Cocos Airstrip is Compacted Coral

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 7

Cocos Airstrip is Compacted Coral

‘THE first airstrip on West Island. of steel-matting, was laid down by the Royal Air Force late in the wat as a base for air strike operations in Malaya and the East Indies. Though the station was closed down in 1946. the strip was used again in 1948 by a Qantas Lancastrian making an experimental survey flight from Perth to Tohannesburg. Four years later the administration of the group was. transferred from the Straits Settlements to Australia. and the Royal Australian Air" Force built the present airstrip and buildings. The new strip. of compacted coral 10 inches deep, is 10.000 feet lone and 150 feet wide and cost about £A700,000. The old R.A.F. control tower, which dominates the airstrip. has been renovated and fitted with the most up-to-date radio. navigational and meteorologica] equipment. so that Cocos airport now has all communication and navigational aids for regular landings by day or night. To service conventional piston aircraft on regular services the first static fuelling system in the Australian area was installed. These aircraft refuel from hydrants connected to 12,000-gallon tanks instead of from the mobile fueller with which most air travellers.are familiar. | Cocos became an important link in the Perth-Johannesburg air service just over a year ago. when a Qantas Con stellation made the first commercial flight across the Indian Ocean-a flight which. listeners. will remember was described for the NZBS: by Joan Faulkne: . Blake ih a Sunday evening. talk. Con. stellations now. fly this route fortnightly landing at Cocos on Tuesday evenings on the west-bound flight and early on Sunday morfiings on-the return journey. Sixty or seventy people, including

women and children turn out fo: the landing and take-off. whatever the hour of day or night. The airstrip is also used by Qantas on a fortnightly Skymaster service between Singapore Jakarta. Perth and Sydney. The Cocos Islands are in many ways an island ‘paradise with a healthy. intelligent population. few- pests and a remarkably equable climate. though during the monsoons’ the weather caa be rough, and in the past disasttous cyclones have caused much damage. The islands were discovered by an agent of the East India.Company about the tima Shakespeezre was writing The Tempest, but the surviving settlement was made in 1827 by Captain John Clunies Russ. Clunies Ross found there a former British resident of Borneo, Alexander Hare, who was searching for a congenial spot to live with his harem of over 100 vamen Tn the end all of Hare’s women deserted or were abducted by seamen. Darwin called at Cocos on his famous voyage on the Beagle and based part of his theory on studies of coral formation made there. Before the age of flight the most important development was the establishment of a cable station, which was wrecked by a party from the German cruiser Emden in 1914. However the raider was run down by the Australian cruiser Sydney and battered to pieces at North Keeling Island, 15 miles north of the main group. where parts of the wreck can still be seen. In the recent world war Cocos was again in the news when a Japanese naval vessel shelled the cable station. Though it was announced then that it had been totally destroyed. it was. in fact, quickly repaired and operated throughout the war. The Clunies Ross family. which developed the copra industry. has continued to exercise a benevolent rule on Cocos right down. to the present ‘time.