Gunship Over Angola

So, for a period I would leave the base at the end of the day, grab a quick bite to eat, start the league at 20h30, finish playing at about 23h30, join the rest of my team in partying up a storm, and then return to Dunnottar, bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived and invariably moderately inebriated, at around 05h30 in the morning.

On the third Thursday morning after the start of my Wednesday-night escapades, and halfway through a torturous hour of my delivering gut-churning, ball-in-the-corner, pretend aerobatics, Major White’s mic clicked on and he said, ‘What the fuck do you do on Wednesday nights?’

‘I beg your pardon, Major, but what do you mean?’ I muttered lamely.

‘I asked what the fuck you do on Wednesday evenings, because every Thursday lately you have been flying like a prick!’ he shouted.

No, I’m wrong. Major White never, ever shouted. He was too cool for that. He might have raised his voice slightly but he didn’t shout.

There was probably no other instructor in the world with whom I would have taken the chance to be that honest, but Denzil was like no other instructor and so I told him about the bowling, the partying and the redhead.

Then I held my breath.

Five minutes passed, and maybe another five, and then his mic clicked on again.

‘We’ll fly only on Thursday afternoons in future, OK?’ said the good major.

*

The days and months leading up to my final wings test passed in a blur, and suddenly my extended struggle to earn those coveted silver wings on my chest was over.

Despite all the ups and downs, the broken noses, the despair at being grounded and the other curveballs thrown at me, I’d somehow met all the standards and could now proudly state, to all who would listen, that I was a qualified SAAF pilot. In passing the final test, I became the 55th member of Pupil Pilot’s Course 1/77 to earn my wings.

With there being only two of us on our ‘sub-course’, the post-wings-test celebrations were somewhat muted, and were confined to a few drinks in the Dunnos pub with our instructors. Brian and I had done our wings tests slap-bang between the twice-yearly Pilot’s Wings parades, which were usually grand affairs in front of sizeable crowds of well-wishers and all manner of smartly turned-out soldiers marching in an honour guard with shouted orders and bands and all the pomp and ceremony befitting such a prestigious celebration. In our case, it was unclear as to when we would actually receive the wings themselves from the SAAF hierarchy.

That left us in limbo. We were now qualified SAAF pilots, but as we hadn’t yet formally been presented with wings we couldn’t be used in any flying role that mattered. So, we were temporarily posted to the CFS Dunnottar Station Flight. This was where young, newly qualified pilots, also known as ‘station sluts’, or stasieslette in Afrikaans (singular: stasieslet), tested the Harvard aircraft after minor repairs had been conducted at the base itself. They ‘swung’ magnetic compasses to enhance their accuracy, flew ad hoc flights – for example, to convey replacement parts to unserviceable aircraft stuck at faraway airfields – and conducted formal test flights at Fields Aviation at Rand Airport near Johannesburg, where SAAF Harvards underwent major overhaul and repair.

The temporary jobs assigned to Brian and me involved being the onboard scribes during these tests. We had to record in writing on the official paperwork provided, all the relevant data being passed to us verbally by the station sluts conducting the tests.

The formal tests at Rand Airport could sometimes be stressful events for the young pilots who had to conduct them. They were not qualified test pilots, nor did they have any great experience of test flying, but they were nevertheless given the responsibility for evaluating and ultimately signing off the newly repaired/serviced Harvards as being airworthy and usable to train the next crop of SAAF aviators at CFS Dunnottar.

Lengthy preflight checks were carried out, using a detailed checklist, and literally every nut and bolt was carefully inspected by the designated station slut before taking the Harvard into the air for the flying section of the test. Nevertheless, incidents still occurred. One day, one of the station pilots, having taken all due care with the preflight inspection, went hurtling down the runway under full power. When he reached take-off speed and gently eased the stick back to get airborne, the aircraft seemed to grip the earth even harder than before and refused to fly. Fortunately for the quick-thinking young aviator, he realised that something was very wrong. Mentally calculating that there was enough runway left to abort take-off and stop the Harvard before it crashed into the boundary fence, he immediately closed the throttle, slammed on the brakes and brought the aircraft to a shuddering standstill.