Charter operator solves goldminers’ turbine transportation needs
As soon as Dougal McQuie and Mark Woodley acquired Goldfields Air Services (GAS), a small charter and maintenance company based in the legendary Western Australia gold mining town of Kalgoorlie, they had an important decision to make.
One of the operation’s largest clients was growing and their air transportation needs would soon require turbine aircraft operated by two-pilot crews. At the time, Goldfields had an all-piston, twin-engine fleet of two Cessna 404s, three Cessna 402Cs, one Cessna 310, along with a single-engine Piper Warrior in the flight school.
“So we looked at all of the available options,” McQuie said. “Piper Cheyennes, Aero Commanders, we even looked at the Cessna 406s. The temptation to move into Conquests given our knowledge of Cessnas was very high, however in the end we chose King Airs. The 404s and one 402C were sold, and in a fairly short time we had gone from a Cessna fleet to a Beechcraft one.”
That was 2010, and since then the partners – one a pilot and one an engineer – have guided Goldfields on a path from leasing Beechcraft King Airs to meet the needs of clients like AngloGold Ashanti Australia, part of the third-largest gold mining company in the world, to owning a fleet of three King Airs.
Working in remote Australia
Kalgoorlie, or Kal as it is affectionately known by locals, is a town (see below for gold mining history) of nearly 33,000 people about 370 miles east of Western Australia’s capital city of Perth. Western Australia is one of the country’s six states and encompasses the entire western third of the continent. Its 965,000 square miles is about the size of Western Europe and 2 million of its 2.6 million residents live in Perth. More than half of the state is considered the outback or the bush – the sparsely inhabited, arid interior area of the country dominated by agriculture, mining and tourism activities.
Another way to look at the area Goldfields Air Services covers: “We carry all sorts of passengers and freight into and out of a region bigger than Montana, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Arizona combined,” said McQuie, the company’s managing director and chief pilot.
“On any given day, we generally are operating north and east from Kalgoorlie, servicing the remote and isolated communities of the western desert through to the Western Australia/South Australia border in the east, Alice Springs in the northeast and Broome in the north,” he said. “We carry medical personnel, teachers, students, miners and government workers, and anybody else who has reason to travel. We don’t provide medical services but rather leave that to the wonderful guys in the RFDS whom we share the region with.”
RFDS – Royal Flying Doctor Service – operates one of the largest fleets of King Airs and has been using the model for decades to provide emergency evacuations and bring primary health care to the remote areas of the world’s sixth-largest country in land area. It was through their work that McQuie first learned about the abilities of the King Air.
After high school, McQuie followed his father into the business of working for large cattle companies that used fixed-wing aircraft to muster cattle in conjunction with horses or motorbikes on the ground. His role was partly pilot and partly assistant manager at a 2.5 million-acre sheep farm in Western Australia.
“One night I had cause to evacuate a young girl who was working for me after she had fallen off her motorbike and gone into seizures,” he said. “She had suspected head and spinal injuries and our closest hospital was 900 km (560 miles) away. We had to load her onto the back of an SUV and drive her 40 km (25 miles) over bumpy dirt roads just to get to the homestead. That alone took a couple of hours. The RFDS King Air was organized as the medivac and it arrived at about 10 p.m. We lit the airstrip with cars and kerosene flares. It was like the hand of God coming to rescue this girl. What an amazing resource to have at our disposal. That was probably the first time I really understood the capabilities of the King Air.
“This aircraft came 450 nm in under two hours, landed on my little dirt strip that I operated my 172 from and in the middle of the night took my seriously injured worker back to a hospital without detour. They saved a life that night.”
Ticking all the boxes
McQuie said Goldfields chose the King Air B200 because the model satisfied all of his mining company client’s performance and safety requirements. Other factors they considered: King Airs are still in production and supported by Beechcraft, there is a simulator in Australia for advanced training, and he could lease a King Air to continue providing transportation for Anglo Australians without huge start-up costs.
“Originally we were able to lease one King Air B200, BB-529, from Formula Aviation in Perth,” McQuie said. “She was an oldie but with fresh paint and interior, looked like a million dollars. This aircraft very quickly became the cornerstone of our business with clients booking it further and further ahead of time so they wouldn’t miss out on it. One King Air soon turned into three.”
Leasing helped GAS make the transition to twin-engine, turbine aircraft with minimal capital expenses but flying the King Airs 1,000 hours a year called for ownership.
In 2014, Goldfields purchased a 10-year-old King Air B200 (BB-1862) with Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 avionics from a similar charter company in the northern part of Western Australia. GAS had the original engines (with 5,000 hours) overhauled, then put the airplane into service in January 2015.
“It was the biggest investment the company had ever made and a serious investment into the long-term future of the company,” McQuie said.
Soon after, they purchased a 1981 Beechcraft B200C (BL-30) to handle overflow from BB-1862. The factory cargo door has given Goldfields versatility to also use the aircraft for fire and flood relief, urgent freight collections, as well as search and rescue operations.
“She is the grandma of our fleet with 26,000 hours on her clock,” McQuie said. “She has had a lovely dual Garmin 650 avionics upgrade a few years ago, which made her attractive to us as it gives us the redundancy we required to be able to go to remote locations not serviced by any other instrument approaches.”
Last month, GAS took delivery of their first King Air C90 (LJ-1464) to replace the fleet’s aging Cessna 402s and migrate all operations to turbine aircraft. The 1997 King Air is mostly in its original configuration and has 3,000 hours.
