by Al Venter
In late August 2010, I landed at the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam in the late afternoon after a relatively short flight from Dubai. Despite the humidity and sweltering heat, I was pleased to be back in Africa. Almost immediately I could feel the excitement and the buzz of an African people going about their business and I felt as though I had arrived home.
After spending the night in the Movenpick Hotel, I was flown in a small, twin-engine Cessna to Kigoma, a medium-sized town on Lake Tanganyika in the far west of the country. It was here that Sir Henry Morton Stanley crossed the great lake on his epic journey down the Congo River to the west coast of Africa in the 19th century.
Because we took off late, we arrived at Kigoma well behind schedule. I was met by Louis Venter, the Titan chief pilot, who had ferried the helicopter from South Africa for the contract and had flown the first week in the south of Tanzania. He briefed me on some of the problems they were having with the helicopter, and his parting words to me were something like, ‘good luck … you’re a better man than I am to carry on flying this piece of shit’.
He added that he had found the dust on landings a real challenge and that he was happy to be leaving. Venter also mentioned that the helicopter had been grounded because engine oil was flowing through a seal into the gearbox. In a nutshell, that caused the low pressure oil light to illuminate and the oil in the gearbox to overheat. This was a problem the helicopter had experienced for the last couple of years that nobody had bothered to fix.
I was familiar with the old chopper and knew how to deal with such issues, so I wasn’t too fazed. All that was required of me, apart from flying the beast, was to carefully monitor the oil in the engine and gearbox. This meant using a large metal syringe to suck out oil from the main rotor gearbox and then using the same oil to top up the engine oil. The engineers actually wanted to replace the engine, but I convinced them that we’d managed quite well for several years and that I knew what was needed. Replacing the engine would have taken time and put the electoral schedule out. The next day we ferried the Hip to Dar es Salaam and linked up with the rest of the team.
All three helicopters had been chartered by a South African mining company to fly the president and his electioneers around the country, obviously at a price. We gathered that the gesture was in return for mining or mineral concessions of some sort or another and that there was obviously a lot of cash involved. Contractually, we were allowed to fly 60 hours per month. If we exceeded that basic contractual allowance of 120 hours for the two month period, including ferrying the choppers to and from South Africa, the government would compensate. The contractor was thoroughly professional and we were well treated during our eight-week East African sojourn.
All our food, accommodation, transport to hotels and elsewhere, internet and the rest, was covered. All we needed to bring to the party was cash for beer.
Remote, lagoon-side village along the Tanzanian coast. The electoral campaign took in most of them. Photo: Neall Ellis
While still in Dar es Salaam, Braam Wessels was replaced by another Titan co-pilot, Janneman Erasmus, who would stick out the contract to the end. In addition, Sacha, a Russian technician flew in, fresh from the Russian summer. Between the rest of us, we couldn’t speak a word of Russian, and he didn’t understand three consecutive words of English. It took a little while to figure out, but eventually communication was achieved by using a language translation programme on Janneman’s computer. He would type in a phrase in English and then press the translate button. It would be passed to Sacha to read and the Russian would reply in the same manner. It was primitive, but it worked.
The start of the Tanzanian election campaign was a good distance north of Dar es Salaam at the port of Tanga, not that far from the Kenyan border.
Wherever we went, it was evident from the enthusiastic crowds who gathered for the president’s address that he was a popular man. I could quickly see that the chances of him winning the election were good. We’d land and be swamped by crowds of his ululating, demonstrative followers, although there were moments when I wasn’t sure whether it was him or the choppers that were the main attraction.
Using helicopters the way that President Kikwete did was a shrewd election ploy, especially in this African backwater. We’d always be tasked to land as close as possible to where he’d be giving his speech and, truth be told, the LZs were mostly far from ideal. It might be a small football field surrounded by trees that were 30 metres high, or a school with buildings nearby. Always, we’d be faced with our rotors stirring up a fine, powdery dust and there were quite a few ‘brown-outs’.
The rallies were a spectacle. Loud music would invariably blare out from a succession of speakers positioned on vehicles parked around the fringes of all the venues. The masses added their own touches of Third World panache with dresses and kikois in bright yellow and green, the colours of the Chamu Cha Mapunduzi (CCM) political party. There was always plenty of food and drink available, which meant that the venues hummed because everybody turned out. Some of the people there would have walked for two or three days from some distant village because the occasions were very well publicised by government agents months beforehand.
Curiously, although we were part of the presidential group, we never experienced any attitude problems from Tanzania’s political opposition, even though the rival political party would often hold its own rallies a couple of hundred metres away. With people wandering everywhere, the politicians would loudly proclaim their respective agendas, always to the kind of applause that can best be described as boisterous.
While our faithful old Hip performed well along the coast, the dust soon caused problems with the engines and main rotor gearbox cooling systems. We experienced more serious problems with power performance once we moved inland and operated in the rural areas.
