Australian Window Cleaners Buzzed By Giant

Window cleaners Lawrence Jones and Carl Nothling got the fright of their lives yesterday when they turned around to see one of the world's largest planes heading directly for them.

Window cleaners sitting pretty as Globemasters buzz Brisbane: When your job means you dangle hundreds of metres above the ground every day there is little rattles you. But window cleaners Lawrence Jones and Carl Nothling got the fright of their lives yesterday when they turned around to see one of the world's largest planes heading directly for them. Unaware that four of the Air Force's new C-17A Globemasters were due to fly low over the city on a public relations exercise, the duo from Pacific Rope Maneuvers were hard at work cleaning windows at the top of the Brisbane Square building when they noticed hundreds of people lining the nearby Victoria Bridge.

Mr Jones, 27, said he rang his colleague on the roof of the building to find out what was going on when suddenly the four 53m-long and 52m-wide Globemasters came roaring past  and one appeared to heading right for them. "There was one moment I was scared,'' Mr Jones said. The skies over southeast Queensland were home to four giant aircraft when the RAAF's new Globemasters took to the air. "The second or third one that flew over the building looked really close, like it was coming right at us. As it was coming we were just saying `please turn, please turn' and it did just in time.''

Photographer Alex Aspinall was on hand for the Globemaster flyover, but window cleaners Laurence Jones and Carl Nothling had an even better view high above the city.

Twenty-eight floors below the duo, passerby Alex Aspinall had his camera pointed skyward  and captured the exact moment that left Mr Jones and Mr Nothling shaking in their harnesses. Like the window cleaners, Mr Aspinall had also managed to miss the news of the flypast. He was walking to work just in time to see it all unwind. "It was a coincidence really,'' he said. "As I got off the train I saw hordes of people queued up on the bridge. I noticed the window cleaners as I was coming over the bridge and wondered if that's what people were looking at. "It was a pleasing shot in the end. All the other aircraft had come over the river but that one took a much wider pass around ... it looked like it came quite close to the top of that building. "I can imagine it was pretty scary up there.''

C-17A Globemasters are one of the largest planes in the World, standing 322 metres (1056 feet) tall.

But despite the fright, the window cleaner Mr Jones said it had been ``the highlight of my day''. "Being there on the ropes and seeing it so close, it was pretty nice,'' he said. The huge planes took off from Amberley Air Force base west of Brisbane, thundered across the central business district a few minutes later about 300m above the ground before flying over the beaches of the Gold Coast at below the height of the city's loftiest building, the Q1, which stands 322 metres tall.

The formation, which thrilled tens of thousands of onlookers,  included the newest Globemaster, which was delivered on November 6 and is the Royal Australian Air Force's sixth. Wing Commander Paul Long says the Globemasters have made a tremendous contribution since they first arrived in December 2006. "Our C-17As have supported operations in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan and last year were instrumental in providing support for disaster relief tasking in Queensland, Japan and New Zealand,'' he said in a statement.