Dogfights and Dreams - A story of hope

 This story first appeared in the Aviation News Journal May/June 2014 (Canada)

The first time I heard Arthur Piercy’s story was in 1987 when I was a 20 year old infantry conscript deep in the Angolan bush.  I was part of a force involved in South Africa’s last big invasion of Angola.  We’d watched the aging aircraft of our air force singe the tree-tops as they roared overhead before “toss-bombing” the Angolan brigades we were about to attack.  At other times we would watch the Angolan MiG 23s as they circled high above the forests searching for our positions.  We knew that the Mirage F1, the SAAF’s main fighter aircraft, was no match for the more advanced Soviet MiG 23.

Under the cover of the trees and camouflage nets our commander told the assembled platoons that one of our Mirages had been shot down and the pilot had been badly injured during a crash-landing.

25 years later I met the pilot in a coffee shop in a mall near South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria.  I had stumbled across him again on the internet just before I was about to embark on a journey back to the battlefields of Angola  to deal with some of my own history.  Arthur was unwittingly part of that history and in a way, I was part of his.  So I contacted him and arranged a meeting.

We sat opposite each other in a mall, sipping coffee and exchanging war stories as modern South Africa went about its shopping around us, two war veterans from another time and a forgotten war. 

I’ve heard many war stories, and I’m no stranger to the intensity and fear of the battlefield, yet as Arthur relates the story of the dogfight that put him in a wheelchair, I find myself breaking out in goose-bumps.  It’s clear that as he tells me about engaging with the MiG23 at 1600 kilometres per hour, that he is reliving every second of the fight.  The adrenaline surge as he turns his Mirage around to face the Mig that has just screamed through the centre of his formation.  Flipping his weapon’s safety switch to “cannons” and then the moment when the MiG fires the heat-seeking missile.  “There was a bright orange flash from his left wing and then this incredibly fast telephone pole came hurtling towards me trailing a solid white smoke trail. What’s more is that it was cork screwing so I was never sure where it was going.”   He’s been trained to fly directly at the missile.  It causes difficulties for the missile’s tracking system.  He needs every ounce of his willpower to keep his aircraft on a head on course with the thing that is trying to kill him.  But he manages.  “I kept breaking towards it and I watched it corkscrew over my right wing and disappear.”  There’s a faint explosion behind him and the aircraft shudders slightly.

The way Arthur describes the dogfight I almost feel as though I’m in the cockpit with him;  it’s a mixture of excitement and sour old adrenaline, like a bad taste in my mouth, from my own memories of battle.  I’m with him heading for the ground at full throttle, I’m with him as he wrestles the aircraft out of the dive and levels off just above the tree-tops l and races towards home-base in Rundu, so low that he hopes he isn’t creating a dust cloud for the MiGs to follow. 

He goes on to explain the calculations he has to make about fuel consumption to enable him to nurse his stricken Mirage back to the Rundu air base. He is losing fuel due to the damage caused by the missile.  Once out of danger from the enemy he climbs to an altitude that will extend his aircraft’s range.  In the end he makes it back but with a terrible problem.  The tail of the Mirage is damaged.   The drag-chute, which will slow him down on landing, has been blown away by the exploding missile.  Without the chute the F1 overshoots the runway and eventually comes to a halt after crashing through the perimeter fence.  Unfortunately the ejector seat malfunctions, spitting Arthur out of the cockpit and onto the ground where he lies, still attached to the seat. 

He’s badly injured and the fire-fighters rush to help him but he tells them to attend to the burning airplane.  The flames behind the air intake are dangerously close to the hundred rounds of cannon ammunition.  Arthur doesn’t want to be shot by his own aircraft.  He wakes up ten days later in hospital.  He will never walk again.

The second time I meet Arthur is at the South African Air Force museum near Pretoria.    The museum coffee shop looks out at the apron on which stand a selection of geriatric airplanes.  Among them is an old Impala trainer and an Avro Shackleton maritime search and rescue aircraft used by the South African Air Force from 1957 until 1984.  