“The C90 still allows our customers a smaller aircraft that is cost-comparative to the 402s,” McQuie said. “One of our most common routes is from Kalgoorlie up to Warburton, which is located in the central desert. It’s a leg of 390 miles so its 4.5 hours round trip. With the cost of avgas in the region being quite high for a payload of up to 400 kg (880 pounds), it works out 5 percent better in the C90 because we can carry return fuel. The round trip takes 3 hours 25 minutes in the C90. For larger loads, the B200 knocks an extra 20 minutes off the trip.”
‘Backbone of our operation’
McQuie calls the King Air platform the “backbone of our operation” and is excited about the next chapter for Goldfields Air Services. The company flies about 2,000 hours per year: 1,000 with the King Air 200s and 1,000 with the 402s, with that work shifting over to the C90 this year. The hours are evenly split three ways between mining company work, government missions, and general private charter and flight training.
GAS operates with eight to 10 pilots depending on the volume of contractual work and seasonal conditions, and also operates a flight school with five of the pilots covering both roles.
“On any given day they are flying both King Airs and 172s,” McQuie said. “It’s a great pathway for young instructors. I get a real kick out of seeing people progress personally and professionally and to see young pilots stick at it and be able to progress onto a larger aircraft is very rewarding. It can be slow and frustrating at times, but the rewards are there for those who stick at it.”
Woodley, co-owner of the company and an engineer, heads up a team of five maintenance engineers in the hangar at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Airport (YPKG). The remoteness of their operations tests the team’s self-sufficiency.
“They keep our aircraft in the air and their job is very challenging given the distances and remoteness of our own location,” McQuie said. “We have learned to be very self-sufficient and self-reliant. You can’t just duck next door and borrow a test box when yours needs calibrating when your nearest neighbor is 600 km (372 miles) away.”
The majority of GAS’s missions are transporting people: crew changes at mines, health practitioners at clinics and teachers in remote areas. There is often no infrastructure other than a dirt airstrip.
“We often take our passengers out in the morning and bring them back in the evening,” McQuie said. “The King Air means that they get more time on the ground to do what they need to do when compared to the older pistons we were operating. And the increased range and speed of the King Airs is certainly instrumental in securing work that we couldn’t have done in the Cessnas.”
Among that work he’s referring to is hot shot parts missions.
“If a mine plant suffers a breakdown and needs to get a part, the cost of the downtime can be as much as millions of dollars per day,” he said. “For example, I took a bearing 4 foot in diameter weighing 350 kg (800 pounds) from Perth to Pannawonica in the middle of the night. I literally met the bearing manufacturer on the runway in Perth not half an hour after he had finished fabricating it.
“Sometimes a mine will need some tool or piece of specialty equipment urgently and they know that another mine has one they can borrow, so they send us to pick it up and deliver it. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a circuit board on some control mechanism but without it the mine stops production and every minute counts.”
There are no plans to add additional aircraft at this time, McQuie said, but down the road they might install a Blackhawk engine upgrade on the King Air C90 and they do plan to convert a Beechcraft Duke they own to turbine engines.
“Once we put turbines on the one Duke we own, we will have an all-turbine fleet, which I think is something a little rare and special for an organization like ours that operates smaller aircraft,” he said.
The Australian Gold Rush
In 1851, Edward Hargraves discovered a grain of gold in a waterhole near the town of Bathurst, northwest of Sydney in New South Wales, one of Australia’s six states. Hargraves was convinced that the similarity in geological features between Australia and the California goldfields (from where he had just returned) boded well for the search of gold in his homeland. He was correct. The discovery marked the beginning of the Australian gold rushes and a radical change in the economic and social fabric of the nation.
In 1852 alone, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia and the economy of the nation boomed as the rush spread to other states. The total population trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871 and the emergence of goldfield towns sparked a huge boost in business investment while stimulating the market for local produce, and laid the foundation for the country’s agricultural industry.
In 1893, Irish prospector Paddy Hannan hit a significant alluvial gold deposit in the state of Western Australia and sparked Australia’s largest gold rush. Still today, the city of Kalgoorlie is one of the most important mining areas in the world, with several large mining operations located in and around the city. Two of the world’s biggest open-cut gold mines are nearby: the Super Pit and the Boddington Gold Mine are large enough to be seen from space.
Most of Australia’s gold production comes from open-cut mines, where large capacity earth-moving equipment is used to remove waste rock from above the ore body and then to mine the ore. Waste and ore are blasted to break them into sizes suitable for handling and transport to waste dumps or, in the case of the ore, to the crusher. Underground mining is used where the depth of ore below the surface makes open-cut mining uneconomic. Vertical shafts and spiral tunnels are used to move people and equipment into and out of the mine, to provide ventilation and for hauling the waste rock and ore to the surface.
With a population of about 33,000, Kalgoorlie – where Goldfields Air Services is headquartered – is the largest city in the vast, remote interior of the country known as the Australian Outback. This section of the outback is called the Golden Outback by tourism officials, and it covers 54 percent of Western Australia.
While gold is the primary output of about 70 operations throughout all Australian states, Western Australia accounts for almost 70 percent of country’s gold production. Australia accounts for about 9 percent of global gold production, second only to China, which moved into the top spot over the past decade by producing 16 percent of the world’s gold.
Sources: Australian Government and Western Australia Tourism Board
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