Queensland Police Union Journal

Day in the Life of Senior Sergeant Dennis ‘Bluey’ Peters
Coconut Island and its runway!
Snr Sgt Peters addressing a group at Regional Transport Security Training.
We subsequently discovered that the
airline we travelled with that day has
had its license revoked due to poor
aircraft maintenance.
It is quite sobering when you think
that that most of the islands in the
Torres Strait have memorials for plane
crashes in which lives were lost.
Exercise Oak 2 at Redcliffe; training for a major incident.
“This would have to be one of the best jobs in
the QPS, and there is a wait list of officers ready
to take over if I ever leave.”
WHEN YOU’RE NOT AT WORK, WHAT
ARE YOU DOING?
I enjoy travelling overseas with my
wife Addie, and we have visited the
UK, New Zealand, most of Europe,
Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. In
2011 we travelled to the United States
and Canada which was interesting, but
I still think Australia is the best country
in the world to live.
I enjoy shooting and reading military
history, and I have a fairly good
collection of police memorabilia which
I started to collect in 1977 when I first
joined the Australian Federal Police.
tropical downpour. These aircraft
don’t have radar, and they rely on a
GPS to guide the aircraft.
Coconut Island is tiny, with an even
smaller runway cutting across it from
one end to the other. To successfully
stop before running into the ocean,
you have to land at the beginning of
the airstrip
During this particular downpour,
visibility was zero, and the pilot lost
sight of the island. He asked that we
look out for it. He levelled down to 500
metres hoping for a break in the cloud,
but it was only when he was 200
metres from the ground that we broke
through the clouds and the island
became visible.
The pilot was able to land the aircraft
halfway along the airstrip, and we all
thought we would end up in the ocean.
Luckily for us, the pilot managed to
stop in time.
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Queensland Police Union Journal June 2013