Because of a shortage of experienced South African pilots and technical staff, Titan had not found it easy to sign up crews willing to go to Malaysia, says Nellis. ‘Those who wanted to go either didn’t have the experience, or were greedy. One pilot wanted US$500 per day, which did not make me too happy because I was earning, after daily allowance, the equivalent of around $200 per day. However, in the end he decided not to come and I think everyone was relieved because his demands were too high for the job.’

The insurers have demands of their own with this kind of work. They require that pilots have a minimum of 1,500 hours’ command time on twin-engine helicopters before they fly EMS aircraft. This may not seem a lot of hours, but with the high cost of helicopter flying, it can be difficult to attain that many hours. There are a lot of young pilots who have ‘Robbie time’ (time on the small, piston-engine Robinson R-22 often used for training), but they do not have the twin-turbine time needed.

Nellis’ own acquaintance with the aircraft they would be using was also pretty limited. ‘My training on the Bo-105 consisted of a single ferry flight from Durban’s Virginia Airport to East London, south along the coast, as effective co-pilot.’ On top of that he had something like 40 minutes of running through emergency procedures at Grand Central Airport, halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Nellis had never so much as got a Bo-105 going on his own. ‘It was a pretty new experience for everything’, he reckons. ‘My total training time added up to just two-and-a-half hours. I even had to teach myself how to start the machine!’

Once out in Sarawak, Nellis soon found that the Malaysian airborne emergency medical services were considerably different from the paradigm that is commonly used in the United States and South Africa. In both these countries, such services, whether public-funded or private, include emergency medical technicians, paramedics and sometimes even doctors, to resuscitate and give first aid, stabilise patients and care for them en route to a suitable hospital facility.

In Sarawak, in contrast, a more limited air ambulance service was expected. It was one that merely transported patients from, say, countryside clinics to city hospitals, or provided hospital-to-hospital transfers. That ‘countryside’, however, posed its own problems. Nellis comments:

I was expected to take family members on board to accompany the patient. This was a problem, because legally we are not allowed to carry persons aboard during flight unless they are strapped to an aviation-approved seat equipped with seatbelts. My lack of knowledge of the Malay language was also a problem in these situations, because I was not able to explain why we could not take everyone. In the end we had to get a letter from the Health Department circulated to all the clinics explaining why it was not always possible to take family members on board.

Another problem was that Nellis felt that Seton Kendrick was not always ready to listen to advice.

As much as I find him a great guy with an incredible sense of humour, he is a typical upper-class Brit, at times very arrogant and not prepared to believe that there are other people in the world who may have a better idea of how things should be. Sometimes he and I would clash about the ‘right’ way of doing things. Furthermore, there seemed to be a sense of professional jealousy between him and Martin Steynberg, in that each was trying to prove to the other that he was capable of doing the job better. This applied especially to Seton, who at times became very sensitive and took criticism in a negative way, although it was not meant to be taken that way.

The biggest problem I perceived was that the management in South Africa wanted to dictate how the operation would work and, although most of these inputs were positive, some would not work in the circumstances we experienced in Sarawak. At times there were some pretty overheated phone discussions between the two countries and it was difficult to stay neutral.

I had to try to maintain the balance between the South African Civil Aviation Authority rules and business requirements … without breaking any CAA regulations. Initially, we were operating on the fringe of local CAA legality, although once the klein politiek between the two bosses had been sorted out, the modus operandi became more comfortable. After all, it was not only the emergency medical services operation on the line, but my credibility and my pilot’s licence as well.

The company managed to find a stand-in pilot for two months, as two pilots were needed to handle the workload. They employed Rory Halse, an old friend from the South African Air Force. Rory had been around in the flying game for some time and wasn’t partial to the politics involved. In fact, he is a straight-down-the-middle sort of guy. His relationship with Seton deteriorated rapidly because he was not prepared to push the envelope as much as I did. I was very keen to see the operation continue, particularly as the contract at that time was a temporary six-month one, with a tender for a four-year period being put out by the Sarawak Government later that year.

However, Rory had nothing to lose as he was off to a very lucrative contract once his eight weeks with Titan had expired. It was difficult trying to maintain the peace and also balance the legal aspects. In the end, against his wishes, Martin was forced to agree with Seton that if South African crews could not be recruited, the company would have to look at finding pilots from the region. This, obviously, suited Seton quite well because, in his opinion, pilots are overpaid for what they do and are not much better than truck drivers.

He was forever looking for the cheapest option, even though it might not be the most economical solution … [he was] very tight when it came to money. There were no local Sarawak helicopter pilots looking for employment, so Seton was forced to look at Filipino pilots, and managed to find two aviators who were suitably qualified for the job. Speaking selfishly, I was not too happy that other pilots had been recruited because I was experiencing a very comfortable lifestyle in Sarawak, and would have been quite happy to live there on a permanent basis. It’s far from both the United Kingdom and South Africa, and all my responsibilities seemed to melt away, leaving me at peace with the world and myself. Even relatives in the UK found it difficult to contact me.

The first few flights proved to be ‘a bit hazardous’, Nellis admits. It was a long time since he had flown as a single pilot, handling all the navigation and radio work in addition to the flying. Plus, as mentioned, he was flying a new and unfamiliar aircraft in a country totally new to him, which had a different operating environment from any he had worked in before and which included those difficult-to-understand air traffic controllers.

If all this were not enough, in this remote corner of the world the north-east monsoons run from late November until March, bringing steady north-east winds and heavy rainfall, so that between December and January the weather can make flying conditions marginal, at best.

