31/08/2026
Harrowing tale of RAAF airman Gordon McDonald from Inverell ….
He is twenty-five, flying second pilot, building the hours towards his own captaincy. Ten men are aboard. Nine will not come back.
Gordon John McDonald grew up on his parents' property, Gleniffer, outside Inverell in northern New South Wales. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force on 14 August 1943, three weeks after his eighteenth birthday. Beyond that, almost nothing of his early life survives in the record.
He qualified as a pilot before the war ended and was promoted flight sergeant. He stayed in uniform afterwards and flew transports. No. 38 Squadron's advance party reached Changi on 19 June 1950 and the deployment was complete by 6 July, one of two RAAF squadrons Australia sent to Singapore as its first commitment to the Malayan Emergency. Three RAF Dakota squadrons were already working out of the same base. In late August the RAAF attached McDonald to one of them, No. 110 Squadron.
He took off from Changi at four in the morning on 31 August 1950, second pilot of Dakota Mk IV KN240, on a courier run to Hong Kong with a refuelling stop scheduled at Saigon. The aircraft made one call shortly after take-off. It never reached Saigon.
Major Herbert David Lowther of the Royal Artillery gave the evidence for what happened next. He had been asleep at the back among the crates when the Dakota flew into a sudden tropical storm and a downdraft threw him into the roof. Rain ran on the windows and drummed on the fuselage. Prolonged and unusually severe turbulence, then a loud noise from the tail. The aircraft dropped into a steep spiral dive and struck the water.
Twenty aircraft searched. Dakotas, Valettas, Lincolns and Sunderlands out of Malaya and Singapore, and French aircraft from Saigon. The Royal Navy sent the frigate HMS Morecambe Bay and two motor launches. At about twenty past three the following morning, ML3505 pulled a box of stores out of the sea eighty miles from the nearest land. Within half an hour the same launch found Lowther alive in the water. Nothing else came up but freight, fittings and one small piece of aircraft. The search was called off at half past six on the evening of 1 September.
Gordon McDonald was 25 years old. He has no known grave. The Roll of Honour records his rank as Pilot 3, one of the aircrew musterings the post-war RAAF used briefly in place of the old sergeant ranks.
His name is on panel 3 in the Commemorative Area at the Australian War Memorial. It is also on the Memorial Wall at Terendak Military Cemetery in Malacca, and on the Commonwealth Memorial at the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan, in South Korea. A Korean War cemetery, for a man who died in the Malayan Emergency.
His commanding officer wrote to his father in Inverell. Gordon, or as we knew him, "Mac", was a very keen pilot, and by virtue of his personality and the thoroughness with which he did his job made many friends among the officers and airmen of the squadron.
Today is Malaya and Borneo Veterans' Day. The date was chosen for Merdeka Day, the independence of the Federation of Malaya on 31 August 1957. Gordon McDonald died seven years to the day before it, ten weeks into Australia's commitment. His is the first Air Force name on the roll for that conflict.
The account above draws on Mark Lax, Malayan Emergency and Indonesian Confrontation: 1950-1966, number two in the Australian Air Campaign Series, published by Big Sky Publishing in 2021 and funded and managed by Air Force History and Heritage Branch. It carries the full search narrative for KN240 and a roll of RAAF deaths in Malaya and Borneo.
Lest we forget.
