Aviation Report 2002

Read about how others experience aviation in South Africa. This is the English translation of a friend's travel report that appeared in a Bulgarian magazine.

Aviation Report 2002

(not to be read by my father!)

Due to overwhelming interest in air tourism among the progressive community, I hereby present a short treatise on the matter.

The observations were made in the year 2002 in the South of Africa

• Act One:

The Madikwe Game Reserve. Somewhere in the savannah. A three-seater Cessna takes us from our base to the so called ‘airport’ in more than an hour. The flight is nearly cancelled as the pilot can’t seem to get the knack of the radio. He has just obtained a licence and I am his first passenger. Before he knew it, he was stuck with the oldest Cessna in the air park. The radio comes to life and off we go. The manual says we should be careful when landing because the runway often serves as a playground for warthogs – a kind of small African boar. There weren’t warthogs – there were elephants! The runway is no more than a strip of land that has been cleared of bushes. The elephant herd crosses it - an expression of total contempt for the small plane that has just landed on their faces - and disappears into the bush.

We spend the next couple of days in the company of lions and antelopes. When we leave to go back the number of antelopes has been reduced by one and the lions are purring happily. On July 1 we stage a hippy dawn-welcoming ceremony in the clearing that has been made to allow the planes to take off from the reserve. Then the Cessna’s pigheaded engine won’t start for more than half an hour and in the meantime the battery meter’s readings drop alarmingly. At long last the engine does start, the flames from the exhaust pipe scaring away both people and animals. Then, just as we are about to touch ground, a cloud cloaks the Wonderboom Airport. With a moderate amount of courage and moral support from the air traffic control tower (which wasn’t there for a Bashkirian Тupolev 154 and a DHL Boeing 757 that crashed over the Bodensee that same night) the pilot lands the plane, violating an order that clouds should be avoided at all costs.

• Act Two:

The Waterkloof Air Base. Africa’s biggest air show. It featured demonstrations by South African, Swedish, French and US fighters, helicopters and bomber and a much more extensive commercial participation, including Russians and Czechs. There were no Ukrainians on the list – otherwise I wouldn’t have dared step there. The Czechs were not showcasing aircraft but landmine-proof boots – thick-sole boots, of the kind blondes in Europe were sporting a year or two ago and are now trendy in Africa. (Poor Lady Diana never lived to see this fad).

All exhibitors were whites except for a black guy who was selling cat and dog collars with small planes engraved on them. The ice-cream men don’t count. Once there, I found a crowd of some 100,000 people scattered in small groups who had made themselves comfortable in foldable chairs under garden shades with the must-have of a South African picnic – a braai (barbecue) grid with sizzling boerewors on it.

The final statistics of the air show reads that of all 150 paratroopers only one didn’t manage to open his parachute. This makes for a success rate of over 99 percent! And, according to the show host, there is an even better piece of news – that same evening the man was discharged from the emergency ward and transferred to the intensive care unit with a damaged (broken?) spine. Another paratrooper broke his leg but this is attributed to his own clumsiness.

In the demonstration flights department, a mere two planes crashed. And besides, they were WWII veteran Harvards, way past their expiry date. One had a showcase crash – it got entangled in some wires, fell and exploded in a residential area street. The other had a rough emergency landing on one of the nearby freeways. Science is powerless to explain how exactly the two pilots escaped unharmed and no one on the ground was injured.

[Remark: Read the African Pilot Newsletter No.16 to find out what exactly happened at the airshow.] 

• Act Three:

Act cancelled. The plan was to fly to Springbok to see the famous spring wild flowers (by spring I mean September). Why cancelled? Because the plane we had set our eyes on crashed in a training flight two days earlier: a very rough landing in the bush after the engine went dead while the plane was still in the air. The pilot, in this case an experienced instructor – survived but he didn’t feel like piloting another plane on Saturday

• Act Four:

The African bush has this narcotic effect. It is addictive. I have already seen dozens of rhinoceroses, hundreds of giraffes and dozens of antelopes, and still, I don’t have the heart to spend the weekend in town knowing that within a several hours drive I may be braaing meat under the stars and sipping premium red wine in the company of these very rhinoceroses, giraffes, antelopes, baboons, mosquitoes and dung beetles.

The problem is how far exactly this paradise is located. For that weekend I decided on the Ithala Game Reserve, the Mecca of giraffes amid the land of the Zulus. It was a six-hour drive, and that was why I organized air transport so that we could reach the reserve faster by breakfast on Saturday. There had been an over-supply of amateur pilots among my friends lately, and there was no shortage of aircraft, either, despite Acts One, Two and Three. Three of us decided to go on a safari flight with no less than two planes. Just like they do it in the army – a jeep for the major and another one for his cap. Eventually, it turned out two was not enough, so next time we will mobilize a whole squadron.

We had at our disposal only three-seater aircraft that are little more than flying boxes the same age as my father’s Lada (born '76). Our experience with them so far included the following problems: radio doesn’t work, engine won’t start, weather is not right. I was wondering which of the three would resurface. The answer: all three. Final score: two abandoned aircraft, an eight-hour flight in one direction and a dull six-hour ride back.

