Crash-landings and stranded in the Outback – flying padre mishaps
- deansimpson7
- Sep 19
- 8 min read
BY JESSICA MORRIS
The Flying Padre Service is part of the bread and butter of The Salvation Army in Australia. Since 1945, flying padres have served in the aftermath of war, floods, cyclones and drought, travelling to some of the country’s most remote locations by air to care for people.
The service began 80 years ago as The Salvation Army served during wartime. Sadly, records about the Army’s work in northern Australia between 1944 and 1974 were lost in the devastation of Cyclone Tracy.
However, former flying padre Brigadier Vic Pedersen (MBE OF) took on the mammoth task in 2002 of curating those three decades of missing history. Through this, we are given insight into the Flying Padre Service’s miraculous beginnings. Even being stranded in the Outback and surviving crash-landings! But more about that later.
The Salvation Army was very active across northern Australia even before the flying padre’s operations took off. But in 1944, a certain Captain Vic Pedersen entered the scene.
Vic was appointed to serve 500 Australian military personnel at the RAAD 58 Operational Base Unit Truscott (WA), the closest part of Australia to the then Japanese-held territory in Timor and Java. With no chaplain on-site and an additional 1000 military personnel based nearby, Vic was responsible for delivering Christmas hampers to permanent and temporary personnel across multiple radar sites.
He was soon conducting Sunday services, and when a Liberator aircraft crashed in early 1945 at Truscott, killing 11 airmen, the need for greater service from The Salvation Army was clear.
As Vic recalls in his documents, “Commanding Officer Senior Leader Barry said, ‘Vic, you are our chaplain; you are to conduct the funerals.’ Vic stepped up, helping his peers through their grief. And soon afterwards, a chaplain was appointed to Truscott, leaving Vic to oversee welfare and church services at radar stations.
On one particular trip, Vic travelled 160km down the coast to a radar station and was forced to shelter for three days while a storm blew over. On arrival, he found a letter from then Territorial Leader Commissioner W.R. Dalziel enquiring about his work, to which Vic replied, “If we had a light aircraft, I could have come home in an hour.”
The divinely inspired path to The Salvation Army Flying Padre Service was set, and just before Vic could travel to Melbourne to meet with Commissioner Dalziel, everything came together ... sort of.
“In Melbourne, Commissioner Dalziel called [me from] a garage with a flat tyre, and there I met Mrs Fitzgerald, the leader of a group of women called the Red Shield Units of Service. They financed the purchase of equipment for Red Shield Work,” Vic writes.
“‘What do you need now?’ was [Mrs Fitzgerald’s] opening remark. ‘An aeroplane,’ [I said].’ ‘We’ll buy it,’ [she replied]. I arrived in Melbourne a few weeks later and discovered that buying an aircraft in wartime was easier said than done.”
READ MORE: Changing a tyre and acquiring a plane
When Vic arrived in Melbourne, the plan was in motion and they had their eyes set on purchasing an ex-RAAF Tiger Moth – the only aircraft available in 1945. While the Army purchased and readied the aircraft for use, Vic spent his time down south visiting the families of the men who had passed away in the Liberator crash.
Before the aircraft was ready, peace was declared. But that didn’t stop The Salvation Army from dedicating the aircraft – a VH-ASA, for God’s service. And on 24 September 1945, at Essendon Airport, it was dedicated by Commissioner Dalziel in front of all Red Shield personnel.
Soon, Vic was in the air, and the first journey of The Salvation Army Flying Padre Service was in motion.
But on returning to Truscott and the surrounding radar sites, he soon found his service wasn’t needed. Instead, he conducted services in Wyndham, Broome and Derby in northern Western Australia. He recalls using many Red Shield songbooks and playing the English concertina.
Stranded in the Outback During this time, a request came in for Vic to transport a Mrs Heggie and her five-year-old son, Bruce, to the Presbyterian-run Kunmunya Mission, 480km from Broome. The plan was to reunite them with Reverend Jack Heggie. It should have been a simple trip, but the journey was marred by dense smoke haze. They were forced into an emergency landing across a tidal swamp. It was the dry season, and with temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, the situation was life-threatening, primarily because the VH-ASA was now immovable.
“The aircraft landed normally, but our situation was desperate. It was 10am on Sunday 21 October 1945, and [coming into] the hottest time of year. We had precisely two pints of water, which were quickly used,” Vic recalls in his records. “We asked God to help us, and he did. No other help came until the following Thursday when we were located by aircraft and supplies were dropped.”
So how did God help the unlikely trio in one of the world’s harshest environments? By providing them with water. And it was five-year-old Bruce who saw it first.
“Our tidal flat was surrounded by hills of rocks and loose stones. I climbed one and soon realised that my strenuous action was foolish,” said Vic. “We rested in the shade of the aircraft. Dozing off in the early afternoon, I heard Bruce call out that there was water racing towards us!”
