Warrnambool Ansett worker remembers the legacy of an airline 20 years after it was permanently grounded

Ansett Airlines may have disappeared from our skies 20 years ago but memories of a bygone era still fly high for those who worked there.

When planes hit the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, planes all across the world were grounded but there was one airline that never really got off the ground again.

It was the end of an era for an airline that had started in Hamilton when the first passenger service took to the air in 1936.

For those who worked there it was "one big happy family".

Warrnambool's Graeme Stingel, who is known by his nickname Sting, worked as ground crew for the airline during some of its golden years from the early 1970s.

"I was there when Sir Reg had it. It was a great place to work when old Reg had it. He was a good bloke. He used to come out every six months in his helicopter," he said. "Sometimes he would come by car."

Heather Kruger, who is the secretary of Hamilton's Ansett Museum, said Sir Reg was known for flying from his Mount Eliza home to the heliport on the Yarra River to get to head office in Melbourne.

Sting said Sir Reg would wander around with the ground crew and have a "great talk" with everyone.

"If anything wanted fixing. If anyone suggested we should do this or that, he'd do it straight away," he said.

Sting said from the very day the airline was taken over in 1979 by Peter Abeles and Rupert Murdoch it started to go backwards. "I kid you not," he said. "I could write a book on where Ansett went wrong. I hated to see it go backwards." Sting left his job at Ansett in 1988, just before the pilots' strike. The long hours and fumes had wreaked havoc with his health. "I ended up getting very sick. Damned sick. I ended up in hospital. It was kerosene and long hours at work," he said. "The inside of my tummy was red raw. Big blisters. No wonder I was ill."

When he told his specialist where he worked, doctors told him to "get the hell out of there while you can".

Sting stuck it out for another 12 months before he resigned and returned to King Island where he harvested kelp and drove tour buses for a living before moving to Warrnambool six years ago.

But he still keeps in touch with his old work mates from Ansett. And 20 years on from its collapse, Sting still has good memories of his time there. Like the day when ABBA flew in to the airport.

"They had a 120-seater plane with ABBA written on it in big red letters. It was full of people. ABBA and all their extras. They had another plane with all their gear. Gee they had some stuff," he said.

There were many celebrities he met over the years. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Boy George and Dolly Parton, just to name a few. "We talked to Dolly for about 10 minutes. She was lovely," he said.

Not all passengers were the kind you'd want to come face-to-face with. Sting was working at the back of a plane when a police divvy van pulled up and two police officers got off the plane handcuffed to a man accused of killing two or three people. "Made your blood run cold to look at him. He was a real criminal," he said.

But some cargo was more precious than others, like having to take care of vital organs such as hearts being flown in for patients waiting for a transplant. "Every now and again the Perth plane would come in and quite often they'd bring in little red bags with gold nuggets in them," he said. Each bag would have about $80,000 worth of gold in them, a lot for back then.

But one day a plane arrived with a cargo of gold bars in boxes, but there was no security waiting and no one had told the ground crew what was in the boxes.

"Armguards should have been there waiting for it. I just left them in the baggage room because it was raining," he said. Sting said he had no idea what was in the boxes until he got a phone call to say they were missing. "We had a rough idea who took them," he said.

About a week later, the gold was found discarded in a paddock near the airport. "Whoever did it couldn't get rid of it," Sting said.

Sting's job at Ansett meant he had performed lots of roles. "You name it. I did it on the ground," he said. "I used to tow the planes out and bring them back, even the big fellas.

"There was a hell of a wind one evening. It was a DC-9 jet carrying 100 people and they wanted it in Sydney.

"The wind was blowing a gale from the north and I got out from the building and, being wet on the tarmac area, the wind caught the tail and just swung it around.

"All I could do was follow the plane around where the wind took it. It spun it sideways. We had to slowly put the brakes on. It wasn't funny at the time, but it was funny to see it going. I wish I'd had a camera."

Former cabin manger Michael Jones, who runs the Instagram page for the Hamilton museum, started working at Ansett around the time Sting left and said he still called it his second family. "When I started it was one of the most modern fleets in the world. Unfortunately, over time with different business decisions...it ended up as it did. It was not a very fitting end for a wonderful brand and name," he said.

Mr Jones was part of the last Ansett crew to return to Australia after the airline stopped flying in 2001, bringing to an end to a career with the airline that he said never really felt like work. "Ansett was essentially just one great big family. It never felt like work. There was an innate sense of pride. There were days you didn't even know it was pay day," he said.

"It was definitely a beautiful brand and you were proud to be an ambassador.

"It was by far an airline with an edge. Through someone having courage to overcome obstacles and build it into essentially an Australian travel empire, overcoming governmental hurdles, Reg was a true pioneer."

This February marked the 85^th anniversary of Ansett's first ever flight which left Hamilton on February 17, 1936. It is also 30 years since the Hamilton museum first opened and this year it has seen an uptick in visitors with numbers double and triple what they were pre-COVID.

Sir Reg started his Ansett business with a taxi service from Hamilton to Ballarat in 1931, which then grew into a bus service. "Then the government decided he was competing against the railways so they brought in a law that he couldn't do that. So that's when he decided to take to the air and started flying," Mrs Kruger said.

"Of course he went from here to Melbourne and then all around Australia and eventually international."

Mrs Kruger said Sir Reg kept the planes flying to Hamilton daily, even during the war years when they stopped flights everywhere else. "A lot of the DC-9 planes were used during the war," she said.

Mrs Kruger said the Ansett name has not completely disappeared. "The Ansett name still flies. Reg Ansett's grandson Will Richards has Ansett Aviation and he trains people to fly helicopters. He had his base in Broome in WA," she said. "So that Ansett name still flies around but in helicopters."

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