shit hole places, not much happens, so an aircraft become an attraction. I loved the registration of that plane, APE, since one of the main attractions of that company was the chimpanzee viewing. Some nasty tongues said that the name perfectly described our way of flying…tsstss.
a Tanzanian Air Force HS748 which had a problem on landing, on lake Manyara airstrip.
spare parts like the engines were then removed or salvaged.
sad or funny story, you decide…these are the engines and the wheels of a cargo Boeing 707. That plane had come at night to land in Mwanza on the shore of lake Victoria. The captain decided to give some extra training to the copilot and perform touch’n’goes at night, a good exercise. After a while, there was a power cut in town. The pilots decided to circle for a while. Sure the emergency airport generator was going to kick in any time right? Well it didn’t! Tanzania, always full of surprises…stolen fuel probably. By then it was too late for a diversion apparently, the pilots had burnt too much fuel instead of leaving right away. So in pitch black night, no lights, no beacons on the ground…they had to land with the help of the GPS, which are not always meant to be used for that type of flying. Anyway the poor guys missed the runway just by a few dozens meters and landed in the lake. All the crew survived! This was not the end: it was decided after the inquiry to pull the plane out of the lake. Some incompetent contractors were called in. They used cables and trucks in the wrong way and managed to rip apart the plane in 3 bits!
2 Russian Ilyushin 76 in the back.
airstrip nearly flooded, Olaika, northern Serengeti.
this is what happens when lazy people don’t maintain THEIR airstrip, blaming each other, the bad moon or the evil eye, whatever. The blades look like grass cutters.
and the rest of the aircraft is no better…
wet grass, chopped, pulverized by the propeller… it got very sticky and hard to remove.
Olpirikata, one the narrowest strips I know.
Njurlan, Rift Valley. Some high grass again but not too bad.
a bit of a sandy strip wedged between trees, Pininyi, Rift Valley
airstrip spared by wild fires. I didn’t need the map or the GPS to find it!
elevator damaged by rocks from rough strips.
a friend visiting his chick, my by-then colleague. Now the Masai have a monster in their legends to scare the kids, a mix of a bat and a man who kidnap naughty boys. Imagine when they saw that microlight coming in! No kids to be seen around, within miles. They must have been shit scared, even hiding in burrows I bet.
I think that by now, you start to get the idea on why I love to fly here, right?
