by Al Venter
Ordered to appear before his commanding officer, he was reminded that officers never drank in the bars of NCOs without being invited in to do so. Even if they were invited, it was just not good form to get involved in a bar brawl.
His reply was curt and totally uncalled for: ‘What is the difference, Sir? In 10 years’ time, this country will have a black president anyway.’
The next moment I found myself on the floor: I’d been given a short, sharp crack to the side of my head by the Rhodesian Army lightweight boxing champion. He was my escort and had been standing right alongside me.
That one comment effectively terminated Neall’s career in the Rhodesian armed forces. However, as he recollects, being thrown off the junior officer’s course was probably the best thing that might have happened:
In any event, I was starting to get more interested in flying, and even considered applying for a transfer to the air force for flight training, although whether I would have passed selection there, after the fracas in Gwelo was another matter.
Meantime, he’d also had problems after returning to base from leave, when he’d tried to patch up things with Babs, his girlfriend—their relationship had become rocky due to his extended periods away.
We were doing a survival course in the bush which, as usual, turned into something gory. The thrust of it centred on teaching us the basics of survival under the most arduous bush conditions imaginable … and in Africa it can sometimes be really difficult!
As he recalls, the instructors had their own ways of doing things, like forcing the men to carry boxes of sand over long distances in difficult terrain. They were required to go in search of food because everything was taken from them, including sleeping bags and any warm clothing they might have brought. As Neall remembers, being winter it was a really hard call because after dark, in the Rhodesian countryside, temperatures tend to plummet.
After some days of that bullshit, we were given some bricks which we had to put into our packs. We were then split into groups, or ‘sticks’ of three. They said that they would give us food to start with, and, indeed, they did—all of a couple of tins of bully beef for an unspecified period and no water.
We were then ordered onto an antiquated Rhodesian Air Force DC-3 Dakota and flown to Buffalo Range in the south-east of the country, where our first operation was to reconnoitre an old gold mine. Map coordinates were provided, together with a specific destination where we were to be debriefed after our so-called recce.
Meanwhile, we had every Territorial Force unit in creation chasing after us, and for those who were caught, it was really fierce: some men were stripped down naked for interrogation—not pleasant in the middle of winter—while others were made to stand on rocks in a flooded quarry. I was lucky because I seemed to be quite good at escape and evasion. In the end we were all captured, but I missed the interrogation part because by the time I was hauled in, the allocated period for that phase of the exercise was up and so I was spared the ‘torture’.
Thankfully, says Neall, the time on that leg of the course went quickly. On the fourth day, something happened that was to change his life forever.
I was waiting there, on the edge of the airstrip when out of the sun came this bright, shiny little aircraft, a South African Army Cessna 185. It landed, taxied towards where we were waiting, and from it emerged a pair of shiny polished brown shoes and an immaculately dressed guy in neatly pressed khaki clothes, wearing a tie and Ray Ban sun glasses with a great big watch on his wrist. His blond hair was perfectly combed and somewhat longish by military standards. When he got close up you couldn’t miss the after-shower deodorants, which I suppose wasn’t difficult, because we hadn’t washed for more than a week. Under other circumstances he would have been quite nondescript, but there, way out in the bush, he was unique. The man was an army pilot serving with the South African police and he looked like he was having the time of his life.
It’s funny how small things become etched in your mind, which was how it was with me. At that precise moment I decided that I would become like him: I would become a pilot, I told myself. I met him afterwards—Captain Piet van der Merwe—and his daughter later became quite famous as a Miss South Africa. That same young lieutenant—as he then was—ended up flying some of us northwards, straight over the magnificent Chimanimani Mountains, and I already knew where my future lay. It certainly would not be with the ‘Brown Jobs’, a term which aviators sometimes disparagingly use when they refer to soldiers.
Meanwhile, on the orders of my father, I was required to give the academic world another bash. I enrolled at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg for a legal degree, or what is known locally as Bachelor of Arts, Law. My deal was that he paid my fees while I was required to earn enough to keep my head above water.
My first job was pretty mundane: tending tables at the Spur Steakhouse in Rosebank. The other waiters couldn’t believe that I was actually working for a weekly wage and that I refused the tips clients gave me. In the end, I put all that extra money into their pool as they only earned what they were tipped.
Meanwhile, there had been some other changes as well. My folks moved back to South Africa from Rhodesia while I was in the army and Babs, my girlfriend, wasn’t talking to me. So at the end of it, there was nothing left for me in Rhodesia and I left the country for good. One of the first things I told Dad was that I wanted to join the South African Air Force, but being ex-military himself, he saw no future for his son in uniform and gave me a pretty explicit thumbs down.
Then, when my second stint at university also turned sour, mainly due to boredom, I simply upped sticks and signed on the dotted line at the headquarters of the South African Air Force in Pretoria.
CHAPTER TWO
EARLY DAYS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN AIR FORCE
Since an early age, Neall Ellis had been interested in all aspects of flying, including reading about aircraft and World War II combat heroes and, of course, talking to the occasional pilot he would encounter while serving in the Rhodesian forces. Had he not queered his own pitch by a series of untimely comments, he might even have tried for the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF).
