Therefore, the Gerringong author jokes that his new book is a “tell-all” story of the airline and the many characters who have worked there. 

Eames said many books have been written about Qantas and its 95-year history.

However, he said his new tome The Flying Kangaroo, published by Allen & Unwin, doesn’t seek to be another chronological history.

His previous book Taking to the Skies was inspired by Eames's long-time love of the industry - in his early days as a journalist, he was aviation writer for what is now the Herald Sun.

He later became press secretary to the federal Minister for Aviation in the Gorton and Whitlam governments and then in 1975, Qantas director of public affairs, where he remained until the '90s. 

“It’s really about a Qantas of yesterday,” he said of the new book.

“Post-war, and the introduction of the Boeing 707s, and how the training was so tough.

“It was really (because of) that high professionalism of training their pilots that Qantas’ basic safety record is so good, and still applies today.”

Eames said there were events that the public didn’t know much about, such as that Australia had experienced five hijackings. 

“Also, during the Vietnam War, Qantas did something like 300 charters with Boeing 707s into the war, taking troops in and bringing them out,” he said.

“Some of the flights were quite dangerous; rockets were going off near aeroplanes, and they were really testing the barriers of danger with them.”

Eames, 76, also wanted to document “some of the near misses we had, things we often didn’t tell people about”.

“We had some close calls with a bit of luck over the years, with aeroplanes going close to each other,” he said.

“There are offbeat things, like once we had to smuggle the future Princess Diana back to England (in 1981).”

Diana Spencer was secretly in Australia to talk to her parents before announcing her engagement to Prince Charles.

However, after the media discovered this news, a decision was made to take her from Yass to a Qantas aircraft bound for London. 

Eames said “only a few people at Qantas ever knew about” this clandestine effort, although said he didn’t get the opportunity to meet her. 

“We got told we had to get her back without any media, and they smuggled her aboard a Qantas aeroplane.

“It was all very subterfuge; meeting her car in a side street in Sydney, and getting her through the airport without being seen.

“It was a government organised thing out of Canberra, and it was a bit like a James Bond movie.”

On the topic of films, Eames also writes of how a scene in Academy Award-winning 1988 release Rain Man took the airline to new heights. 

Dustin Hoffman’s character, an autistic savant, using the famous line that “Qantas never crashed” proved to be an enormous boost to the airline’s international profile.

A producer phoned one of Eames’s colleagues in San Francisco when the film was under way, who provided the film-makers with details of Qantas’ history and safety record. 

Although at the time Qantas staff believed the film’s star power (Hoffman and Tom Cruise) meant it could potentially be a hit, they had no indication how successful the four-minute scene would be in terms of promoting their airline.

“We had no idea what the scene was going to be,” Eames said. 

“The guy (later) gets back to (colleague) Ernie (Beyl) and says, ‘it’s been nominated’, and Ernie said, ‘wouldn’t it be great if they used that scene?’ 

“He said, ‘I’ll have to talk to Dustin Hoffman about that’, and it turns out they did.”

The segment was played during the 1989 Academy Awards presentation, during nominations for Best Actor which were broadcast to millions throughout the world.

In the book, Eames notes that, “this relatively small foreign carrier had to compete for passenger revenue with some of the largest airlines of the world”.

“Other airlines would have paid a fortune for that, it was just advertising gold in America,” he said. 

Eames laughed that the book also depicted some of the larrikins that “sort of don’t exist in aviation today, because the world’s changed”.

Many of his former colleagues were interviewed for it. 

“Some of the things they got up to in those days, which I chronicle in the book, they’d be fired if they did them now, with social media and goodness knows what.”