“…there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”
- Ernest Hemingway
January 11th: Dar es Salaam
We landed in Dar es Salam at night and are now slogging our way through this realm of sweat where everybody disappears in the dark except for white teeth and eyes and white clothes hovering in air heavy and laden with heat and noise and exhaust. The moon hangs jaundiced and bloated above and beckons us towards the teeming center of the din. Onwards, Inshallah.
At the hotel palms hang limp in the heat. In the distance, over the invisible water of the bay, towering clouds are lit with evanescent flashes, the sudden awakening of latent storms glowing like x-rayed skulls tethered to the turgid surface of the Indian Ocean. We have reached the eastern extremity of the continent.
After being detained in South Africa for almost a week by customs officials, we have finally made some headway towards our first demonstration flight in Africa. We are here in Dar es Salam with a Twin Otter that we are flying around the world for Viking, the manufacturer. I am the Captain and I arrived in Johannesburg a few days into the new year. The previous crew had brought the aircraft there from the Dubai Airshow and it stayed in Joburg over the Christmas break. For the next three weeks I will be taking this aircraft around Africa with demonstration flights planned in Nairobi, Abuja, and Algiers, as part of a world-wide sales tour that will eventually take us through the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, before we return home to Canada.
Our time in Joburg consisted primarily of recovering from jet lag while waiting anxiously by the hotel pool for updates on the aircraft export documents which were holding up our departure. We made a couple of trips to the Lanseria airport to prepare the aircraft and ensure that all the equipment was loaded on board. This Twin Otter has been missionized for ISR (Intelligence, surveillance, and Reconnaissance) operations. A S.C.A.R.
(Self-Contained Aerial Reconnaissance) pod is mounted on the wing, and a tactical workstation - consisting of two large screens, a joystick and keyboard, and an operator seat - has been installed in the cabin. The nose, just aft of the radome, houses an array of cameras for a ViDAR (Visual Detection and Ranging) surveillance system. The S.C.A.R. pod supports an EO/IR (ElectroOptical/Infrared) gimbal that can detect and track ground targets and display them to the ISR operator at the onboard tactical station.
For the many repositioning flights required to get the aircraft to the demos, we need to remove the pod from the wing and load it in the cabin of the aircraft. It weighs about ninety kilos, and when nested in its protective cradle it occupies the aft five feet of the cabin by the airstair door. At Lanseria, once we had completed the reconfiguration work at the hangar and loaded the aircraft, the cabin was full to the gunnels with just enough room remaining for seats to accommodate three crewmembers: Norbert, our engineer; Mick the systems operator who will run the tactical equipment for the demos; and Konstantin, from the sales team. Christophe is our co-pilot. He and I comprise the rest of the five-man crew.
In addition to the S.C.A.R. pod in its cradle and the tactical station and operator seat, the cabin and baggage compartments are loaded with a life raft, oxygen tank, survival kit, a large tool kit, two totes full of spares, and various Pelican cases full of spare components and tools for the pod. Occupying most of the space on the right-hand side of the cabin, behind the operator seat and in front of the S.C.A.R. pod, the ferry fuel system is packed into two large plastic totes which are strapped to seat tracks on the cabin floor.
The system will be installed for long flights, such as the water crossings to India and Indonesia. Two collapsible rubber bladders, when connected to an array of hoses, pumps and valves which will be installed in the cabin, can be filled with jet fuel, swelling like tumorous black sacks to consume the width of the cabin up to the base of the windows. Taut and bloated with marrow pulled from the primeval bones of a world buried millennia ago - over three thousand pounds of it, sloshing and straining at the walls of the rubber membranes - the bladders can extend the range of the aircraft up to one thousand six hundred nautical miles.
After four frustrating days of waiting in Johannesburg we attempted to bluff our way out of the country. We showed up at the airport, filed a flight plan, and towed the aircraft to the customs ramp for departure, hoping that the officers wouldn’t catch that our export documents still had not been processed. They didn’t. Unfortunately, they fabricated other Kafkaesque reasons to detain us, and sent us back to the hangar to unload everything and spread it out on the hangar floor for yet another inspection.
At this point I was starting to feel very much like Joseph K in The Trial, and the Nairobi demo, which we had already delayed, was in jeopardy. Fortunately, the customs officials were satisfied with their inspection and the following morning the export documents for the aircraft were released in time for us to depart. We were on our way.
On route to Dar es Salam we make tech stops in Harare and Lilongwe for fuel.
Both stops are quick and easy. At thirteen thousand feet we tack our way through frequent thunderheads that climb high above us, blooming livid against the blue sky to altitudes we can never reach in the Twin Otter, and occasionally we turn on the weather radar to probe their cores, penetrating their soft sides when they are ranked like shoals across the sky, their tops white and hard and rumpled above their dark skirts trailing sheets of rain across the green landscapes of Zimbabwe and Malawi.
After departing Lilongwe we fly up the western shore of Lake Malawi before crossing over its waters, a long turquoise swath running north to south; its eastern shoreline creates the border with Tanzania and beyond that we overfly terrain that rises to crests dotted with huts tangled upon the slopes - serpentine dirt tracks leading to nowhere - and then these slopes run down to sea level and broad swaths of dense rolling rainforest broken only by lone conical hills and ridges rising low and green from the flat jungle basin and muddy river bottoms like the algae-encrusted spines of half-buried leviathans.
Nearly fourteen hours after departing Johannesburg the sun sets behind us and we approach Dar es Salam in the dark.
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