Having moved to South Africa which, because of historical ties, regarded Rhodesians (as well as other whites from neighbouring territories) as de-facto Southern Africans, it was a lot easier to enlist in the various arms that made up the South African Defence Force (SADF). That included the South African Air Force (SAAF).
I joined the South African Air Force in 1971. Because of my military service in Rhodesia, I was exempted from the usual three months basic course at Swartkops, the air base on the southern outskirts of Pretoria. It was a good thing, as I dreaded being thrust in at the deep end with a bunch of rookies, not that I was much older than most of them.
Instead, since I had volunteered for pilot training, I was shipped off to the Cape to undergo a formative course at the Saldanha Military Academy, a South African version of Sandhurst and West Point. The idea was that I, and a bunch of like-minded recruits, would be prepared for the necessary at the nearby air force base at Langebaan Road.
It wasn’t the happiest of situations to begin with, in part because Afrikaans was the lingua franca throughout and my appreciation of the language was somewhere close to zero. Not that I had anything against Afrikaans, I’d just never had much need to use it before then.
It was an interesting experience nonetheless, but the academics soon bored me, which was why I started playing hockey and made the academy team. The move wasn’t without the usual ulterior motive. Basically, if you played sport you usually got to go to Cape Town on a weekend pass, which made a change from Saldanha which lay 150 dusty kilometres north of the Mother City. During that period I also met my wife Zelda, and we were married two years later in 1973.
My time at the academy was little more than transitional, which was probably just as well. Saldanha was basically a fishing village with few features worth mentioning. The only restaurant in town was beyond the limited re
sources of us new recruits and when the wind blew in from the fish factories that lined the coast, the entire area stank, sometimes for days at a time. Also, the surrounding ocean, which should have offered some kind of diversion to those of us who might have been off duty, was not only uninviting but could also be dangerous.
Although Saldanha stood on a great natural lagoon—where, through two world wars, Allied ships would gather to form convoys before proceeding north—the ocean was freezing cold almost all year round, in large part because of the icy and sometimes treacherous Agulhas current that sweeps in from the Antarctic.
Most of my colleagues didn’t complain. Our accommodation on ‘The Kop’, a windswept, barren hill, was reasonably comfortable and, anyway, this was the year that the movie MASH appeared on the circuit and, one and all, we were addicted. Like the rebel doctors in the movie, we named our bungalow ‘The Swamp’ and we tried to emulate some of our limited excesses according to what we’d viewed, although the only ‘war’ we had at Saldanha was with our instructors.
Not long after I passed through the military academy at Saldanha, I was ordered to grab my things and head a few miles down the road to Langebaan Road, one of the country’s largest air force bases, where most young pilots were put through their paces. Like a handful of others, I was actually being taught to fly by a host of experienced aviators, some with combat experience in Korea, and a few old timers from World War II.
Almost overnight, I was in my own special kind of heaven. Moreover, it wasn’t just any old plane I was climbing into each time I went aloft. My friends and I were put through our paces in South Africa’s newly acquired Impala jet trainer/fighter, a solid sophisticated machine well suited to the African environment in which it operated.
The Impala was my first aircraft, and I spent so much time in these delightful little jets that I got to appreciate their quirks and foibles very well indeed. They are certainly among the most reliable planes I have ever flown.
Not many people are aware that outside the United States, the ‘Imp’—or more correctly the Italian-designed and built Aermacchi MB-326—remains one of the most successful jet trainers ever built. There were more than 600 of them wheeled out of factories in half a dozen countries including Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Pretoria ordered 165 of them and, except for the first 40, they were all built locally by Atlas Aircraft Corporation, which had its facilities adjacent to the old Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. It is called Denel Aviation today.
The plane’s performance specs—with a lifespan of about 5,000 hours—were awesome. An Imp would take off at maximum load in 800 metres and, in doing so, could clear a 15-metre obstacle at the end of the runway. At light weight, it needed only about half that much runway. Its maximum speed was upwards of 500mph and it could achieve a rate-of-climb rate of 3,000 feet-per-minute. The plane set many category records including one of the very first for a small, single-engine jet fighter/trainer: an altitude record of 56,807ft (17,315m) set in March 1966.
I achieved a great sense of satisfaction in getting on to the training programme and was only made aware much later that I was a member of a pretty exclusive little band of trainee pilots. There had originally been more than 5,000 applicants. Of them, only 250 were chosen for the second selection phase, of whom only half went to the academy and half again—or 60 pupils in total—were accepted for actual pilot training. By the time it was all over, only 27 of our original group got their wings.
Learning to fly jets at Saldanha was never an easy option. Langebaan was exposed to the sea and the winters could sometimes make things a little hairy. With north-west storms constantly roaring in—the region lies in a winter rainfall area—cross winds and down drafts were routine. When the quirks of some of our mentors were added into the equation, things got more complicated still.
My first instructor was Budgie Burgess, an experienced pilot who preferred to shout his orders at you instead of telling you what was required. I just couldn’t take his bellowing and ended up doing the unthinkable for a new recruit: I asked for somebody else to teach me. It says a lot that I wasn’t kicked off the course, which suggested that someone higher up must have spotted a little promise from this Ellis boy.
