Sumbe Luanda
Sumbe Luanda
Lat = 11 degrees, 9.6 minutes South
Long = 13 degrees, 52.7 minutes East
Flight journey to
Great Massingham Private Airfield Ipswich UK
Lat = 52 degrees, 46.4 minutes North
Long = 0 degrees, 39.9 minutes East
Friday 1st July 1988
The Gulfstream three had been airborne for seven hours at an altitude of thirty-nine thousand feet, six-thousand short of its service ceiling, at its cruise speed of Five-hundred and twenty-eight miles per hour; the pilot had begun the descent to refuel at Toulouse airport in southern France.
On board were Vas Dembo, Ben and five other men all mercenaries from the African continent.
Whilst back at the bar in Sumbe, Ben had become loose tongued from his consumption of alcohol and Vas had established the UK landing site, he had managed to get away from the bar unnoticed to another phone to relay the details to Strayker.
Most of the men had slept for the first part of the flight and were now waking as the Gulfstream was powering down on the descent.
The Gulf Stream was one of two belonging to Shakira both had been kept at an airfield just outside Sumbe town.
Vas had not expected the additional manpower, but had decided it was prudent not to query it.
The Gulfstream touched down with a light thump on one of the two bituminous concrete runways.
After a short taxing, it halted where the ground-handling crews chocked the wheels.
The pilot powered down the twin Rolls Royce Spey Turbofan engines, and announced they would be taking off again in twenty minutes and there would be no debarking from the plane.
A fuel tanker arrived within a few minutes and the delivery hose was quickly connected to the fuel intake.
The five mercenaries had mostly kept to themselves; Vas understood this, as he was an outsider an unknown quantity, Ben came over to him offering a bottle of water.
“Dankie Ben”. (“Thank you Ben”).
Ben turned and spoke to the five men, “come hier en sien my vriends Vas.” (“Come here and meet my friends Vas”).
They came over introducing themselves and within five minutes all of them were chatting in Afrikaans, they had all come from the Bulawayo region of Zimbabwe, all had been involved in the skirmishing when the country was known as Rhodesia and had met up with Shakira in nineteen-eighty after the elections when power was transferred to Robert Mugabe.
None of them had met a true bushman before and Vas found himself the centre of attention, this was all interrupted when the pilot announced they were ready for take-off, the men returned their seats and buckled up.
The Gulfstream taxied to the runway; the pilot applied the brakes and powered the twin engines up to two-thirds thrust, he released the brakes and the Gulfstream powered down the runway with only 3 miles per hour head wind the pilot applied twenty-two degrees of flaps.
As the speed hit one-hundred and five knots (one hundred and twenty one miles per hour) the nose wheel lifted, several seconds later the rear wheels were spinning in free air, the pilot retracted the undercarriage.
He banked the plane onto three hundred and thirty point three degrees, north by northwest direction he also applied the throttle control forward to achieve maximum thrust of eleven thousand four hundred pounds it took the Gulfstream eighteen minutes to achieve initial cruise height of thirty-nine thousand feet.
Arrival time at Great Massingham Private Airfield Ipswich UK seventy-five minutes