Gunship Over Angola

Unfortunately for me, however, his great big number 11, metal-studded right boot, travelling at close to light speed, connected with my upper jaw and nose. The sound of the impact, I have been reliably informed, was heard even in remote areas of the western Free State. The collision broke my nose in a couple of places, the consequences of which would ultimately have a 30-year impact on my health, and the root structures of my two front teeth took an almighty hammering too.

When I woke up the next morning, I studied my battered face through the discoloured narrow slits where my blue eyes had been. I decided, none too cleverly, that flying trumped everything else and reported for my turn in the cockpit with my instructor, Lieutenant Maree.

By the third day after my impact with the boot, the swelling had not subsided in the least, and in fact was far worse. I was also in excruciating agony from toothache due to my bruised front gnashers, and I was trying to self-medicate by rubbing crushed extra-strength Disprin directly onto my gums. Not being possessed of effective diagnostic skills, I didn’t realise that I had developed a large abscess deep in the roots of my recently traumatised pearly whites.

While flying, each time the microphone, which extended on a stainless-steel arm from the inner helmet, came into contact with either of my front teeth, which happens in the air far more often than you’d realise, I would experience such an intense burst of pain that the lights would momentarily dim. Cois Maree, in stock-standard instructor tradition and utterly ignorant of my injury, told me to ‘Suck it up, chappie’, and pronounced me fit to fly.

As my infection-ravaged competency, already not in the Sailor Malan class, declined further, he felt compelled to increase his use of the detachable back-seat joystick. This ‘instrument of torture’ was woven through the maze of tubing separating the front seat, where the pupe sat, from the rear, where the instructor was, and was used by the instructor to ‘prod’ a student back into line, by tapping insistently on the pupe’s helmet. However, in my case, Lieutenant Maree’s actions caused even more contact between my teeth and the microphone.

Something had to give, and it did.

Early one morning, after another agonising and sleepless night, a fellow student and good friend, the late ‘Lang Lappies’ Labuschagne, convinced me to go to a dentist and said that he would cover for me if anyone asked where I was. I know that I intended to find the resident base dentist, but when the next lucid moment arrived, I found myself outside the office of my family dentist in Pretoria, nearly 120 kilometres away.

I staggered into his consulting rooms. The receptionist immediately declared an emergency, and shortly thereafter I experienced the indescribable relief of the abscess being lanced. This action instantaneously relieved the pressure in my head, and I then felt the delight of a powerful analgesic being injected. I barely made it home to my parents’ house before collapsing onto my bed and sleeping for 18 hours straight.

*

As previously stated, the first major flying hurdle on the Pupe’s Course was successfully passing the 18-hour test. Once safely over this obstacle, the next stage involved pupes progressing to actually landing the aircraft.

This sounds a lot easier to do than it actually is.

All kinds of dynamic forces come into play when an aircraft gets close to the ground, and many a mishap has resulted from a momentary lapse of concentration on the part of the aircrew during that brief transition from flying like a bird to rumbling along the ground on a set of wheels like a terrestrial vehicle.

Instructors intrinsically know this, and so, at CFS, they had developed some pretty effective, though not entirely conventional, aids to help guide their students towards life-preserving success upon landing. From time to time, a fellow pupe could be seen, for days on end, carrying a set of bicycle wheels, one in each hand. The wheels accompanied the pupe 24 hours a day and nearly everyone that the pupe met would ask what had caused him to acquire these appendages. He would be required to answer that carrying bicycle wheels was the standard consequence for forgetting to extend one’s undercarriage while preparing to land the Spammy. The rarity of actual landing-related accidents at CFS was a direct result of this treatment, which worked wonders for the memory and prevented a lot of ‘wheels-up’ returns to solid ground.