Burgess was clearly upset, but the order came down that I was to be handed over to another flying instructor and after that, there were no problems. In later years, Budgie and I ended up being good friends. In fact, he was of immense help when I landed in a spot of serious bother in the Congo (Brazzaville) many years later.
Langebaan Air Force Base always promised to be a tough regime for us youngsters, enthusiastic as we no doubt were. But then, as aviators of all generations will tell you, flying is also a great leveller. There was an inordinate amount of pressure on each of us to succeed and our instructors during the 13-month course—from ground school to getting our wings—were demanding as well as tough. They were all professional aviators and totally non-judgemental. Apart from flying, everyday rigmarole at the air base was coupled to a measure of military discipline that would sometimes make newcomers blanche.
Add to this a series of lecture sessions, regular exams, fatigues and being completely base-bound with no weekend passes to get away to Cape Town, all of which made my time there more than challenging. Having said that, always being head of the pack when it came to getting things done, if I did not get a pass to leave the base, I simply went AWOL every weekend and headed for Cape Town and Zelda. Interestingly, I never got caught, although I had my share of close calls. I would almost certainly have been bumped from the course had I been, because others were.
Fortunately, towards the end of the year the instructors relaxed somewhat, which was more than a good thing. I was sneaking down the back stairs of our quarters one evening when Buck Buchanan, my instructor, was heading up them.
He asked: ‘You going to visit Zelda?’
I said: ‘Yes.’
‘Have you got a pass?’
‘No,’ I replied quite brazenly.
‘Well, then I don’t think I’ve seen you, have I? Have a good time!’
For all that, I wasn’t the best student in our class. In terms of reference (I discovered much later) my overall performance was rated as mediocre. However, my instructors were aware that while I might have occasionally struggled with maths and physics, I appeared to adapt almost naturally once I was strapped into a jet trainer and prepared for take-off.
Then, as I was to learn rather dramatically, it wasn’t only pupil pilots who made mistakes. There were times when the instructors would blunder, and more than once there were lives lost, once almost my own. This was one of about four occasions in my life when I’ve felt this really could be the end. When it happens, as I know from my own experiences and those of others who have survived a critical moment, you just accept it. Not that you don’t keep trying, of course, right on up to the last moment …
That incident took place during a routine training exercise one August winter morning. We’d taken off in an Impala from Langebaan Air Force Base and had found ourselves in some fairly heavy cloud. At that point, my instructor came through on the intercom and said he didn’t want to do a controlled let down. Moments later he spotted a gap in the huge bank of cloud somewhere over the Hopefield Bombing Range and decided to spiral down. However, the trouble was that when circling down like that, the aircraft’s speed increases exponentially. Add to that the fact that the radius of the aircraft’s turn also increases and we found ourselves right back into cloud.
The instructor was on visual when suddenly the Impala inverted. Ideally, he should have rolled it level and gone up again, ending with a controlled approach. Instead, he took the plane down almost vertically, his intention, I imagine, being to complete the last part of a giant loop. By the time we’d dropped below 1,000ft, I told myself to eject. However, by then we were pulling so many Gs that I could barely move my arms to get my hands onto either of the two ejection handles. That was when I also realised that had I actually pulled one
of those handles, I would have probably been hurled straight into the ground. I had no option but to stick with the aircraft.
We were well clear of cloud when we finally emerged from the loop and all I could do was hold my breath. We must have cleared the ground at around 100ft, or perhaps it was 50 … we will never know. It was so close that I remember seeing the low scrub bushes only feet below us. My instructor wasted no time in getting our plane back to base and once we’d landed, he was speechless. He just got out of his cockpit and left it to me to switch off. With that he simply walked away. However, he did come back a while later to apologise. Even today, when I see him, he always jokes: ‘Remember that day? I almost got you killed …’ I usually remind him with a smile that we both almost pretty well caught it on that flight.
During the latter stages of our training we learnt the fundamentals of night flying, something that I’ve always regarded as a unique experience. This training was to stand me in good stead many years later in Sierra Leone when I had to go up on my own and, literally, drive the rebels from the gates of Freetown. More to the point, in Sierra Leone, while flying the Air Wing Hind—which was used to halt the rebel advance—I initially did so without night vision goggles (NVGs).
I recall the many times I flew over the South Cape, the rolling South Atlantic Ocean on one side and rows of hills on the other, often on pitch black, no-moon nights at something like 32,000ft. I always experienced an incredible loneliness. Most times when we went up in the dark there was nobody manning the radio back at base. However, the stars, quite brilliant and incandescent above our heads, made up for the solitude.
Following the completion of the flying course at Langebaan, in 1972, and the award of our wings, we went on leave. On return, I was posted ‘to the tower’ for air traffic control training, but halfway through was ordered back to Langebaan as a ‘station pilot’ which, in the lingo, is half-a-step ahead of a gofer aviator and a ferry pilot. Basically, my job was to be on round-the-clock standby.