Gunship Over Angola

Major Sclanders had a pesky, semi-domesticated pied crow, which had an irritating habit of picking up our packets of newly opened cigarettes, typically Camel Filter, in its beak. It would then fly up to the apex of the nearest roof or onto a rafter, where it would proceed to extract the smokes one at a time, taking care to break each cigarette neatly in the middle, before discarding the pieces.

No amount of shouting or throwing beer cans and stones deterred the crow, and stronger countermeasures were contemplated as a matter of necessity and urgency. Nothing seemed to be effective during our first week at Kelvin Grove, and it took until after Sunday lunch, and quite a few drinks, for Captain Dreyer to come up with a solution.

Somewhere he had managed to unearth an R1 semi-automatic assault rifle and a box of 7.62 mm plastic rounds, which he loaded into the 20-round magazine and then set off in pursuit of ‘that feathered fucker’. A one-sided firefight ensued, but every round that Captain Dreyer fired missed the crow, which, totally unperturbed, continued merrily on its path of wanton destruction. A fellow student named Robin ‘Flop’ Laatz, strolled along behind Captain Dreyer, beer in hand, offering a running combination of witty advice and personal insult each time a shot went wide of the mark.

Finally, an exasperated Captain Dreyer, possibly suffering from sense-of-humour failure, rounded on Flop, who was standing about 25 metres away.

‘You couldn’t hit a cow in the c**t with a banjo!’ trumpeted Flop. Then, raising his can of beer away from his body, at just above head height and to the side, he taunted Captain Dreyer: ‘Shoot this, William Tell!’

A shot rang out and a bullet hole appeared dead-centre in the middle of the beer can. Simultaneously, an incredulous expression came over Flop’s face as he looked down at his hand.

‘You shot me, you doos!’ Flop mumbled, before slowly sinking to the ground and staring fixedly at the bloodied stump where the tip of his left thumb had been.

Chopper crews are a notoriously tight lot and will always draw an impenetrable defensive circle whenever they, or any of their number, are threatened. The incident involving Flop’s loss of his thumb-tip was evidence of that bond.

Flop was taken to Ladysmith Hospital for treatment by the only relatively sober aircrew available and returned later that evening, bloodied but unbowed. The official investigation into the circumstances produced a frustrating maze of inconclusive findings. Vague, contradictory and highly varied recollections of the facts were provided by eyewitnesses, none of whom it seems had even heard a shot or seen a rifle. Captain Dreyer was a little more careful with a firearm after that, and many years would pass before anyone who was there would disclose what had actually happened.

Suitably equipped with a whole new set of skills related to operating an Alo III at higher-than-normal altitude, we ended our 12-day sojourn at Kelvin Grove. All the crews flew on to Durban for the weekend where more fun was had in places such as the Father’s Moustache, the Beach Hotel and the Pool Bar at the Lonsdale Hotel.

*

We returned to Bloemfontein the following Monday and dived straight into the preparation for the final phase of the Chopper Course, which was to finish with a two-and-a-half-hour final test specifically designed to expose any shortcomings in the fledgling pilot’s arsenal.

Navigation was one of the more challenging aspects of the test.

Unlike most aircraft, helicopters flying in an operational setting seldom climb to a height of more than 215 feet (65 metres) above the ground. Mostly, the Alouette III was flown at about half that height, necessitating a high degree of spatial and locational awareness on the part of the crew. Flying this low also severely limited your field of vision and made navigation, without any of the aids modern pilots have become accustomed to, an extremely difficult task. The Alo III had a magnetic compass and a gyroscopic direction indicator. Together with the air speed indicator, these formed the full range of electronic navigational aids available to us pilots. That was it. No navigation technologies such as VOR (Very high frequency Omni-directional Radio beacon), GPS (Global Positioning System) or INS (Inertial Navigation System) and nothing but heading and time – ‘dead-reckoning’ old-style navigation at its original and frantic best.