“We needed fresh water desperately and urgently.”
Miraculously, cool water swirled straight past the grounded aircraft and its stranded passengers. Submerging the wheels of the VH-ASA, they sat under the toe wing and dug a hole so they could retain water. And it had come just in time. Describing their thirst as “torture”, flies had been swarming around them, getting stuck in their mouths. They now had enough water to cool off and rehydrate before the tide went out. But not knowing how long they would be stranded, Vic needed to find a way to purify and retain the water.
“I tried to remove the auxiliary tank with a view of distilling water. Getting it out would be a long job. We needed fresh water desperately and urgently,” Vic said. “The thought came, ‘Why not boil water in my service water bottle?’ I filled it from our waterhole and set a fire underneath it.”
Connecting the speaking tubes from his flying helmet and wrapping his handkerchief around the Y end to fit the water bottleneck, the other ends were placed in an empty bully beef tin. Vic’s ingenuity worked. They soon had water spurting into the tin, and they drank it while it was still too hot to tell whether it was salt or fresh. Their saturated clothes also became a source of hydration, and placing items on the tubes, the steam became distilled water for their consumption. In addition, God kept providing for them when the tide covered the flat again.
“We had a lot to thank God for,” Vic shares. “Using the water bottle, I’m sure, was divinely inspired. It not only gave us all the water we needed but also provided excellent occupational therapy. It also gave a sense of achievement that boosted morale. When the sun rose, bringing another day of extreme heat and flies, we could relax in water-cooled comfort and count our blessings.”
The first sign of human help came on day three when Bruce heard an aircraft. By Thursday, they had all seen a plane overhead, and it dropped a canvas bag of supplies for the trio on the mudflat. Finally, on Friday, five days after their emergency landing, they were rescued by a mission lugger [small sailing ship]. They left the VH-ASA behind, intending to recover it to continue the Flying Padre Service’s work. But before reaching Kunmunya Mission, they had an extra stop. The mission lugger was tasked with picking up the stranded crew of a Dutch Mitchell aircraft on the coast, a job that Vic was able to assist with. And after dropping the Heggies at Kunmunya – albeit five days late, they went to Truscott and then Darwin.
Making his way back to the coast, Vic rallied and got a ride on a RAAF ship 06-16 that was pulling out radar stations along the coast. With Red Shield Assistant Frank Bounds accompanying him, they located the grounded VH-ASA, which they realised was at the foot of Mount Trafalgar in the Kimberley region.
Along with the crew of the RAAF ship, they crafted sleds and dismantled the plane, placing it on the boat. The engine was damaged by salt water, but this, along with whatever was salvageable, was loaded onto the 06-16, which unloaded at Darwin Wharf that December. Not before a trip back to Truscott, though, where Vic and Frank dutifully handed out Christmas parcels to the remaining servicemen!
Appointed to 12 Squadron in Darwin, Vic was able to store the VH-ASA in a retired RAAF hangar and do the repairs himself. Amidst ensuring the servicemen were able to get home for Christmas, he rebuilt the engine with the assistance of engineers over the coming months.
Soon, the Flying Padre Service would be up in the air again, before a crash-landing not long later ended the career of the VH-ASA.
The unfortunate incident in the Cambridge Gulf (north of Wyndham, WA) caused the demise of this aircraft. The lighting of a signal fire to attract attention and eventual help turned to disaster, when Spinifex grass that covered the ground enabled the fire to work its way against the wind and burn out a big area – including VH-ASA.
In 2007, Flying Padre Major David Shrimpton was flying in the area where the Tiger Moth had met its fate. David recalls:
“With an incredibly rough ‘lat’ and ‘long’ marked on my map and GPS set to coordinates close to this mark – I went searching! Not expecting to locate the plane immediately, I was totally amazed when an object on the ground glinted in the sun and caught my eye. Unbelievably the markings on my map were within 20 metres of the wreckage of ASA.
“It was quite difficult to curb my excitement of this sighting; and after circling a number of times at low level and carefully surveying the area, I cautiously landed on the mud flats and went to investigate! After capturing a number of photos of the site, I began to fossick around the area and gathered together a number of the aluminium panels that were still in a reasonable condition. Although partly eroded, one panel included a faint outline of The Salvation Army Shield.”
This particular panel has been donated to The Salvation Army Museum in Melbourne.
Vic is reported to have had five minor crashes between 1945 and 1950, surviving all of them, but it demonstrated the commitment of the early-day flying padres and the dedication they had to serving the people of the Outback in God’s name.
Nearly three decades later, in 1975, the Flying Padre Service was dramatically grounded again, this time because Cyclone Tracy blew it away! But that's another story.
All photos courtesy of The Salvation Army Museum, Australia. Visit the Flying Padre Services exhibit at The Salvation Army Museum in Melbourne.
