But I was totally ignorant of how hard it would be to do so in the South African Air Force.
I arrived at AFB Ondangwa – my home for the next three months – for the first time just after lunch on an early November day in 1979. The temperature stood at a steaming-hot 38°C.
I was 21 years old.
The Flossie that had brought me there had approached AFB Ondangwa, still called 95 TAU (Tactical Airfield Unit) at the time, after a brief pit stop at AFB Grootfontein, 200 kilometres to the south, at an altitude of around 25 000 feet (7 620 metres). Once over Ondangwa, the Flossie pilots closed the throttles on the aircraft’s four Allison turbine engines and flung the aircraft into a steep, left-hand spiral turn. In just two of these gut-wrenching circuits, at almost breakneck speed, they lined up the large aircraft on a short final approach to Runway 06 and smoothly ‘greased’ the wheels onto the 2.4-kilometre-long tarmac. Once the wheels were on the ground, the pilot slammed the propellers into reverse pitch and stood on the brakes to bring the shuddering white-and-orange Hercules down to a speed safe enough to turn off the runway and taxi to the enormous concrete hardstand situated just to the south of the main runway.
When the engines had all been shut down, the cavernous jaws of the cargo loading ramp at the rear of the aircraft opened and loadmasters began to discharge the on-board freight. A crew member opened the small door near the front of the aircraft on the left-hand side, from which most of the passengers aboard disembarked.
I exited into the brightest sunshine that I’d ever experienced. The first thing that struck me was not the rows of parked and armed combat aircraft and helicopters stretching off into the distance, but rather the cornea-incinerating glare from the white sand that covered every unpaved space. It was impossible to see without sunglasses, and I immediately understood the foresight of some Ondangwa predecessor in convincing the SAAF to issue high-quality Ray-Bans to all personnel.
Before I could follow the other passengers, who were making their way towards a large arrivals hall, I was approached by an Air Force major in a nutria-brown uniform.
‘Baz Newham,’ he introduced himself. ‘I am the Ondangs CO. You must be Joubert. Please show me which bags belong to you.’
Startled, I followed him as he moved towards the cargo pallets that the loadmasters were unloading. A cursory search produced my only piece of luggage, a kitbag, which contained a few work and casual clothes and some basic toiletries.
‘Is that all?’ he asked, and I showed him my Nomex flying bag in which I had hand-carried my flying helmet, boots and gloves in the passenger cabin.
‘I travel light, sir.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come with me,’ and he set off towards the line of parked Alo III gunships that I could see about 400 metres away.
On the way there, he briefed me.
‘I am told that you do not yet have the required 500 hours which you need for an ops command. How many do you have exactly?’
‘Uhhhhh… 499 and a quarter, Major,’ I said, somewhat tentatively.
‘Then you will have to get into that Alo there,’ he said, ‘and stay airborne, within the confines of this airbase, for at least 45 minutes.’
One of the tasks of Alo gunship crews at Ondangwa was to ensure that aircraft landing and departing, like the Flossie, did so without being shot out of the sky by the guerrilla fighters of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The guerrillas were mostly Ovambo tribesmen from Ovamboland, and moved quite freely among the local population, wreaking their own special brand of havoc from time to time. However, so effective a deterrent was the Alo III gunship ‘top cover’ counter at Ondangwa, and at other SAAF bases in the operational area, that no aircraft were ever attacked there.
So, without even changing into a flying overall, I did as Major Baz instructed. When I landed after the departure of the Flossie, 45 minutes later, I was deemed to be ‘operationally legal’ and instantly became the greenest greenhorn gunship pilot in the SAAF.
I will be eternally grateful to the gentle shepherding, preferential treatment and covert protection that Newham and others at AFB Ondangwa afforded me over the course of the next three months, as I assimilated a wealth of tricks and shortcuts from the older, more experienced pilots without being blown from the African sky.
There was no greater manifestation of this special care than the allocation to me, as my ‘partner’ flight engineer, of Flight Sergeant Flip Pretorius, a large, immensely strong and battle-proven warrior-among-men. I probably learnt more about life, about the technical stresses to which an Alo is exposed in bush war conditions, and about the tireless commitment to ensuring its ongoing serviceability from Flip, the other flight engineers and ground crew, in that first three months, than in the rest of my career combined.
So green was I with respect to the challenging local flying conditions, and so blissfully unaware of the fact, that I almost crashed the Alo III ‘trooper’ that I flew on my first mission out of Ondangwa. The ‘trooper’ was an Alo III configured for light passenger transport or ‘walking wounded’ casualty evacuation, and it had only a small .303 machine gun mounted in the left-hand sliding door for protection.
My mission, a day or two after my arrival at Ondangwa, required that I fly the Alo about 100 kilometres northeast to a small South African army base called Nkongo, just south of the Angolan border, where I was to collect a senior and very fierce army officer, Colonel ‘Witkop’ Badenhorst, and his aide. I was then to fly them 110 kilometres due westwards to Eenhana, another army base located just a few kilometres south of the border.
At around 11h00 I took off from Ondangs with the air temperature hovering around 40°C. When I got to Nkongo I performed a hover (vertical) landing onto a concrete slab inside the five-metre-high protective perimeter wall, called a revetment, which secluded the interior of the base from prying eyes outside. There was a 25-metre-wide gap in the revetment that led to a 1 000-metre-long paved runway. At the time, I strongly believed that no self-respecting chopper pilot would ever use a runway, like a normal aircraft, unless it became absolutely necessary.
Now, Colonel Badenhorst was a large man. As was his aide. And so was Flip. It was also extremely hot and dry. The combined effect of all these factors, I should already have known, had I been listening carefully when the subject of density altitude was discussed on the Chopper Course, instead of dreamily contemplating hidden accesses to nurses’ residences, was to rob the Nkongo air of most of its available lift.
My passengers boarded and I started up. Once I’d completed the pre-take-off checks I lifted the trooper off the ground and onto a cushion of air called ‘ground effect’, which helps to keep hovering helicopters airborne while stationary. However, as soon as I pushed the cyclic stick forward to initiate forward momentum, blissfully unaware of the impending disaster, the Alo simply ‘fell off’ the supporting cushion of air and refused to go anywhere, let alone accelerate smoothly and climb gracefully over the concrete and steel revetment.
I realised that something was terribly wrong, and at the last possible moment hoofed the right rudder pedal as hard as I could to prevent the Alo’s imminent impact with the wall. The aircraft immediately spun around to point the way it had just come, miraculously missing various pieces of structure, each of which could have caused serious damage or even injury and loss of life.