I’m meeting Arthur to find out more about his Dreamwings project and, more specifically, to see the specially adapted airplane he is building.  To regain his private pilot’s licence he has to demonstrate that he can get behind the controls without assistance.  When we drive over to the hangar to see his airplane I notice that it takes some effort, although he’s well practiced, for him to transfer from his wheelchair to the car seat which is at a similar height.  How difficult will it be, I wonder, for him to get into an aircraft?  The car is specially adapted so that all the controls are operated by hand and the aircraft will be similarly easy for him to operate.

 When I see the aircraft, I realise why he has chosen the four-seater Seawind amphibian.  The half-finished ‘plane is squeezed into the hanger between old military spotter planes, a transport helicopter and even a more modern Rooivalk attack helicopter.  With its high-level wing and the engine mounted on the tail-fin, the Seawind is low to the ground and, as he is building it from a kit, he has modified it with a special door in the side of the cockpit to facilitate easy entry.  It seems perfect.  Equally important is the fact that the aircraft has a range of over 900 nautical miles, a good long range which will be essential if Arthur is to fly it around the world.  The fact that he can land it on water adds an element of versatility

Remarkable as it may seem for a quadriplegic to be restarting his flying career again, what is more remarkable is that Arthur intends to fly the Seawind around the world on a mission to promote peace.  And at the risk of sounding like one of those awful shopping channel advertisements:  there’s more.  Through a third party, Arthur has managed to get in touch with the Cuban pilot who shot him down.  His hope is for the pilot, Major Rivas, to fly a leg of the journey with him: a reconciliation of former enemies.  Having recently met several former liberation fighters who were active on the same battlefields as me, I understand how such a meeting can help an ex-combatant to put the past to rest.  I can tell by the turn our conversation takes that he is itching to discuss the ins and outs of aerial combat with the man who pulled the trigger on that telegraph pole!

As with so many dreams, Arthur needs to raise funds to pay for completing his aircraft and to embark on his around the world flight.   This amounts to a substantial sum of money and will, in all likelihood, require the assistance of a large corporate sponsor.  Until then, his Dreamwings project will remain just that, a dream. 

For more information or to contribute to the funding of Project Dreamwings, visit Arthur’s website:  http://www.projectdreamwings.co.za/

Desert Hideaway - Chasing fugitives in the Namib

A version of this story first appeared in the Sunday Times Travel Weekly

I searched for Henno Martin’s hiding place.  I drove deep into the Naukluft region of the Namib Desert, the wilderness he called the gramadoelas.  A landscape of tightly folded valleys, bent and twisted ravines and stingy scrub.  A place where animals cling to a tenuous, dry, desert life.  An empty place which, in the 1940s, had no roads and no maps and no reason for anyone to visit unless they were looking for two German fugitives.

Martin and his friend, Hermann Korn and their dog, Otto, hid here during the Second World War.  The two young geologists decided that it would be better to spend the war hiding in the desert than be interned as the enemy.  Nobody knew when the war would end, and anyway, it was a war the two friends wanted nothing to do with.

They hunted the sparse game in the area with a Luger hand-gun, their hunting rifles having been confiscated at the beginning of the war.  They learned, after many failures, to get close enough to the Gemsbok and Zebra that were their primary quarry to kill them.  In the quickly evaporating pools in the deep shade of a gorge, they found a way to harvest fish.  They tried, and failed, to plant a vegetable garden.  With a combination of resilience and resourcefulness they survived for two years in an environment where failure could mean death. 

In his book "The Sheltering Desert", Martin described this corner of Namibia as somewhere "the devil had created in an idle hour...an impressive and intimidating" place.

Somewhere between the Kuiseb and Gaub passes I slowed the car expecting to pick up some sign,  of where they built their shelter.   Over the brow of a low pass, built years after Martin’s adventure, I came upon a cairn.  Did this mark the spot?  I parked and looked down the slope.  There was a path, which I hoped would lead the way to the shelter.  The barely discernable scraping in the gravel braided several times and then petered out into the stony desert.