Tanzania’s inland elevation averaged around 5,500ft, and temperatures hovered around 30 degrees Centigrade, sometimes more. In effect, it was a classic ‘hot and high’ scenario. Obviously, the whole crew was aware that the Russian Mi-8P model had originally been designed to operate in the colder climes of Soviet Russia, particularly Siberia, and was not really suited for tropical work.
At temperatures below 20 degrees Centigrade, the helicopter was able to perform quite well, even at higher elevations. Once the temperature went beyond that though, there was a rather drastic reduction to our basic lifting capability for every degree increase in temperature. At a rough guess, this is a reduction of about 70kg for each degree of temperature increase. The result was that once we’d started working inland, I had to carefully calculate our load, based on the temperature and altitude graphs.
The owner of this helicopter had leased his machine as an 18-seater and, in theory, able to carry a full load of fuel anywhere and at any time. Under the circumstances just then in Tanzania, that was twaddle.
Figures from the Hip’s performance graphs stated that five per cent of the time I could safely carry ten or 12 passengers, together with enough fuel for 90 minutes flying time—the usual endurance is just under three hours flying time with full fuel. It was left to us pilots on the ground to make the best of a bad job, and that meant walking an extremely fine line between the safety of everybody on board and working beyond the specified operational limits of this otherwise capable Russian machine.
The reduction in range and carrying capacity naturally upset the client who, obviously, was paying a lot of money for every hour we were in the air, so was not happy to have only half of the performance promised.
Then there was the fuel, which added another dimension to the imbroglio. Its provision at all our stopover points became a major problem. We were refuelling from drums trucked to remote villages where we’d arranged for the fuel stops. Often the vehicles loaded with our fuel would leave a distant depot the day before in order to rendezvous with our arrival in good time. If that did not happen, the resultant delays could create huge problems for the election rally. That meant th
at extra fuel stops soon became something of a logistical nightmare. To their credit, the Tanzanian support crews did their best. Most of the time they were in position as originally planned and there would be no delay to the campaign.
When I arrived at the first fuel stop, the crew was refuelling the helicopter with a hand-driven Macnaught pump. It took quarter of an hour to empty a 200-litre drum of fuel. Worse, to manually fuel the helicopter this way could take two hours of solid elbow grease. I immediately bought the company a petrol-driven pump, which made our lives that much easier. The bean counters who handled the money at Titan were not happy and they said so, but then they were not out there in a remote corner of Africa working the way we were. It was no joke labouring under the hot sun in 35 degree Centigrade temperatures, even if we did have the help of some of the locals.
To reduce the friction caused by some of the empty promises, I had to play the role of the ultimate conjuror and pull numerous rabbits out of the hat. Take-offs, consequently, were mostly rolling to pick up speed and lift. As the surfaces we sped across were usually unprepared for that kind of action, there was much bouncing and jerking around during some takeoff runs.
In the end, it was the dust that created the most havoc and some of the implications were severe. For instance, it was not always possible to see the anthills or the potholes along our take-off paths, which was worrying because anthills in Africa are sometimes the size of small cars. Some of the landings were just as hairy, because just about every field in which we touched down became a dust bowl. At times, the murk was so thick, that when I wound up the engines to flight idle in preparation for take-off, I often had to reduce the main rotor revs to ground idle in order to let the dust settle, just to determine that there were no obstacles in our take-off path.
More than once, I had to revert to the ‘bouncing-back-into-the-air’ technique in order to leave the ground, and co-pilot Janneman learned very quickly to have good faith in me and the helicopter. Some of the passengers who regularly flew with us named the old helicopter Makirikiri, which, loosely translated from Swahili, means ‘the one who shudders and shakes’.
Dust would also play serious havoc with our systems, making it a constant battle to keep the oil coolers clean. We ended up cleaning them almost every day. Filling the fuel tanks from drums was another hazard, as the fuel was invariably contaminated, either with dust or water. At times we were forced to clean our fuel and engine air filters twice a day to prevent engine failures, something that in the normal servicing schedule is only done every 100 hours of flight time. Add to all those problems the fact that the helicopter was already in a poor serviceable state when we took it over, and we had a real can of worms on our hands.
We rarely stayed at any location for more than a night, which meant that the contract could be fairly demanding on the crews. Once we started to operate in some of the more remote areas, food would become ethnic. We’d actually end up eating what the locals had and that was not always palatable to some of the younger members. At some of the so-called ‘guest houses’ in which we were billeted, there would be no electricity, no running water, lots of young girls banging on our doors at night and more often than not, our toilets were communal ‘long drops’ in the back garden.
Clean bedding sometimes became a luxury and I often wondered who had shared my sheets the night before, as the rank stench of filth and sweat from some departed guest fuelled the imagination for as long as it took to fall asleep. However, wherever we went, we were always able to find a cold beer or six after a full-day’s flying, and, once we’d consumed a couple of ‘sleeping pills’, things weren’t too bad.
