AT the age of 20, a despondent Angus Houston, having been rejected in his dream to become a pilot by the Royal Air Force because he was too tall, was wandering the Strand, in London, looking for a new world.

Houston saw promotions from various Australian states, urging British people to get to here to work, but it was the presentations of Western Australia as the “State of Excitement” that drew him in as a 10-pound Pom.

“I would say a 10-pound Scot,” corrects Houston, born in Ayrshire. He headed south, leaving his family behind.

Now the expectations of an anxious world rest with Houston to give it to them straight on the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

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The former Australian Defence chief knows that this is the greatest unscripted mystery ever played out. Perhaps because he doesn’t know where the plot will turn next, he’s not yet ready to call it his biggest career undertaking.

“Frankly, I didn’t look at the task in those terms, but as a job that needs to be done. And we need to do it as professionally and as well as we can.”

Now, on an almost daily basis, 239 families and many millions besides tune to hear his latest on the jet. Houston has been presenting the facts as soon as he can. The events, watched around the world, have sometimes been electrifying, sometimes frustrating.

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Yet as the search tightens on area of just 46,000 sq km, an area smaller than Tasmania, Houston feels we’re close.

“We’ve picked up transmissions that are man-made,” he says. “I think we’re in the right area.

“We have got to find this aircraft. There’s a broader need to find it, because we need to know what happened, but the principle reason we need to find it is for the 239 families.”

Yesterday 12 military aircraft, three civil aircraft and 13 ships from seven nations set out again to search above, and below, the sea. The mission has welded the resolve of numerous nations, in a way no joint military exercise ever could.

“I think it will be lasting,” says Houston of the multinational goodwill coming from the search.

The search area has tightened on the basis of two sets of deep-sea transmissions that were detected the Australian Defence vessel Ocean Shield, which on Saturday and Tuesday picked up strong signals that analysts say are consistent with the beacon frequencies of the Boeing 777’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

Tuesday’s signals were weaker than Saturday’s causing Houston to fear the batteries were fading fast. Then, on Thursday, a RAAF Orion P3 again detected sounds from an underwater microphone dropped in the search area.

Houston, 66, a greyhound-lean fitness junkie standing over 6’4” or 196cm, mysteriously managed to shrink an inch or two to get himself into the RAAF, where he flew helicopters and went on to become Air Chief Marshal and Chief of the Defence Force.

Upon arrival in WA as a young man, Houston headed to Mukinbudin, in the Wheatbelt 300km east of Perth, where he became a sharecropper until severe drought drove him out two years later.

It says something of Houston’s desire for a challenge that he signed up for the RAAF in 1970, at a time the Vietnam War was going very badly. He’d wanted to fly in support of Australian troops but did not get the chance when we pulled out in 1972.

Houston was born Allan, but says he got the name Angus on his first day in the RAAF.

“They found out I had been born in Scotland, so that had an influence. It stuck like glue,” he says. Even his (late) mother succumbed. “Everyone calls me Angus, even my family.”

He spent years doing survey work in Iroquois choppers over PNG, making maps of the wild land.

He was often called upon to find missing planes in the web of jungle, just as he was in a three-year exchange stint in Utah, where he says it was a matter of routine to be sent out to search for light planes that had pushed on in heavy weather, frozen up, stalled and crashed in the High Rockies.

“I’ve spent a lot of time looking for downed aircraft in very demanding conditions,” he says, though this is not the reason Houston was called upon by Tony Abbott to lead the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Perth, and to be Australia’s public face of the search mission.

There are likely several reasons: historically, the RAAF has forged closer ties with our regional neighbours than the army and navy; Houston has a solid reputation for humanitarian interventions; he is studiously apolitical; and he possesses a reassuring and dispassionate manner.

“I lead by example, I encourage teamwork, I try and remain completely calm in all circumstances,” he says. “I’m not a person who does his block. I empower people and don’t micromanage them. I let them get on with their job.”

Houston has served under John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, who told Houston’s wife, Liz, upon his retirement as CDF in 2011: “I’m a little bit in love with your husband,” referring to him as “so completely an officer and so completely a gentleman”.

Many thought his career was over in 2002 when, under Howard, during Senate Committee questioning, he changed the narrative of the Children Overboard affair by revealing that no one on the asylum vessel had thrown their children into the sea.

“I was asked a question and I answered,” says Houston. “(Labor Senator) John Faulkner asked the question. I responded and told him what happened. There were no children in the water and that’s what I had told Peter Reith and I passed that message to him. We all know what happened.”

Reith, as Defence minister, had been warned by Houston there was no evidence but continued to make the claims.

“The interesting thing is at the time people were saying my career was over and all the rest of it,” he says. “Well, it didn’t prove to be that way. It was John Howard and his government who selected me to be Chief of the Defence Force in 2005.”

There is a lesson there, on not bending the story to suit your masters?

“I think it is,” he says. “It’s important to tell the truth. And you know in those circumstances you are required to tell the truth, and basically, I told the truth. There’s no way of spinning such a direct question. It needed a direct answer. The facts needed to be on the table, in my view.”

His method is to first provide updates to the Chinese, Malaysians, the Australian families and to Perth resident Danica Weeks, whose New Zealand husband Paul was lost on the plane and is “hanging on every word”.

Houston is familiar with the meaning of loss. More Australian servicemen died in Afghanistan during his tenure as Defence chief than any other.

“There was a lot of heartache associated with our losses in our Afghanistan,” he says. “I got to know almost all of the families, because most of the people, as you say, were lost on my watch.

“The hardest families to deal with are when it’s been green on blue, a rebel Afghan soldier turned and shot our people.”

On a personal level, he says: “I guess I’ve managed it. I guess I understood when we deployed people there would be casualties. Thankfully, perhaps not as many as we might have had.

“My focus was very much on the families. I didn’t want it to be like Vietnam.”

Asked to name the moment when he has seen people at their most desperate, he nominates September 1979, when the cabin cruiser Nocturne, with five people aboard, put out a mayday off Evans Head, in northern NSW.

He was on duty at RAAF Base Amberley and headed south in his Iroquois at crawl speed into heavy winds from the south. After an Orion P3 had spotted wreckage and one person in the sea, he located three survivors.

He was awarded the Air Force Cross for his part in holding the chopper and winching up three people in 50 knot winds, in what he said were “the wildest conditions I’d ever experienced”. Two others of the vessel who had jumped in a dinghy later washed ashore dead.

There will be no survival stories from MH370. It is a search, not a rescue. But walking away without finding the plane is not an option for Houston.

paul.toohey@news.com.au