If you haven’t been to southern Africa, then you should go. It’s an area of the world that is ripe for adventure, and it is vast. Before I ended up in the UAE, my previous job involved an awful lot of travel. One of the most memorable times of my life was learning to fly in South Africa, at Swartkops airfield in Pretoria. I was in South Africa for a seven-month stint and had decided that there could be no better way to spend my ‘in-country’ allowance than learning to fly and then, hopefully, getting the chance to fly around southern Africa before I left.
I was very lucky and had managed to get membership at the Flying Club at Swartkops (a military airfield) and had the bonus of being taught to fly by seasoned South African Air Force pilots. The other advantage to this was that the instructors’ manner was, well, let’s call it ‘brusque.’ So, if you could cope with the ‘directness’ of military instruction, you would get on very well. They also allowed me to complete my ground school training at the same time as the practical aspect of flying; normally they would insist you do the former before the latter. I’m not going to bore you with the learning process but you need a minimum of 40 hours of flying to gain your licence and I managed to get mine after 42. Thus, equipped with a South African Pilot’s Licence, I now had about two months left of my stint to fly around southern Africa (unfortunately I did have a job to do, with a break of a month in between, so I couldn’t get my licence earlier).
Now the adventures could begin. The weekend after I got my licence, I persuaded two colleagues that we should fly in a small four-seater Piper Archer PA28 to 
Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. This was a distance of 1,100km and it was likely to take some time in an aircraft that could only go about 220km/h. Undaunted, I booked the plane for three days but there was a sharp intake of breath at the Club as it was considered a little ambitious for a newly qualified pilot. However, I must have impressed someone because the Chief Instructor, who’d flown with me on my final test, said I should be allowed to go. Good man!
So, with air charts bought, flight plan filed, passengers weighed and a plane full of fuel, we took off for Vic Falls. Despite having gone through the ground school and done the flying tests etc., I’d never really mastered the art of using the navigational radio beacons that help aviators navigate, and we didn’t have a GPS. So, this was going to be a wholly visual, map-to-ground flight. Fortunately for me, there are some remarkably obvious ground features that would assist. So, we followed the motorway and the road to the border with Zimbabwe, dropped in to Bulawayo to refuel, and clear immigration and customs, and then followed the railway line from Bulawayo through Hwange National Park towards the hills to the south of the town of Hwange.
Now, one of the freedoms of flying in such a vast and empty place as southern Africa is that there are huge areas of uncontrolled airspace. You need to broadcast on the radio every so often to warn other aviators of your location, height, heading and speed but apart from that, you can do pretty much what you want. So, we descended to an ‘un-advisably’ low level, slowed down and got to see some excellent game as we flew over Hwange Park.
The next stage of the flight proved a little testing, navigationally. The railway line bore off in another direction as we headed towards the hills. This called for close attention to the map and the hope of picking up the road heading to Vic Falls airfield. Having company helped and we passed over the hills, picked up the road and landed in Vic Falls after 7 hours in this cramped little plane. Being here, we had to make the most of the adventure activities on offer.
We hired some mountain bikes, headed over to marvel at the falls, onto the Vic Falls bridge, where we did the bungee jump and then onto Livingston in Zambia to book a whitewater rafting descent of the Zambezi the next day. That done, we headed back but, being the spotter I am, I took a solo diversion to the Livingston Railway museum, while the other two returned to Zimbabwe. Satiated, I headed back across that spectacular bridge and headed off onto some tracks to parallel the river only to come face to face with the back-end of a very large elephant. Not wanting to test his patience, I skedaddled pretty quickly the other way.
The whitewater rafting the next day on the Zambezi was outstanding. You can do this on the Colorado River, but you don’t get the added bonus of sharing the slack water with hippos and crocs!
Having successfully returned to Swartkops, I and my two colleagues were keen for another ‘international’ flight. I’d been accumulating quite a few hours flying internally in South Africa and had also managed to do a reasonable time on the Comrades Marathon. So this was to be our last jaunt outside. We decided to head to Botswana and I’d identified a couple of airfields from my air charts and one in particular, in the Kalahari that took my fancy.
