Who is Angus Houston charged with finding Malaysia Airlines flight MH370

news.com.au ^ | 12th April 2014

[naturalman1975]

AT the age of 20, a despondent Angus Houston, having been rejected in his dream to become a pilot by the Royal Air Force because he was too tall, was wandering the Strand, in London, looking for a new world.

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“We have got to find this aircraft. There’s a broader need to find it, because we need to know what happened, but the principle reason we need to find it is for the 239 families.”

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Houston, 66, a greyhound-lean fitness junkie standing over 6’4” or 196cm, mysteriously managed to shrink an inch or two to get himself into the RAAF, where he flew helicopters and went on to become Air Chief Marshal and Chief of the Defence Force.

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It says something of Houston’s desire for a challenge that he signed up for the RAAF in 1970, at a time the Vietnam War was going very badly.

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Asked to name the moment when he has seen people at their most desperate, he nominates September 1979, when the cabin cruiser Nocturne, with five people aboard, put out a mayday off Evans Head, in northern NSW.

He was on duty at RAAF Base Amberley and headed south in his Iroquois at crawl speed into heavy winds from the south. After an Orion P3 had spotted wreckage and one person in the sea, he located three survivors.

He was awarded the Air Force Cross for his part in holding the chopper and winching up three people in 50 knot winds, in what he said were “the wildest conditions I’d ever experienced”. Two others of the vessel who had jumped in a dinghy later washed ashore dead.

[Red Badger]

They called him and said, “Houston, we have a problem.”.............................

[Uncle Chip]

In related news there are a whole lot of bureaucrats in Malaysia hoping that the black box is never recovered:

Malaysia’s government has begun investigating civil aviation and military authorities to determine why opportunities to identify and track Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were missed in the chaotic hours after it vanished, two officials said.

The preliminary internal enquiries come as tensions mount between civilian and military authorities over who bears most responsibility for the initial confusion and any mistakes that led to a week-long search in the wrong ocean.

Malaysia’s opposition coalition has demanded a parliamentary inquiry into what happened on the ground in those first few hours.

Government officials have said any formal inquiry should not begin until the flight’s black box recorders are found.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/malaysia-starts-investigating-confused-initial-response-to-missing-jet-507308

[latina4dubya]

Angus Houston

what a beefy name! i like it!

[reg45]

At 6’ 4”, he was too tall to be a pilot. Would they have rejected Charles Lindburgh?