The details:

Dirk (the pilot, a German) and I wake up at the break of dawn as the first roosters - but before the first ibises – crow and we turn up bright and cheerful at the Wonderboom Airport. The idea is that we hop aboard the plane, fly 20 minutes to the Lanseria Airport, refuel there for the long flight and join Rolf (the second pilot, also German) in the other plane. Tough luck! There’s not enough fuel to last the 20-minute flight. We have to wait until seven o’clock for the filling station to open. We wait. We call Rolf and ask him to pick us up rather than do it the other way round. It’s seven o’clock. We fuel up. The working hours of the air traffic control tower, too, start from seven (at night pilots fly at their own devices). We try the radio. Tough luck, Take Two! It doesn’t work. Without radio the plane is as good as useless. We push it back to the grassy parking lot. Dirk would gladly like to see it disappear in some ravine. Now we have to wait until eight for the office to open so that we can announce our change of plans. We wait. Rolf arrives in his plane. It is eight o’clock. We do the paperwork, move the luggage and take off aboard the second plane to Ithala. It’s far so we stop over to refuel in Newcastle, Nowheresville. An asphalt runway in the middle of nowhere. A one-storey building with two fuel pumps at one end. Lucky break! The gas station man is there. It’s ten. We fill up. We try to start the engine. Tough luck, Take Three! The ignition crackles, without causing any part to rotate. We dismantle the front part of the aircraft in an attempt to get through to the engine and locate the problem. The problem has done a good job of hiding. It takes more than two German engineers to establish that the battery is low. The Bulgarian has no licence so he keeps his mouth shut. A consultation over the phone: it’s got to be the battery. We shouldn’t have left the headlights on for ten minutes even. Lucky break, Take Two! The gas station man has a recharger. We wait. It’s eleven o’clock. It’s hot. It’s 36 degrees in the shade and the only shade is under the plane’s wings and tail. We snuggle there.

Lucky break, Take Three! A light wind comes up. We are slugging, dead bored, and watching the other people. The local aircraft-modelling club has gathered in the airfield and its members are fumbling with their small do-it-yourself jets. They have put up awnings and have brought their families along. The families look bored-stiff. They are too lazy even to braai. The club members too are bored. They are too lazy even to play around with their do-it-yourself jets. They are slugging under the shades, dead bored and watching us. Now and again someone would brave the sun and perform a face-saving looping or two with his plane. This brings to the faces of the bystanders an expression of amazement at his courage to venture out in the heat, rather than admiration for his loopings. They ask us why we don’t try to hand-start the propeller as they do in the movies. We explain that it doesn’t work with this model. The truth is that it does work but we don’t dare do it because we have never done it before, and no one around seems willing to risk his body integrity for a tip of 10 rands. It’s twelve o’clock. The battery is recharged. We assemble the front part of the plane, the engine starts and we take off. Tough luck, Take Four! Wind picks up. The back seat has been designed for dwarfs or hobbits at the best. The distance from the crown of my head to the ceiling does not kill the effect of the turbulences. Lucky break, Take Four! The ceiling above the back seat cushions the interaction and spares you the bruises. Success no.1. We land in the reserve!

Side effects: the support team that had arrived at the camp already last night was quick to dispatch a volunteer to meet us with a jeep. The camp is in the bush some 20 km away from the runway. GSM coverage is poor and you keep in touch, as far as possible, via text messages. It is only after we touch ground the volunteer grasps the meaning of one of these – that on the way out of the camp he had locked the gate thus turning the camp into a concentration camp. In fact, it is a gate in the field that in no way affects the free movement of people, zebras and leopards but restricts the wheeled species. If they get desperate, the prisoners can take down stone by stone the low fence and let themselves out. The group, however, comprises of mostly ladies, and the gin & tonic stock in the gas-run field fridge is sufficient to pare down such excessive behaviour.

I skip the part about the pleasure from the safari. I will keep that to myself. The thrill of crossing the stream before dusk and to sense that the shadowy hill slope two stones’ throw from your straw-roofed hut is live and striped in black white and watching you with several dozens of pairs of eyes, to see a huffy warthog come and miss by an arm’s length, to scare a shy bushbuck and catch the eye of a suspicious waterbuck – you have to be there to experience it.

I hop over to ‘Tough Luck, Take Five!’ Next morning the reserve is covered by thick low clouds. The landscape has acquired a pronounced Scottish look. Not only is flying unthinkable, but the animals have hidden away in the heart of the bush. Last night’s zebra slope, and the entire region have been deserted. The giraffes alone find it difficult to hide their tell-tale necks. Only a rare species of a black rhinoceros decides to humour us by wandering within eyeshot of our field glasses, saving the outing from being a complete bust. We abandon the second plane, leaving one of the pilots to wait for a change in the weather in the indefinite future – in a day, a week or a month. Lucky break, Take Five! The first plane’s radio was not working. Otherwise, we would have had two accidental hermits instead of one. We leave with the cars of the support team. The trade-off: six hours of a dreary ride through rain and fog. The mercury in the thermometre has plunged 28 degrees from yesterday. Dinner at a petrol station in a rain-soaked diner, teeth chattering. We have greasy cold chips. Not good enough for a ‘Tough Luck Take’ even ...

• Act Five (Epilogue):

Total solar eclipse. I watched it among the baobabs on the banks of the Limpopo river (20 km from a bridge that was built not long ago from the Bulgarian Civil Construction Corps). We got ourselves there only the night before the eclipse – a 1,000 km ride to watch a minute-and-a half show. Again, we were contemplating a flight but our experience from in Acts One, Two, Three and Four made us go for land transport instead and avoid disappointment. Enough for accidents!

D.’02