Attending lectures, completing syndicated projects and square-bashing on the parade ground, in roughly equal proportions, filled our days, while the nights were mostly spent acquainting ourselves with Pretoria’s not inconsiderable pub and club life. Many happy hours were spent in such venerable hostelries as the Keg and Tankard, Rose and Crown, Crazy Horse Saloon, Bumpers, Grand Wazoo, Petticoat Lane, Zillertal, Jacqueline’s and plenty of others whose names now escape me.
A nonsensical trend began to emerge whenever our group of 70-odd COs left the confines of the College on route marches that became longer and longer as we prepared for the 110-kilometre, five-day course-ending hike along and across the Magaliesberg, northwest of Pretoria. I use the word ‘nonsensical’ because of the insistence on the part of our drill instructors to do the training route marches at double pace for hours and hours on end.
It made no sense to any of my fellow pilots and navigators to trudge across hill and dale at a brutal rate for an extended period of time when our enormously expensive training – and future deployment – dictated that we move from place to place by air, even in the slowest aircraft, covering these distances in seconds or, at most, maybe just a few minutes. It was a question of energy efficiency, and the drill instructors just didn’t seem to grasp the concept.
After all the intensity, expectation and excitement of the Pupe’s Course, there was no way on earth that the Officer’s Course was going to be anything but an anticlimactic, frustrating, progress-halting, three-month interlude for a group of young people eager to use their newly acquired flying skills in an operational setting at an SAAF squadron.
A devil-may-care attitude came to prevail among most of the aircrew delegates. After all, we reasoned, if it is now discovered that you are not officer material, what are the higher-ups going to do? Fire you? Make you an NCO? Not a chance, after all the effort and money invested in training competent pilots and navigators. So, few of us bothered to stretch ourselves very much.
The one thing of value learnt at SAAFCol, and which we spent a lot of our time working out, was how to short-cut the system (for example, how to acquire and share exam questionnaires and answers before the exams were written) and not get caught. In the event of being caught out for some indiscretion or other, we practised long and hard to display, automatically and unthinkingly, the blank ‘I-don’t-understand-I’m-just-a-dumb-CO’ facial expression and body posture. (This skill also came in handy when I was commissioned as a second lieutenant.)
And then, just before the relative inactivity really became unbearable, SAAFCol was in the past and we were all (unsurprisingly) qualified to become commissioned officers. However, one final, and key, component remained to be announced before we left for the next phase of our flying careers. What aircraft category would we be flying operationally?
There were four main options: jet aircraft, light aircraft, transport aircraft and helicopters. Selection to the individual categories was based on a combination of factors, including the psychological profile of the pilot, stated preference of the pilot, recommendations of the Pupe’s Course instructor, the pilot’s Pupe’s Course ranking and squadron vacancies
Somehow, a combination of factors determined that I would fly helicopters, and so I was posted to 87 Advanced Flying School (AFS) at AFB Bloemspruit, outside Bloemfontein, to learn to fly this awesome category of flying machine. My instructor was Captain Kukes Dreyer, a vastly experienced and widely respected chopper pilot.
Having successfully completed the initial two-week 87 AFS ground school preparation, the day dawned for my first training flight on the single-turbine Aérospatiale Alouette III seven-seater chopper. Captain Dreyer, a flight engineer and I, flew out to a flat piece of ground to the east of AFB Bloemspruit.
Captain Dreyer brought the chopper into a stationary hover about two metres off the ground in the dead centre of the vast field.
‘When I say, “You’ve got it”, I want you to just take control and keep the chopper in exactly the same place until I give another instruction,’ he said.
I remember thinking that this was a complete waste of time as I already had almost 400 hours of flying time. Asking me to keep an aircraft in one place was grossly underestimating my considerable (self-appraised) skills and was, in fact, insulting to my prowess as a qualified SAAF aviator.
‘You’ve got it,’ he said quietly.
I hadn’t even managed to say, ‘I’ve got it’, when the Alo shot off sideways at a rate of knots. I immediately corrected and it screamed off in the opposite direction, climbing rapidly away from the ground as I fought for control.
I tried to arrest the climb and the Alo dived straight towards the ground.
‘I’ve got it!’ Captain Dreyer said, his voice slightly raised, immediately taking control of the aircraft and preventing imminent impact.
Over the next hour he showed me only one thing, and that was how to keep the chopper, more or less, in one place. It proved to be a difficult aircraft to get used to, and the controls were super-sensitive. The best practical advice Captain Dreyer gave me was ‘Just think about the direction you want to go in and the Alo will go in that direction. You don’t really have to consciously move the controls.’
So sensitive were the controls of the Alouette III that an experienced pilot could form a ring with their left-hand thumb and index finger around the shaft of the cyclic stick (joystick) and, without making contact with either thumb or forefinger, carry out all of the normal flying functions of the aircraft, including getting it into the air, progressing to full cruising speed, turning, slowing down and hovering just off the ground before completing the landing.
I was smitten from day one, and I relished every hour that I spent learning to fly this amazing aircraft.
Originally designed as an Alpine rescue helicopter, the Alo III had been reconfigured by the Rhodesian and South African armed forces to do a wide variety of jobs, ranging from maritime and mountain rescue to light transport to medevac to gunship. Of the roughly 2 000 logged hours that I have flown, either as pilot-in-command or as a co-pilot, without doubt the finest were while flying the Alo III, particularly in the Drakensberg on the border between South Africa and Lesotho.
But more about that later.
Learning to fly the Alo III was not easy. Even the most experienced of pilots battled to achieve more than a 70 per cent result in ‘academic’ flying tests. Academic flying is when you fly an aircraft in a strictly predetermined pattern of set speeds, headings, steepness of turns, rates of climb and descent, and precision landings. The sensitivity of the Alo’s controls meant that just thinking, or not thinking – as the case may be – even for a split second, would cause the aircraft to deviate from the desired path. This made accurate academic flying nearly impossible to maintain for the duration of an academic flying test. Nevertheless, there was no compromising on the strict standards of the SAAF, and only those pilots who met these standards were permitted to fly any of the range of SAAF helicopters operationally. I am still proud to count myself among those few who believe that ‘To fly is heavenly but to hover is… divine’.