This was to be a two-day jaunt, where we’d visit a couple of bush strips (dirt/gravel airfields), try and do some game watching and generally have a ‘look’ at Botswana. The flight was, again to be a visual, map-to-ground navigation feast, though with one very disturbing error. So, flight plan filed, passengers weighed again and with full tanks, we headed off to Gaberone in Bostwana, where we could do the immigration and customs formalities. On calling the tower at Gaberone International Airport, they stated they had no record of our flight plan, but welcomed us anyway and told us to come in and land. Now, a Piper Archer flies a lot slower than a Boeing 747, and it seemed that the air traffic controllers hadn’t taken this fully into account after I’d lined up with the runway. As soon as we touched down, the tower ordered me to ‘immediately’ leave the runway and as we did, a British Airways 747, coming in behind us, nearly blew us over. Welcome to Botswana.
We booked into a game reserve outside Gaberone, where we could wander at will, guideless, which was a very special treat.
The next day, we headed back to the plane and took off for the Kalahari. Perhaps in hindsight, I had bitten off more than I could chew. It wasn’t a particularly long flight but it became obvious that the weather was not helping. The bush plain was gently gaining height whilst at the same time; the clouds were gradually descending so I could see in the distance that the two met. I was only qualified to fly in clear view off the ground and had done no instrument flying (for when you’re in cloud or when out of sight of land) so this was getting a bit dodgy. I kept to a height I knew was higher than the ground and we flew into the cloud, which is horribly disorienting and a bit of a shock first time round. Keeping the plane straight and level by the instruments, we eventually came out of the cloud, completely lost, but at least in view of the ground.
The Kalahari is a big place, and not somewhere you want to get lost in when flying, with only limited experience. We now had a rather anxious time trying to locate ourselves (a GPS really would have helped). This is not the time to panic or forget your navigational skills; methodically tackle the problem. The charts were 1:500,000, so only the larger ground features were shown, as well as roads and large tracks but there were none to be seen. We knew were we’d come from so it couldn’t be that difficult, surely? After an eternity of keeping the panic suppressed, I spotted some salt pans on the ground and they looked remarkably similar to some on the map and they were in the right’ish area, though horribly off course. We decided they were similar enough for us to rely on them as being where we were and changed heading for the dirt strip we’d been aiming for.
Hugely relieved, after an hour or so we spotted the dirt strip from afar and I descended to do an inspection flypast; paralleling the runway at about 100ft to check it was ok, which it seemed to be. I climbed and then turned to come in for a landing on this deserted desert strip. We touched down, but too far down the runway, meaning there wasn’t enough room to stop, quickly I pushed the throttle fully in to take off and go round again. Stupidly and perhaps in panic, I raised the flaps (completely the wrong thing to do at this stage), resulting in a loss of lift, the stall warning light coming and my passengers wondering what all the noise was as the undercarriage crashed through the tops of the trees at the end of the runway. Turning to them as calmly as I could, I think I managed to pass it off as a minor hiccup, not the potential disaster it could have been. This second time I was determined to get it right, which I did, and we disembarked onto a soft sand strip in 
the middle of the Kalahari. There was nothing and nobody around so we went off for a wander and had a delightful late morning’s game viewing. We called in at another strip on the way back to Gaberone and reached Pretoria and Swartkops by dusk.
Having been spoilt by flying in southern Africa, flying in the UK was just not comparable. There is no liberty, everywhere is controlled airspace, and it’s all a bit less enjoyable. I thought that coming here may be different but the UAE is a small country and the liberty to come and go as you please as an aviator is just not possible. So my flying days are ‘on hold’ until I get the chance to find somewhere else, hopefully, as vast and as ‘uncontrolled’ as southern Africa was.
Photo Credits: Author’s own.
Published in September 2012