On one occasion Nellis had to fly the Bo-105 from Miri, on the northern Sarawak coast, some 285km south-west through the inland mountains to Kapit, pick up a patient and head west to Sibu, around 130km further on. However, just 20 minutes out of Miri the weather deteriorated so badly, recalled Nellis, ‘that I was flying at 50ft above the jungle looking for a route to get to Kapit. The visibility was no more than about 200 metres in the rain and when it starts to rain in these monsoon conditions, the mist seems to rise up from below to meet it.’

The intervening highlands and the Dulit mountain range didn’t help either. Nellis subsequently discovered that he was the only pilot flying in that area at that time and recalls: ‘Sometimes I was flying just above transition, at 40 knots, weaving the helicopter in and out between trees, all the while trying to keep contact with the ground. There was actually no place where I could put the helicopter down … the jungle just stretched on’.

Kapit, lying on the south bank of the muddy Rajang River, features some modern administrative buildings. However, the traditional Iban, or Sea Dayak, ‘longhouses’ on stilts, peering out of the jungle towards the river banks and housing a whole community of families at a time, remain a feature in this part of the world. Their only concession to modernity is that longhouse roofs are now generally rusty, corrugated iron rather than the palm thatch of the past. Once in Kapit, picking up the patient and accompanying medical staff was no problem. The flight to Sibu Hospital then followed.

Initially, it seemed logical to continue flying along the west-flowing Rajang River. It was about 200 metres across at this stage but widened to around 500 metres closer to the inland river port of Sibu. However, this proved not such a good idea as there were sometimes wires straddling the waterway. Nellis made the decision to go somewhat inland, and almost inevitably, the weather started to deteriorate badly once more.

‘I thought if I could find Sibu Airfield I’d be OK, and that should have been relatively simple. However, there were still plenty of high-tension power wires and microwave towers, and all the time I was flying, peering ahead, looking for obstacles.’ Finally, he found himself over the airfield, some 15km to the east of the town.

There I was, flying down the airfield, and I said to the tower: ‘Requesting permission to cross the airfield.’ The woman in the tower asked my position, saying she didn’t have a visual on me because of the visibility … it was so bad that she couldn’t even see the runway from where she was.

I said: ‘Look down in front of the tower and you will see me.’ But the only answer I got was a nervous giggle.

Eventually, Nellis acquired the hospital, offloaded his patient and accompanying medics, and then decided he’d had enough. He left the aircraft where he had landed, ‘booked into a hotel and had a beer … and got my heart rate down as well’.

Monsoons and mountains apart, he found Sarawak ‘a great experience’. The lifestyle was laid-back and the people, he thought, were generally among the most honest to be found anywhere. Furthermore Nellis, who likes his food, found he liked the local cuisine. He recalls:

I also managed to get quite fit; I’d wake up in the morning and go down to the public swimming pool. Eventually, I worked up to 2,000 metres a day. Sometimes I was the only person in that massive pool … it was almost a case of living the high life with one’s own private Olympic-sized pool!

As is his wont, Nellis also sealed some friendships during the course of this tour. Among those he got to know was an Australian, Peter Salkowski, who had served with 8 Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), in Vietnam. Nellis also had the impression that Salkowski had been involved in Special Forces at some time, presumably the Australian Special Air Service. ‘He was an interesting guy, and we clicked well. He didn’t drink, but he’d once been quite a hell-raiser. Even so, without booze he carried on pretty well.’

In fact, Nellis’ new friend had quite a reputation. During the Vietnam War, in late 1970, Corporal Peter Salkowski and two privates had been drinking in their company canteen until it closed. The logical next step seemed to be to break into the adjacent Australian Reinforcement Unit (ARU) canteen. Inside, and in the dark, they were about to pass some cartons of beer out of the window when the lights were switched on and an ARU sergeant was seen to have his 9mm pistol pointing at the head of one of the errant troops—the other had meanwhile jumped out of the window.

Salkowski, who had been behind the bar uplifting the beers, then apparently came running out between the sergeant and the private, who by then had his hands up, and yelled: ‘Don’t shoot him; he’s one of my men!’ Although they spent the rest of the night locked up, they were lucky not to be charged, the apparent explanation for this leniency being official reluctance to initiate disciplinary proceedings as these would inevitably have been publicised in Australia at a time when involvement in the war was becoming increasingly unpopular.

Now long out of the Australian Army, ‘on the wagon’ and in his early sixties, Peter Salkowski had built his own catamaran yacht, a Grainger 38, which he christened Zosha. As Nellis remembers him, Salkowski was ‘a short, stocky, well-tanned man with a great turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humour’.

He was ‘living his life as he liked’, adds Nellis—somewhat wistfully. ‘He’d sail from place to place, tie up alongside and stay as long as he felt comfortable and then move on. If things got too hot with social contacts, he’d set sail again.’ Nellis continued:

Pete has the ability to talk to anyone and wherever we went … there was always someone who would greet him and we would have a temporary halt while they chatted. I think he had been to just about every bar in Miri, and there would always be a flock of girls seeking his attention, more often because they knew he would buy them a drink so they could fulfil their quota for the night. Life with Peter was never dull!

The trouble is, unwanted ‘social contacts’ cannot always be escaped as easily as Peter managed it. When Nellis was working later in South Africa, one such contact made in Sarawak—who had possibly read more into their brief friendship than he intended—kept on sending him one SMS after the other with ever-more insistent suggestions that he convert to Islam and wed her. The was nothing necessarily wrong with that, but if your counterintelligence skills are getting a bit rusty and you keep leaving your cellphone around for your current partner to check out the competition, things can get a tad fraught!

The way Nellis puts it is:

I formed a friendship with a masseuse who was managing a hotel spa adjacent to the Ship Café. She was one of three Indonesian girls there. It was the first time I’d ever had a professional massage. It was not a ‘happy-ending massage’ and when I brought that up they were quite offended.