JIM EAMES - AUTHOR
Jim Eames formerly Qantas Director of Public Affairs is also an author of a number of books. Three of these are dedicated to Qantas and the people like you who contributed to making the airline the globally recognised icon it is today.
Exclusive to the Red Tail Gift Shop is an offer by Jim to personally autograph a copy of these fine books.
Courage in the Skies
The outbreak of war in the Pacific in saw Qantas flying boats dodging Zeros in the dangerous skies of south east Asia as the Japanese advanced through the islands towards Australia in early 1942. In those desperate days a Qantas flying boat was the last to leave a besieged Singapore and would subsequently lose four of its flying boats within the first four months of the war on missions carrying supplies in and refugees out of island outposts.
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In the perilous days to follow the airline would perform miracles flying into and out of the New Guinea front line, create an engineering and maintenance arm which would play a vital role in keeping allied military aircraft flying and , finally, writing itself in history by establishing the secret Indian Ocean service between Perth and Colombo to once again open the vital air link to the United Kingdom. It’s a story of courage and foresight but also the story of a time when the airline’s very survival was at stake.
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Read the Sydney Morning Herald Review
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Autographed Copy $30.00 Plus Postage
The Flying Kangaroo
The Flying Kangaroo is a nostalgic journey back through the Qantas of old, taking in some of the stories the public never heard about, the airline’s characters and the politics, drawing from the airline’s years between the Second World War until its privatisation in the 1990s.
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Rich in detail, The Flying Kangaroo shows why Qantas won its world-renowned reputation as the pinnacle of airline safety standards, its role in re-establishing air transport in Papua New Guinea after the war and its critical role in the dangerous troop charters into and out of Saigon during the Vietnam war. It’s also the story of the characters who made the airline what it was in the days when characters were part and parcel of the airline business and how their unique Australian background made Qantas very different to other airlines.
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Autographed Copy $25.00 Plus Postage
Taking to the Skies
While Taking to the Skies covers everything from heroes to hijackers who have been part of Australian aviation, it’s inevitable that such a book would contain many examples of how Qantas and its people changed the face of Australian aviation.
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It describes how Hartley Shannon and his Qantas team re-opened a devastated Darwin after the war and how the airline subsequently played a prominent role in the evacuation of that same Darwin after Cyclone Tracy. In addition to demonstrating how characters like Hugh Birch gave the airline such a unique ‘personality,’ it explains the background to how the airline went about purchasing its Boeing 747s through a much more rigid acceptance procedure than most other airlines along with the only real behind the scenes account of how one of those aircraft – VH-OJA—established a world non-stop record from London to Sydney in twenty hours, nine minutes and five seconds in August 1989.
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Autographed Copy $25.00 Plus Postage