Pilot-administered anaesthesia and the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia: An interview with Captain Keith Galloway

A tragic event

In 1953 Keith Galloway (1929–) was a 23-year-old First Officer with Trans Australia Airlines (TAA), which in 1986 became Australian Airlines, and which in 1992 was subsumed into Qantas. Galloway’s career prior to that had included working as flight instructor on Tiger Moth and Gipsy Moth aircraft at the Royal Queensland Aero Club at Archerfield, Brisbane, and operating a small air charter business in remote Mundubbera, Queensland, using an Auster aircraft. After flying with TAA for two years he found that they supplied aircraft and pilots to the RFDS. He approached the TAA management indicating his willingness to apply for RFDS service but was told that they had a full complement of pilots.

A tragic event changed that. The Courier Mail (Brisbane) of 23 October 1953 ² reported on its front-page a fatal aircraft accident at Cheviot Hills Station, a pastoral property 180 miles west of Townsville. Dr Timothy J O’Leary (1925–1987), a recently immigrated 28-year-old Irishman, had taken a position as a flying doctor with the newly established Charters Towers RFDS base in northern Queensland. Charters Towers was the chosen location because of the sealed runway, its proximity to the population of the eastern Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York Peninsula, and the better weather consequent to its position on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range. It was though the least well equipped of the three Queensland RFDS bases which also included Charleville and Cloncurry.

O’Leary and pilot Martin Garrett were spending three days visiting three remote communities with a plan to develop clinics there. O’Leary had married six weeks earlier to sweetheart Catherine Burke, who had recently arrived from Tralee, Ireland, and she had travelled with them as far as Cheviot Hills Station where she remained with the Murphy family, to be picked up on the return flight.

The aircraft was the De Havilland DH84 Dragon ‘John Flynn’, registration VH-URY, an obsolete wooden biplane with fabric covering and two First World War era Gipsy Major engines. Constructed in 1934, it had led a hard life and Garrett had described it as a ‘heap of junk’ (Figure 1). On the return flight to Charters Tower the occupants were Garrett, O’Leary and his wife Catherine, and a Mrs Lethbridge and her five-year-old son, who were travelling to Charters Towers for treatment of his fractured arm. On take-off, the aircraft failed to climb due to the heat and the altitude of the airfield (2820 feet) and likely also the lack of official performance charts for the aircraft. It stalled and spun into the ground, with Garrett impaled on the control column and Mrs O’Leary with an engine exhaust pipe in her back, both dying immediately. Dr O’Leary suffered a dislocated shoulder. The other passengers were uninjured.

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Figure 1.

The ‘heap of junk’ De Havilland Dragon ‘John Flynn’ DH84 VH-URY with an unknown pilot. (https://www.airhistory.net/photos/0131550.jpg with permission).

Pilot anaesthetist

Following this dangerous flight, O’Leary decided that Galloway had to learn to give anaesthetics. The task of teaching him was accepted by Dr Jock Robinson, the superintendent of Charters Towers Hospital. Dr Robinson swore him to secrecy. Tim O’Leary’s sister Patricia, an Irish anaesthetist, had joined O’Leary after the death of his wife and had taken a position as an anaesthetist at the Townsville Hospital. She regularly visited Charters Towers and gave Galloway advice on anaesthesia. Galloway recalls that he was introduced to medical procedures by assisting at post mortems at Charters Towers Hospital ‘…until I got toughened up a bit’. Then he was promoted to the operating theatre. He recalls, ‘they started off by me watching and being instructed in giving anaesthetics. They used to use ethyl chloride spray to induce, with a wire mask and screen… induce with ethyl chloride spray and get them through the excitable stage then you swapped over to the ether. You dripped the ether; it didn’t come out as a spray, it had a special spout on it – you dribbled it over the mask’.

From then on, ‘every Tuesday and Thursday, the operating days in Charters Towers Hospital …they actually had me doing them under instruction. I finished up giving quite a few in the bush but it’s the sort of something you don’t really remember’.

O’Leary once estimated to Galloway that he had performed over 200 anaesthetics, mostly in the Charters Towers Hospital but quite often in very remote areas. He does not recall any operative deaths. When asked how he monitored the anaesthetic and his patient’s condition he replied that his favourite observations were ‘the dilation of the pupil, the pulse, and the breathing; it was very rudimentary I can tell you – but it worked!’. Respiration was key: ventilation was never assisted. When the authors asked Galloway about ‘taking over’ ventilation, he replied that this was not used: he said he tended to keep them ‘a bit lighter’ because he remembered being told once ‘they’re starting to wake up down this end how are they up your end?’ Galloway said, ‘I did learn when you needed to take them a bit deeper, like when going through the peritoneum, otherwise the flesh would twitch a bit’. When canvassed about other techniques, Galloway recalled ‘They just bought in pentothal; they got a couple of real good frights in the hospital with pentothal and they wouldn’t use it anymore, so all we ever used in the hospital and out on the Flying Doctor work was ethyl chloride and ether. The ether came in big bottles and there were six to a carton and it was a dangerous cargo, and we weren’t supposed to carry it but we carried two cartons down the back of the plane.’

Galloway clearly recalls two of the surgical cases for which he anaesthetised in the field. One was a stillbirth in Julia Creek. ‘That really tore me apart’, he said. The other he recalls is the amputation of a woman’s arm. This case is featured in O’Leary’s book North and Aloft ³ and also in the 1956 Annual Report of the Director of Native Affairs in relation to Aurukun Mission, which reads ‘Dr O’Leary has performed several small operations here and last September (1955) bought with him Dr Davis from Brisbane who amputated the hand of a woman who had been badly burned out (in the) bush and bought into the mission for treatment’. ⁴ Galloway believes that there is a photograph in the RFDS archive of him giving the anaesthetic. He commented, ‘Now this woman, she couldn’t speak any English, she was a bush native and she came in and we wanted to take her to Cairns, and the missionary said “no, you can’t take her to Cairns, she has no English and she’s the sort of person who, if you take her away from here, she’ll die anyhow, so you either leave her here and let her die or you get rid of the arm”.’ ³ Galloway recalls that Dr Davis was the late Brisbane surgeon Neville Davis AO.

Galloway was intrigued when told of the parallels often drawn between anaesthesia and aviation, but offered no personal view. He reflected about his time as a pilot anaesthetist with the RFDS that ‘It was something that I didn’t relish doing but when somebody’s life was dependent on it, I used to accept that I wanted to be as proficient as I could be at doing it’.

Captain Galloway went on to have a long career with TAA as an airline pilot, well into the jet era and accumulated over 22,000 flight hours.