29 on board.
The inquiry based in Brisbane that October, chaired by Mr Justice Spicer, was unsuccessful in determining the cause of the crash.
But Spicer learned of the existence of an Australian invention – flight data recorders – and he recommended all passenger-carrying aircraft of the size of the F-27 and larger should be equipped with them.
“Australia became the first country in the world to mandate black boxes on all planes and other countries followed,” says Brisbane-based composer and dramatist Paul Hodge.
Sixty-four years on from Australia’s worst civil aviation disaster, in a South Brisbane rehearsal room, Hodge is removing a head from a box.
Composer Paul Hodge with a Neumann KU100 microphone, shaped like a human head. The rare microphones are priced at around $14,000.Credit: Nick Dent
This is another innovative recording device: a Neumann KU100 microphone, shaped like a human head and equipped with two very human-like ears.
Hodge’s musical Black Box will be the world’s first “binaural” musical, with music and voices the audience will experience via earphones, recorded using the KU100.
“It replicates the way that we hear,” Hodge says.
“If we record an actor walking behind the head, then when you are wearing headphones, it will feel like someone is walking behind you. Or if we whisper into the ear of the dummy, then it will feel like someone’s whispering into your ear.”
The show’s director, David Berthold, had the idea of using binaural sound when Black Box was in workshop stage during his last Brisbane Festival as artistic director, in 2019.
It tells the story of inventor David Warren, a government scientist who worked at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne from 1952 to 1983.
In 1954, he proposed a device that would record cockpit conversations as well as flight data.
But, as an expert in fuel tank design, Warren was expected to focus on why aircraft fuel tanks exploded. His work on the black box project had to be done on weekends and kept secret until his retirement in 1982.
David Warren with an early prototype of the black box flight recorder.Credit: Creative Commons
“He couldn’t get anyone to agree that this is something that should happen,” Hodge says.
“Also, David’s father had died in a plane crash when he was eight. And I went, oh, that’s like an emotional catalyst for it all.”
Hodge has had shows produced Off-Broadway, in London and Edinburgh as well as Australia. Queensland Theatre will this year stage his musical adaptation of children’s television classic Round the Twist.
Black Box will tell Warren’s story with just two actors singing on stage. Warren will be played by Michael Cormick (Beauty and the Beast), and his wife Ruth will be played by Helen Dallimore (Wicked).
Additional cast members participate as recorded voices, including Eurovision finalist Dami Im.
Dami Im’s recorded perfromance of the song A New Era is part of the musical.
Im and Hodge knew each other from their music studies at the University of Queensland. “Dami’s degree was as a classical pianist,” says Hodge, “and so I had no idea that she could sing until I saw her on The X Factor.
The songs in Black Box take their cues from swing and jive music of the 1940s and 1950s, of which Warren was a fan. The inventor’s own natural speech patterns were an important part of the composition process.
“He was very charming, and very funny. Almost all the song titles are taken from actual phrases that David said, and I’ve taken his natural speech, and spun that out into the melodies.
“People say to me ‘the music is incredibly catchy’, and I’m like, ‘Well, you can thank David Warren for that.’”
Black Box runs at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, May 10-19. Buy tickets.