Princess Diana was smuggled out of Australia just before engagement to Charles
An ex-Qantas executive at the centre of a top-secret mission to smuggle the future Princess Diana out of Australia revealed yesterday the bizarre details of the operation.
The mission: to get Diana Spencer back to London, unseen, in time for her official engagement to Prince Charles in February 1981.
The challenge: cabin crew strike grounding Qantas planes, the media frenzy at Sydney airport and paparazzi swarming around Diana’s holiday location in Yass, NSW at her mother Frances Shand Kydd’s rural property.
That’s where Brian Wild, now of Killarney Heights in Sydney, came in.
He was a regional manager for Qantas at the time when his chief executive and a government figure in Canberra tasked him with getting a very special passenger, known only as “Miss Reid”, to fly out of Sydney incognito within days.
“I was given a codeword called The Reid File,” Brian told news.com.au. “I was asked to get her into the airport and onto the aircraft without going through the front door.”
Brian, 85, said he had “no idea” who Miss Reid was. He’d run similar operations previously and believe it might be a political defector.
He planned a route into the airport via an access gate and tunnel, where a hidden waiting room would be waiting. Brian made sure to do a test run “in case anything went wrong”.
As Brian plotted the secret route, plans were made to transport Diana from the farm unseen by a media helicopter.
“Her mother went out the front door in her dressing gown with a broom in her hand waving it at this bloody helicopter, to distract it while Diana went out the back and got in the car to go to Sydney. It worked," he recalls.
Brian met the yellow Toyota Corona on the corner of O’Riordan and Gardeners Rd in Mascot.
“The car arrived, the back door opened and I got in. There was the driver and a guy in the front, and Lady Diana and her mother in the back seat. They were both big ladies … it was rather a squash.
“I just said hello, I’m Brian Wild and I’m to take you to the airport — there was a lot of laughter.”
Brian spent the next three hours chatting with the women as he led them to the airport and onto a special Qantas flight.
Just a week later, the engagement was announced.
“They were lovely,” he says of the family.
Ms Shand Kydd, who Brian got to the UK on the another flight, said she wrote him and his wife Joy a number of thank you letters.
They also sent a photo of the royal engagement and most surprisingly, they were sent a slice of the wedding cake days after the Royal Wedding in July 1981.
Brian and Joy still has the slice of wedding cake to this day.