I looked back at the car high above me on the road.  Below, the small gully dropped into a ravine which led into another, forming a rocky and confusing labyrinth.

I followed the gully and then scrambled to the ravine to where the deep shadows of afternoon tempted me out of the heat.   To continue would be to lose sight of the car:  another turn this way and one that way and would I remember the way back?  I took a few more steps, hopping onto rocks and sliding on stones and halted just before the car disappeared from view.  Down the ravine I could see no order to the brokenness of the terrain, no obvious reference points:  a maze in which to get lost, a place in which to die.  Martin, Hermann and Otto, who nearly died after being gored by a gemsbok, survived somewhere near here until they had to move, fearing that their hideout had been discovered.  I wondered who might have discovered it in this impenetrable place.  I turned around and trudged back up the slope.

Disappointed, I drove on, slowly, scouring the rocky brown terrain for a sign of the hiding place, hoping that I would notice a clue.  Like the authorities of the time, I never found the shelter of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn.  They chose their hiding place well.

I continued on towards the Gaub Pass hoping that perhaps the shelter was further along than I had anticipated.  As the horizon drew nearer to the sun the shadows lengthened and the rocks softened from their bleached harshness to a deepening red.  It was time to consider a camp site for the night.  I kept a look out for a sign pointing to accommodation and occasionally I stopped the car to watch the bat eared foxes foraging next to the gravel road.  There were still a couple of hours of light when I spotted a sign:  The Namib Valley Lodge and Camp Site.  There was a signal so I dialled the number on the board and the man, sounding a little surprised, told me there were sites available.  “Turn left from where you are and drive seven kilometres.  Then turn right and pass through the gate when you see the notice board and keep going until you get there.”  He didn’t tell me that there was another seven kilometres of jeep track to drive before we would reach our destination.  It was slow going but quite beautiful as we climbed slowly up into the mountains.  We startled a herd of zebra that then cantered off ahead of us before cutting across the track and disappearing into a kloof below.

When we arrived we realised that we had found our own kind of hide-out in the Namib Desert.  There was a solitary caretaker in residence.  I asked him for a camp-site and he pointed in the direction of three small, thatched rondavels.  Later we discover that, rustic on the outside, the rondavels contained hot showers heated by their own individual solar panels, immaculate private ablutions for each site.  Meanwhile, I gave up on conversation with the caretaker.  Though quietly friendly, he was not a man for small talk.  Perhaps spending so much time alone, surrounded by the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Namib mountain-scape is what reduces his conversational needs to the essentials.

The roadside sign pointing the way here had said “Namibia’s Valley of a Thousand Hills”.    Below us, beyond a lone quiver tree, stretches a scene that looks like the hide of a giant elephant.  A valley of a thousand ravines hemmed by ranges of saw-toothed mountains.

As the fire burned the hard thorn-wood, the cracked valleys below glowed like red embers in the dying of another day.  Martin and Korn must have gazed at similar scenes during their time in the desert as they spent long hours discussing their theories of life and the natural world.  Whereas I have plenty of supplies in a cooler full of ice and cold beer, the two fugitives had few luxuries.  Hardly knowing where their next meal would come from the men would often walk great distances in extreme heat through the canyons and onto the plains, seeking out new waterholes where there might be game to shoot.

Though I set out to find the shelter, and although I had felt disappointed by my failure to locate it, I feel a creeping satisfaction as the mystery lingers.  A confirmation that the Namib is one of the few wilderness areas left in the world, a place that can still keep its secrets.  Even though many people have visited the old shelter, it remains hidden to those without detailed directions. 

The night claims the view with a blackness unspoiled by artificial light and so I crawl into my tent.  As I draw myself down into my sleeping bag I resolve to return one day, next time with the map co-ordinates, to the place where the two courageous young adventurers successfully sought refuge in this empty place from the collective madness that was World War Two.

Some of my favourite Travel Quotes

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

Daniel J. Boorsti

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water. 

 W. C. Fields

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Aldous Huxley

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

Buddha

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Anais Nin

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

Rudyard Kipling

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

William Hazlitt

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

Paul Theroux

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

John Berryman