Great rolls of fire!
The RFDS in Australia used flaming toilet rolls to form a temporary runway.
Apart from the obvious one, most of us can’t really name many other uses for toilet paper; maybe as a substitute for kitchen roll, or as part of a cheap Halloween costume. But the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) in Queensland, Australia, has another role for roll: to help land its planes.
On 12 August, when trying to evacuate a critically injured station hand on a property near Cloncurry, RFDS pilot Geoff Cobden realised there were no flares available to mark out a landing strip, so decided instead to use the next best thing – toilet rolls dipped in fuel.
While most of us seem to run out of loo roll at critical moments, the crew on the ground were luckily able to locate 20 rolls to help light the makeshift runway.
Cobden admitted that he has ‘probably landed with toilet rolls a few times a year’ due to the remote locations the team are often called out to. These kind of locations mean that the crew often have to think quickly and not get bogged down on details: “The last resort, we can land with the lights of four cars, which gives us a touchdown point and where the other end of the airstrip is, but that’s an absolute last resort,” explained Cobden. “Generally, if a station doesn’t have flares, the toilet roll option is the next best thing to using car lights, and most stations have got enough toilet rolls.”
The injured station hand was picked up from the air strip and taken to Mount Isa hospital.