We would often land at, or soon after, last light, and then be airborne very early the next day. There was no provision for any kind of rest or recreation time, as required by standard international aviation regulations. Any talk of allowing the crew to relax a little was met with either a stony silence or a totally uncompromising approach from the campaign organizers. In general, though, the officials appointed to act as our liaison officers were quite amenable and tried their best to make our lives as comfortable as possible.
At the end of the day, we were to discover that Tanzania is an amazing country. It is blessed with an abundance of natural wealth including open plains teeming with wild game and some of the finest game reserves in Africa. Take only one example, the Serengeti game park, an awesome stretch of natural wonderment that goes on for miles and miles. Its rolling, grassy plains are inhabited by herds of hundreds of thousands of wild animals and some of the herds we flew over seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other.
We spent a night at Ngorongoro’s famous Wildlife Lodge, in the heart of what had once been a volcano, and it too was an incredible experience. The moon was full, and as I lay in my bed listening to the sounds of Africa—lions roaring, hyenas cackling and an impala buck barking a warning—I was enthralled. Jackals and the chirrups of the cicadas completed what I’d like to term the symphony of the African night. There is no question, Africa does have its remarkable moments.
Back on the election trail, we had more problems as the helicopter steadily lost performance. There was no letting up though, and we carried on working to complete the contract. However, there were moments when I wondered whether we would get the helicopter back to South Africa in one piece. More than once I considered walking away, but each time professional pride got the better of me and I stuck it out. Janneman was also not happy, and I think there were moments when he would rather have been at home than nursing a lame duck across the African veld. We were both aware that our engines were not up to some of the demands made of them.
I am pretty sure that President Kikwete and his staff weren’t aware of some of the risks we took. Had they been, alternative arrangements to move him about the country would almost certainly have immediately come into effect.
The risks were real. One time, I was obliged to land in an extremely dusty LZ. During a turn, to position the aircraft into wind in preparation for take-off, I side-swiped a small tree on the edge of the LZ with our tail rotors. It was a catastrophe as, even though there were no injuries or lives lost, it made the helicopter inoperable. That also meant that we were on the ground for a week waiting for a spare set of tail rotor blades.
Apart from the embarrassment, we ended up staying in a very small town in the middle of nowhere with few luxuries to compensate. Of course, there were also recriminations from the owner of the helicopter, which was obviously losing him a lot of money. The fact that we had been on duty from first to last light for the previous couple of days, mostly in tropical conditions did not matter to him. It would not have concerned him that we were taking the old girl down onto dusty football fields with no proper rest facilities, or any decent shade cover or that we hadn’t had a decent meal for days. Never mind the bugs, the mosquitoes, the filth and the dust, the owner had lost money and someone had to take the blame.
The highlight of the contract came at the very end, when we were invited by President Kikwete to a private dinner with his wife at the State House in Dar es Salaam. We were given the opportunity to relax and talk freely and it was one of the highlights of my career. I had discovered very early on that the President of Tanzania is a remarkable man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NEALL ELLIS FLIES RUSSIAN HELICOPTERS IN AFGHANISTAN
The war in Afghanistan is unlike any other fought by the West in the past century and a half. It is a clash of cultures and ideologies that almost defies description. As one journalist who had been there recently stated, there are parts of the country still furiously galloping into the 14th century!
A youthful Winston Churchill once commented that Afghanistan was a land that almost invited conflict. However, once embroiled, he warned, it was a devilish task to disengage—a statement that is as pertinent today, in the second decade of the New Millennium, as it was when he made it.
Neall has been handling support missions in Afghanistan in Russian-built helicopter
s for the last few years. He is based at Kabul International Airport on the outskirts of the Afghan capital and at one stage there were more than 50 expatriate pilots flying for his employers in Afghanistan. He says that working in this troubled and hopelessly fragmented land has been different from anything else he has experienced. While he admits that it has not all been ‘uphill’, there have been moments when he would rather have been working elsewhere.
Ellis takes up the story:
Getting to Afghanistan the first time, in August 2009, was a memorable experience. While still in South Africa, I had been contracted to fly a Russian support helicopter, the Titan Mi-8 MTV, for an American-based company. We would be operating out of Kabul International Airport and tasked to fly missions in support of a government agency, USAID.
The Russians specially developed their Mi-8 MTV helicopters, fitted with TB3-117 VM engines, for operations in Afghanistan. Arguably, it is still the best helicopter in the world for its weight/ class for operations at altitude, often in unusually rugged conditions. Indeed, no Western helicopter in the same weight category can perform as well. With the Mi-8 MTV we could uplift 22 personnel plus crew.
Our helicopter had originally been loaded at Cape Town into an Ilyushin-76 aircraft for transport to Kabul. Prior to that, we’d looked at several other options, including actually flying the helicopter from South Africa to Afghanistan via Pakistan, a journey that would have taken ten days if there were no hold-ups. The decision was finally made to take her in by air, with a team of technicians in place by the time the helicopter arrived at Kabul. They would assemble it in time for my arrival. Therefore, my first view of the country, as the sun lifted above the horizon, was in a Pamir Airbus-320 from an altitude of 30,000ft.