TANZANIA
For those of us who have spent most of their working lives in Africa, the appeal of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ can be irresistible despite all its problems. To some, it’s the call of the wild.
Therefore, when my tour of duty in Afghanistan finished in the summer of 2010 and I was asked by the Titan Operations Department to go to Tanzania, I jumped at the chance. I had never flown in East Africa before. In fact, Dar es Salaam was little more than a name to me, even though most of the insurgents I had fought against over years in Rhodesia, Namibia and Angola had been routed to their respective war fronts through the Tanzanian capital. The offer was an opportunity I simply could not miss. Consequently, at the end of August that year, I was on my way back to my beloved Africa.
The Tanzanian contract was for two months. We were to fly the incumbent Tanzanian leader, President Kikwete, together with a fairly hefty entourage, around the country on one of the biggest election campaigns the country had experienced. A vast, underdeveloped and mostly under-exploited region, Tanzania had its own set of problems, but after seeing those of Central Asia, they were minimal. At least there would be no Taliban aiming their guns at us.
For the duration, there were three helicopters set aside for the programme: an AS-350B3 French-built Squirrel; a Bell 205 from Aeronautical Solutions, a South African-based helicopter company; and an Mi-8P from Titan Helicopters, which I would fly with Braam Wessels and Johnny O’Neil as crew. I was happy working with both men because we’d all worked together on firefighting deployments in South Africa. However, the choppers we’d been given to complete the task worried me, the Hip especially.
In a word, the machine was tired or, more aptly put, exhausted. The last time I’d flown this helicopter, its main rotor blades, as it is phrased in the lingo, were almost ‘calendar life expired’. The engines weren’t much better. I was concerned that Titan had never bothered to replace either the engines or the rotor blades after I’d first reported these shortcomings to their head office in Johannesburg two years earlier.
When I had last flown the helicopter on firefighting missions in South Africa two years earlier, its engines were not performing well. Since then, it had been on a contract in support of government elections in Mozambique, and who knows what else had happened in the interim? Moreover, the machine had no sand filtering for the engines, which meant that every landing in dusty zones was likely to cause compressor blade erosion and subsequent loss of power. From what I’d heard even before I arrived in Tanzania, there were very few paved runways or landing areas outside the country’s main centres, which meant that a large proportion of our touchdowns and take-offs would create dust, probably in abundance.