The Sunshine Coast moved into the jet age in April, 1984, when an Air New South Wales Fokker Fellowship F-28 touched down at Maroochy Airport.
The flight from Sydney had taken about 85 minutes, slicing almost an hour off the time taken by its predecessor, the F-27 turbo prop.
Although East-West Airlines had been operating out of Maroochy Airport since 1970, a pilot strike had robbed them of the honour of bringing the first jet into the Sunshine Coast, and they landed a day later.
The East-West boss declared: “we may have the second jet on the tarmac, but we don’t intend to run second much longer. East-West and the tourist industry on the Sunshine Coast have developed hand in hand.”
It meant light planes were subject to air control for the first time. The area west to Nambour, then following the line of the Bruce Highway the length of the coast from Caloundra to Noosa and 18 miles out to sea, became designated air space.
Progressively known as Maroochy Airport, Maroochydore Airport and finally – and logically – the Sunshine Coast Airport from 2010, it now has jets coming and going all day long and caters for more than a million passengers a year, although this has been impacted in recent times by COVID-19.
Its story begins in 1958, when Dave Low, who was both Maroochy Shire Council chairman and the Member for the State seat of Cooroora, organised a retinue to accompany him to inspect land for an airport.
Surveyor Fred Murray described the mission to get there for the survey:
“At that time there was no bridge over the Maroochy River at Bli Bli so we parked our car on the western side of the river and rowed a boat across.”
They were met by a local farmer with his Massie Ferguson tractor and trailer and taken to the aerodrome site through patches of sugar cane, dense tea-tree scrub and equally dense swarms of mosquitoes and sandflies.
“We ate our lunch on the sand dunes looking out to Old Woman Island with not a soul in sight. It was a rare day when a lone four-wheel-drive Land Rover made contact with us by coming south from Coolum,” he wrote in his memoir.
“I signed the survey plan which marked the boundaries of the airport on December 27, 1958.”
The Maroochy Airport opened amid great fanfare on August 12, 1961, five years before the North Coast became the Sunshine Coast.
There was a day of celebrations with “band music, aerobatics, youth displays, a buffet afternoon tea and a bright programme”.
It has been all up since then.
On December 6, 1979, Murray returned, this time as a Maroochy Shire councillor, for the opening of a new terminal building.
Architect-designed to “blend with our coastal features” it was considered very modern by 1979 standards and was long overdue.
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Then came the game changer – the arrival of jet aircraft. Maroochy council spent $2 million laying 15,000 tonnes of asphalt to extend the north-south runway.
The terminal was soon inadequate and was upgraded “to provide an exciting gateway experience to passengers arriving on the Sunshine Coast” in 1990.
A year later, Murray told a Tourism Sunshine Coast meeting it was time to plan for a second runway, saying if an “open skies policy was to become a reality, a second runway should be built within the next few years”.
He recommended, unsuccessfully, that land for an east-west runway be acquired. Instead, the existing runway was upgraded in 1993 to cater for larger Boeing 737 and Airbus 320 jets.
The terminal was given another major upgrade in 1997, almost trebling its size and giving air travellers a “tropical experience” on arrival with a design to make it clear “that this is a seaside holiday destination – “rolling waves of verandah … sun, surf and sand colours”.
The long-awaited new north-west/south-east runway is set to bring the Coast into another new era, making direct flights to southeast Asia, China and Hawaii possible.
They were surely on the money in 1983, when it was predicted “jet aircraft will put the region closer to the rest of the world”.
This flashback is brought to you by veteran Sunshine Coast journalist and history writer Dot Whittington, also the editor of Your Time Magazine.
