Gunship Over Angola

Christmas and New Year came and went. After three weeks of waking up late, chasing after Pretoria’s most attractive lasses and drinking large amounts of beer and wine, it was time to make the long trek back to the Cape West Coast. It was time to start flying the Aermacchi MB-326, a two-seat jet trainer known in South Africa as the Impala Mk 1.

In SAAF flying training, two pupes were normally allocated to a single instructor. On a weekly rotation, one pupe would fly in the morning while the other would do ground school, and they would swap around in the afternoon. Our instructor was a career jet pilot by the name of Lieutenant John Bain.

Let me say right upfront that I did not enjoy flying the Impala. At the time, I would have really struggled to articulate my reasons, and it was only much later in my life that I realised what the primary cause may well have been.

When I was about seven or eight years old I visited the Cango Caves near Oudtshoorn with my family. Climbing through the caves was quite an adventure, and when a group broke off to climb through the dangerous-sounding Devil’s Chimney, I resisted the advice of both my parents and joined them. I recall going through a narrow tunnel of perhaps ten or so metres. Ahead of me was a quite large lady. About three-quarters of the way through the tunnel her ample posterior became wedged in the confined space and she began to panic. Behind me was another quite sizeable lady, and when the instruction was shouted down the tunnel to reverse out the way we had come, she too had a lot of difficulty in manoeuvring her butt and also became stuck. Ahead of me and behind me were obstacles I could not hope to get around, and to make matters worse both ladies began sobbing hysterically. Like the meat in a sandwich, I had no space to move.

Although my incarceration lasted probably no more than 20 minutes or so, it seemed like days before I was extricated and reunited with my understandably concerned parents. When I dredge up that memory, I still feel that claustrophobic sense of hopelessness and helplessness, probably more intensely now than I did then.

The Cango Caves experience left me with moderate to severe claustrophobia, and so being strapped tightly into the Impala’s Martin-Baker ejection seat, which drastically restricts one’s range of movement for quite logical and understandable safety reasons, caused me intense discomfort, which grew into an aversion to the aircraft that the Impala really did not deserve.

For the first few hours on the Impala, Lieutenant Bain and the Pupe’s Course syllabus dictated that we stay in the immediate environs of the airfield, honing take-off and landing skills. There was consequently no need to climb to any great altitude. Then, when he deemed I’d got the hang of landing the aircraft, we left the circuit and climbed up to 25 000 feet (7 620 metres) or so and did a few aerobatics, which to me seemed a lot more straightforward in the Impala than in the Spammy, because there were no noticeable gyroscopic or torque influences and the available power seemed endless. After a pleasant 45 minutes or so in the FTS Langebaanweg General Flying Area, it was time for us to return to the base and we began our relatively (compared to the Harvard) rapid descent.

Passing through 16 000 feet (4 875 metres) I suddenly became aware of the first twinges that something wasn’t quite right inside my head. Something tangible and physical was seriously, seriously wrong. What started as an uncomfortable twinge, not unlike a light prick with a pin on my cheekbone, rapidly grew into an indescribable agony stretching across my forehead, into my ears and inside the recesses of my slightly chubby cheeks. And the pain just built and built and built.

In the few seconds that followed the onset of the attack, I completely lost my vision and with it any degree of control of the aircraft. I tried to push the intercom button on the stick to tell my instructor, seated in the rear seat, what was going on, but I imagine that all he heard coming out of my mouth was gibberish.

The volumes of blood and air in my head rocketed, the pressures thus created increased exponentially, and I truly felt that my head was about to explode. Understand that while this was going on, my head was encased in a tight-fitting flying helmet and my face covered by an oxygen mask, both of which were rapidly filling up with assorted bodily fluids (as in blood) being secreted through every available cranial orifice.