Profile | Ship captain who rescued a crashed plane from Hong Kong’s harbour, towed a container ship backwards in the Taiwan Strait and greeted Queen Elizabeth in Tuvalu
- Master mariner and salvage expert Alan Loynd came to Hong Kong in 1976 to work for a Swire shipping company, becoming a captain at the age of 25
- His team’s rescue of a China Airlines plane that crashed off the Kai Tak runway in 1993 is the one time a Boeing 747 has been salvaged from the sea in one piece
I was born in 1953 in Branscombe, a small village in Devon (in southwest England), and we lived a couple of miles outside the village. Although I was born eight years after the second world war, we still had rationing, so it was fairly austere. My father was a farm labourer, my mother worked for the market garden and I had a younger brother and sister.
It was a tremendous place to grow up, we had the beach in the summer and shooting in the winter, but I knew there were no jobs unless I wanted to work on a farm. All the men I knew had been in the war and they talked about the places they’d been. My uncle had fought in North Africa, my father had been all over the place with the Royal Navy. I wanted to go to sea and see those places.
Shipping out
I went to a good school, Colyton Grammar School. I didn’t like it much, but I managed to get a bunch of O-levels and applied to several shipping companies. I went to the interviews in my school uniform because I didn’t have a suit. I chose to join the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), these were the merchant navy ships that supported the Royal Navy and did replenishments at sea and passed fuel, stores and ammunition to the navy ships.
They tended to do most of their work at sea and get long periods in port, which was brilliant. When I joined my first ship, in September 1969, I’d just turned 16 and we went straight to sea. It was my first time abroad and I couldn’t believe we were going to Gibraltar, Malta and Naples.
It was fabulous – and I was getting paid to do it. We went to Hong Kong and Singapore, which were big naval bases, and St Helena, where I met a tortoise that was alive when Napoleon was there, and to Pitcairn, where I met Fletcher Christian, the great-great-grandson of the original Fletcher Christian from the Bounty.
Eastern promise
I did six years with the RFA. When I went back to the UK to get my chief mate certificate, there was a Labour government and defence cuts were coming in, which meant we wouldn’t be going around the world any more having the wonderful voyages that I’d had. I loved the Far East and saw that the China Navigation Company, a Swire shipping company, was advertising.