Richie Verschoor and I took the southern orbit.
The western orbit was taken by Arthur Walker and his wingman, Peter Hanes, who had arrived for his first tour on Alos just a few days before. Arthur Walker had a penchant for occasionally drifting off to look for trouble. Unbeknown to any of us, he flew off to look at something that had caught his interest some distance away and left Peter to do the boring work of circling over a designated Puma LZ, a patch of grassland around 500 metres west of the main target area.
At that moment, there was quite a bit of radio chatter going on as we tried to work out why and how the enemy soldiers had managed to evacuate the target area so quickly. Neil Ellis polled the older, more experienced gunship commanders, asking each for his considered opinion of the state of play.
During a momentary break in the radio chatter Peter Hanes calmly said, ‘Guys, I am drawing some fire from a 14.5 gun emplacement. Please would someone come and help me, as Arthur has gone off to play somewhere on his own?’
I remember thinking at that moment that Pete was obviously confusing the sparks from a burning truck with the lethal 14.5 mm trio of spitting death (a 14.5 emplacement was a battery of three 14.5 mm anti-aircraft guns, normally deployed in a triangle with the guns set around ten metres apart and each gun manned by a team of three). And, in any event, no one could be so calm and conversational while his backside was being shot at.
So, no one reacted to his request for help, although the radio chatter did briefly die down a bit. Thirty seconds or so passed and then Pete said, slightly more agitated but not so you’d become concerned at all, ‘Guys, I have taken out all three 14.5 guns. Please, someone come across here and I can show you where they are.’
Still no response came from the other disbelieving gunship pilots.
Another 20 seconds passed.
Then, getting quite exasperated, Pete said, ‘I have a yellow fuel-booster-pump caution light which has illuminated and I think that I must go to the HAA to check it out. Would someone please come across here so that I can show them where these buggers are?’
I was the closest, so I offered to go to where he was, but by the time I got there he was already at treetop level and heading for the HAA, so he quickly described the whereabouts of the guns to me on the VHF radio and left the scene. Following his directions, but still not really believing that they were of any great effect or substance, I looked down at the shona (grassy area) where the six Pumas were about to land… and almost had a heart attack.
On the edge of the shona, with a perfect field of fire over the LZ, were three Russian-made 14.5 mm anti-aircraft guns deployed in the customary triangle. Spread around the anchor plates of each gun were their recently expired three-man crews. Closer inspection later revealed that the guns had all been disabled by extraordinarily accurate 20 mm cannon fire from Pete Hanes’s gunship and carried out by his flight engineer, Flippie Rohm.
‘Sheeeeeeeeitttt, guys,’ I said over the radio, ‘Pete wasn’t joking. There really are three 14.5s and a bunch of dead fellows around them… Come look see!’
A few minutes later Richie Verschoor and I left the target area to refuel at the HAA. While the engine of my gunship was shutting down, I looked across to my left where Pete Hanes’s Alo was parked 20 or so metres away. The entire tail boom appeared to be wet and was shining brightly in the early morning sun.
I got out and strolled across to Pete’s gunship. He was sitting on the ground just to the left of the aircraft, with Flippie Rohm next to him. They were both pale and staring intently at the Alo’s 450-litre fuel tank through the open luggage compartment door at the left rear of the fuselage.
Closer inspection revealed why. In the process of ‘taking out’ the three 14.5 mm anti-aircraft guns, the gunship had been hit by two separate 14.5 mm rounds. The first had struck the base of the fuel tank and left a gaping hole in its wake before travelling up through the fuel and striking the float mechanism, which measures fuel contents, jamming it in the ‘full’ position.
The second round had impacted the steel plates, situated roughly halfway up the fuel tank on either side, into which the cable assembly that suspends the tank above the floor of the fuselage passes. The result was that the aircraft immediately started losing whatever fuel was left in the tank, but no ‘low fuel’ indication appeared in the cockpit as the float was jammed in the ‘full’ position.
Pete said that the rudders had initially become stiff and difficult to operate, but control had largely returned by the time he landed at the HAA. The stiffness was caused by the heavy fuel tank dropping down onto the rudder control cables that run along the bottom of the fuselage, but then, as the fuel gushed out, the tank had become lighter, which relieved the pressure and permitted relatively normal rudder control. Pete would have had no indication whatsoever of the impending engine failure when the fuel eventually ran out. This would have almost certainly occurred directly above the ‘hot’ battlefield.
What had saved his aircraft and crew was that, in the heat of the battle to eliminate the 14.5s, a PLAN soldier must have fired his AK-47 at the circling gunship and a round from the weapon had impacted the cigarette-box-sized fuel booster pump attached to the top of the Alo’s turbine engine. This had caused a yellow caution light to illuminate in the cockpit. Even then, a yellow light is normally a warning that something inessential to the safe operation of the aircraft is failing or has failed and needs to be checked out at the next available opportunity. A red light, such as ‘Fuel low’, means that an essential component is failing and immediate action is required to prevent a catastrophe.
Pete’s decision to act instantly on the yellow light had, in all probability, saved him, his engineer and the aircraft. I never established whether he got due credit for his actions.
Back at 17 Squadron in Pretoria a few weeks later, I was ordered to serve out an ED (extra duty, a favourite form of punishment for young SAAF officers) for some earlier indiscretions, the causes of which I cannot recall. Extra duty was quite a frequent occurrence during my Air Force career, and was occasioned typically by such mortal sins as wearing my flying jacket outside the confines of the base or having hair a little longer than regulations required. On this occasion, I was required to be the AFB Swartkop orderly officer between 18h00 and 06h00. This was tantamount to a base night manager. It was a function with which I had become quite familiar as I tried, ever in vain, to reduce the number of EDs that I still had to serve to a manageable quantity.
The orderly officer was required to sleep in a designated room on the base on the nights that he pulled duty. So, when 17 Squadron’s operations clerk walked into the crew room, just as I was preparing to depart for the orderly officer’s digs to while away the dark hours, and asked whether I’d be interested in doing a trip the next day, I accepted.
The envisaged flight entailed taking an Alo III from 17 Squadron early the next morning, collecting an army general (one General Hanekom) and his aide from the Movements Control area at Swartkop at 06h00, and flying them to the army base at Amsterdam, near the border with Swaziland, to attend a parade. We would return to AFB Swartkop later the same afternoon.
By the standards of the day, this was a simple two-leg mission – there and back in one day. Total flying time would be about four and a half hours. I had never been to Amsterdam, Transvaal, before, so I looked forward to the trip. I also figured that I could relieve some of the boredom of the ED by doing all my route preparation in the orderly officer’s room that evening.