Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

Sydney. Packer had donated the little jet’s services for the nationwide collection of organs bound for transplant.

In May 2005, Packer’s Falcon 200 had a spot of trouble when it clobbered an errant kangaroo on the runway at Snowy Mountains Airport, near Cooma. The roo caused $400,000 worth of damage to the Falcon’s control flaps. It’s not known whether Packer was on board at the time, but it’s well known that he was angry: Packer claimed that the local shire council was negligent in failing to secure the airport boundary.(In early 2006, just months after KP’s passing, James replaced the Falcon 200 with a $61 million Bombardier BD-700 Global Express biz-jet.)

For shorter hops there’s never been a substitute for a helicopter, and with the exception of a small Bell 47—presumably relegated to rural duties, along with a pair of Cessna 172s registered to the company—those of the Packer squadron were obviously KP-sized.

One of a pair of prominent Packer-choppers is the Sikorsky S-76B, a $14 million machine capable of seating up to 12 people, and unusual to find in private hands. The two dozen-odd S-76s registered in Australia are more typically employed in ferrying crews to offshore oil rigs and remote mine sites.

The Sikorsky is a sleek and handsome craft, with a wheeled undercarriage that retracts in flight. Packer’s 1986-build example was nattily registered in 1999 as ‘VH-CPH’ (Consolidated Press Holdings). It’s finished in frosted silver over a deep navy blue with a dark red stripe.

Wearing the same colour scheme, although more the helicopter equivalent of Sly Stallone in an Armani suit, is the Bell UH-1H Iroquois 205. The fabled ‘Huey’ of US and Australian military history, the stretched ‘205’ specification is able to carry a 1500 kilogram payload and is configurable for up to 14 passengers or six stretchers. This example was built to US Army order in 1963, spending time with the US and later the German military. In 1999 it was ‘civilianised’ by US specialist, Garlick Helicopters, and sent to Australia.

In Packer’s possession, the Huey flew only about 100 hours in ten years. It’s now in the hands of Precision Helicopters, in Coffs Harbour, NSW, where it has flown several fire-fighting and flood-relief missions.

Christopher Lee, in Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, relates a story of Packer, John Cornell and an expectant Delvene Delaney being flown to a World Series Cricket game at VFL Park by helicopter. Packer, sitting up front in the (unnamed) chopper, asked the GTV9 Melbourne pilot Geoff Longland, ‘Are these things as safe as light aircraft?’

Longland assured his boss that they were actually safer; that indeed, if the power were shut down to the main rotor, the blades would continue rotating and the chopper would just glide in to a landing.

‘Okay,’ Packer said. ‘Turn the fuckin’ thing off.’ And against the voluble protestations of Cornell, the billionaire businessman and his nervous passengers made a voluntary noiseless landing at VFL Park.

Like Fitzgerald said: The rich are very different.

Part 3

FANTA & FINGER BUNS

10

THE HEALTH REPORT

The big dog in any fight usually has the advantage. And they didn’t come much bigger, or fight much harder than Kerry Packer. At around 190 centimetres and 120 kilograms at the peak of his fitness, Packer was physically intimidating and he knew it. He once confessed, ‘I don’t know any other way to manage people, other than to scare the shit out of them.’ He was a bloke who seemed bellicose and bulletproof.

In truth, Packer was enduring a rollercoaster ride of health issues that were as large and leveraged as the rest of his life. To the best of everyone’s ability the details were always kept from the public record, not least for the reason that the physical status—and even the travel itineraries—of stratospheric CEOs like Packer can pressure the share values of their businesses.

It’s been suggested that Packer’s increasingly mercurial moods in the last years of his life were a by-product of the cocktails of medications he had to take just to stay alive.

In the weeks after Packer’s death, James Packer gave some insight to the physiological time bomb that his father had been for a long time. ‘There is no doubt that if you looked at the list of his ailments, they would have felled most people,’ he said, on the documentary made by his father’s Channel Nine. ‘And there’s no doubt that, at the age of 50, if someone had said to Dad, “You’re going to live to 68” … It’s too young, but I think from where he was at 50, most doctors would have said, no way.’

Kerry Packer had indeed been lucky to make it that far. At age seven, he fell victim to one of the waves of polio epidemics that swept Australia between 1930–50. The disease confined many children—including Packer—for months or even years at a time. Many were left with lifelong crippling injuries. From 1944, when Packer was stricken, to 1954, there were more than 17,000 cases notified and some 1000 deaths.

Packer spent nine months in an iron lung (actually, wooden ones were used in Australia), the pressure-machine helping his paralysed lungs to keep operating. Immobilisation of the patient was itself a critical part of the treatment, to avoid long-term damage to the spinal cord, nerves and muscles.

Those who came to know Packer later in life simply couldn’t imagine this non-stop, insomniac, bull-at-a-gate individual in repose for such a length of time. ‘I would think in a different age he’d have probably been diagnosed with ADHD or something like that,’ says cricketer Greg Chappell, in all seriousness. ‘He wasn’t somebody who could sit still.’

The condition of dyslexia, the learning difficulty specific to reading and writing, had been known about since the late-19th century. But more widespread understanding of it would not come until the latter part of the 20th century. Packer was almost certainly dyslexic; later in life, reading would be one area that his formidable mental powers