Gunship Over Angola

One of the tasks of Alo gunship crews at Ondangwa was to ensure that aircraft landing and departing, like the Flossie, did so without being shot out of the sky by the guerrilla fighters of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The guerrillas were mostly Ovambo tribesmen from Ovamboland, and moved quite freely among the local population, wreaking their own special brand of havoc from time to time. However, so effective a deterrent was the Alo III gunship ‘top cover’ counter at Ondangwa, and at other SAAF bases in the operational area, that no aircraft were ever attacked there.

So, without even changing into a flying overall, I did as Major Baz instructed. When I landed after the departure of the Flossie, 45 minutes later, I was deemed to be ‘operationally legal’ and instantly became the greenest greenhorn gunship pilot in the SAAF.

I will be eternally grateful to the gentle shepherding, preferential treatment and covert protection that Newham and others at AFB Ondangwa afforded me over the course of the next three months, as I assimilated a wealth of tricks and shortcuts from the older, more experienced pilots without being blown from the African sky.

There was no greater manifestation of this special care than the allocation to me, as my ‘partner’ flight engineer, of Flight Sergeant Flip Pretorius, a large, immensely strong and battle-proven warrior-among-men. I probably learnt more about life, about the technical stresses to which an Alo is exposed in bush war conditions, and about the tireless commitment to ensuring its ongoing serviceability from Flip, the other flight engineers and ground crew, in that first three months, than in the rest of my career combined.

So green was I with respect to the challenging local flying conditions, and so blissfully unaware of the fact, that I almost crashed the Alo III ‘trooper’ that I flew on my first mission out of Ondangwa. The ‘trooper’ was an Alo III configured for light passenger transport or ‘walking wounded’ casualty evacuation, and it had only a small .303 machine gun mounted in the left-hand sliding door for protection.

My mission, a day or two after my arrival at Ondangwa, required that I fly the Alo about 100 kilometres northeast to a small South African army base called Nkongo, just south of the Angolan border, where I was to collect a senior and very fierce army officer, Colonel ‘Witkop’ Badenhorst, and his aide. I was then to fly them 110 kilometres due westwards to Eenhana, another army base located just a few kilometres south of the border.

At around 11h00 I took off from Ondangs with the air temperature hovering around 40°C. When I got to Nkongo I performed a hover (vertical) landing onto a concrete slab inside the five-metre-high protective perimeter wall, called a revetment, which secluded the interior of the base from prying eyes outside. There was a 25-metre-wide gap in the revetment that led to a 1 000-metre-long paved runway. At the time, I strongly believed that no self-respecting chopper pilot would ever use a runway, like a normal aircraft, unless it became absolutely necessary.

Now, Colonel Badenhorst was a large man. As was his aide. And so was Flip. It was also extremely hot and dry. The combined effect of all these factors, I should already have known, had I been listening carefully when the subject of density altitude was discussed on the Chopper Course, instead of dreamily contemplating hidden accesses to nurses’ residences, was to rob the Nkongo air of most of its available lift.

My passengers boarded and I started up. Once I’d completed the pre-take-off checks I lifted the trooper off the ground and onto a cushion of air called ‘ground effect’, which helps to keep hovering helicopters airborne while stationary. However, as soon as I pushed the cyclic stick forward to initiate forward momentum, blissfully unaware of the impending disaster, the Alo simply ‘fell off’ the supporting cushion of air and refused to go anywhere, let alone accelerate smoothly and climb gracefully over the concrete and steel revetment.

I realised that something was terribly wrong, and at the last possible moment hoofed the right rudder pedal as hard as I could to prevent the Alo’s imminent impact with the wall. The aircraft immediately spun around to point the way it had just come, miraculously missing various pieces of structure, each of which could have caused serious damage or even injury and loss of life.

The deathly silence that followed the near accident was finally broken by Flip suggesting quietly, ‘Loot, let’s just pretend that we’re a fixed-wing and go take off on the runway like the big boys do?’