Page 6 - Volume 11 Number 5

“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,
TI he Australian Gold Rush
n 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
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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
Australia is the second-largest producer of gold in the world, behind China.
MAY 2017