January 12th: Dar es Salaam to Nairobi
The weather is clear and on departure from Dar es Salaam the white sand beaches of Zanzibar glitter just offshore as we climb past the island to thirteen thousand feet. Our flight path to Nairobi takes us over the eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Although we are flying through skies marred only by drifting cumulous flotsam, we cannot see Kilimanjaro’s grim visage as we pass only thirty miles to the east of the summit. The mountain’s verdant flanks rise steeply into a shroud of white and grey cloud thick upon the slopes where they continue to climb unseen towards the blunt peak brooding beneath its snowy mantle at nearly twenty thousand feet. Here looms the highest peak in Africa. The loftiest free-standing peak in the world. Its ice fields shrinking and snows diminished since Hemingway immortalized them, but still there, remote and alien high above the sweltering swards of the African savanna.
This is the first of many icons that have brought me to Africa with the feverish fanaticism of a zealot staggering into the desert, starving, with wild eyes, in search of revelation. I have been planning and anticipating this part of the trip for months. It is just the first leg of an epic world tour, but although I have flown airplanes all over the world, this will be my first time in Africa. While we were languishing in Johannesburg, I felt like a captive lion stalking the perimeters of its cage. I am responsible for all the planning of this trip and operating in Africa is a daunting unknown. Did I pick the right airports and routes? Will we be able to keep to our itinerary with all our contingency days already torched by the delay in South Africa? Will we have more customs issues? Will we be able to get all the necessary overflight and landing permits for the aircraft, which is flying on a restricted certificate of airworthiness?
Now, every time the wheels of the aircraft depart the runway these pressures and worries drop away like the ground below us, diminishing and replaced by flying the aircraft, by the moment by moment sights of Africa as the props churn and pull us across the ever-changing landscape.
Once we cross the border into Kenya and are talking to Nairobi Flight Information on the radio, we cancel IFR and descend past coffee plantations on the high green slopes, down to one thousand feet above ground where we follow the Athi river across the Savanah past grass airstrips in the lee of stone ridges. Past huts clustered along the river. Past more dirt tracks and lonely dirt roads. It is the rainy season, and everything is a tumultuous green.
We are bound for Wilson Airport. It is a VFR (Visual Flight Rules) only airport - it does not have instrument approaches. We need to get cleared through the control zone of Jomo Kenyatta International and follow a published visual arrival procedure to land at Wilson. The shadow of the Twin Otter follows us, flitting across the savanna like a wraith outside my window as we stay at sixty-two hundred feet ASL, only eight hundred feet above ground, while we talk to Nairobi Approach at Jomo Kenyatta and slide beneath the jets on approach to runway zero-six. We are completely unfamiliar with the area and the arrival is based on landmarks such as Twin Bridges and Silos. We have programmed their coordinates into the FMS, but when we are suddenly handed over to Wilson tower and cleared to land, the only guidance we have is the FMS taking us to the center of the airport which we cannot yet see from eight hundred feet with low hills in front of us and beyond that the seething disorder of Nairobi’s cluttered outskirts. We clear the hills and are abeam the threshold and nearly on top of the airport when Christophe and I both pick it out from the surrounding sprawl of roofs and roads. I pull the power to idle, holding the nose up and pushing the prop levers forward to slow to flap speed while the props howl at maximum RPM, and then I call for full flap. As the flaps travel I push the nose down and then further down while banking the aircraft hard towards the threshold and then lining up with runway zero-seven, which we are cleared to land on despite a ten knot tailwind that is noticeable in the flare as we soar over the asphalt waiting for the aircraft to settle. It does, with a chirp of the tires, while I pull the power levers back past their stops, the props roaring as they reverse pitch and thrash the air. The aircraft slows towards the end of the runway where we exit on the last taxiway.
We are directed to the customs ramp. A frenzy of aircraft take-off and land. Cessna Caravans are being loaded with tourists bound for safari camps and Dash 7s and Dash 8s lumber like tired beasts of burden past other aircraft parked crowded together on the small aprons and clustered around the crossing runways or in-between taxiways with their landing gears submerged in tall grass. The airport is a frenzy of activity and hearkens back to the golden age of aviation before roads opened up the vast spaces of Africa. It reminds me of my years spent flying in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. The end of the road where vintage aircraft are bought cheap and worked hard in the bush.
Customs officials swarm all over the aircraft. Nobody can decide what to do with us. Finally, we are permitted to taxi to the hangar that has been arranged for the demo, to unload and finish clearing customs there.
We cross runway one-four near the threshold and taxi the sliver of taxiway Alpha, the wings swaying as we traverse a ditch onto apron Golf. The apron is stacked with Cessnas and Islanders and drab and beaten Dorniers. Jetstreams sit with Garrett engines whining, waiting to depart. Abeam taxiway Hotel, halfway down the ramp, I bring the aircraft to a stop. We can see the hangar at the end of the ramp, its sides rising above the surrounding slew of airplanes, but the only path to it is a narrow defile of asphalt between aircraft parked on either side. Cessnas are parked in the grass on our left. Aircraft parked in haphazard profusion fill the ramp on our right. Amidst the clutter of aircraft is a hulking Fokker, its nose jutting out where our right wing needs to pass. Beyond that the path makes a right angle turn towards the hangar, between more aircraft stacked on either side.
(Video Credit: Mick Sheehy)
Incredibly, the rampies beckon us onwards. But I shut down the engines and get out to wait for a tow.
Towing the aircraft to the hangar is the most nerve-wracking part of the flight. Both wings hang over the many surrounding aircraft, nearly brushing antennae or props that need to be turned to their lowest arc for clearance, wing-walkers vigilant while others push Cessnas out of the way and the tug driver
pirouettes the aircraft around the corner and pulls it the last hundred meters to the hangar entrance.
The hangar entrance isn’t high enough to accommodate the tail of the aircraft and we leave it pulled nose-in, its up-thrust tail standing stark outside and exposed, like the sail of a ship driven towards a rocky shore.
After unloading the aircraft and hanging the S.C.A.R. pod on the wing with a forklift to prepare for tomorrow’s demo, we leave the aircraft and cross the muddy parking lot to the Kenyan Aero Club. The old building dwells in the shade of surrounding trees. Inside, polished wood dark and exotic gleams in the shadows under the low ceiling. There is a Merlin engine taken from a spitfire and encased in glass, half of its twelve cylinders cut away to expose its core. A wooden prop from some unknown and misbegotten flying machine, some vanished behemoth of the skies, stands from the floor to the low ceiling. A long bar with dusky bottles and tables and chatter are all subsumed within, history hanging in the air, as palpable as the shadows.
We pass through to the back of the club and out into the sunshine where tables and chairs sit on the grass before a fence that backs onto the airport. In the heat of the
afternoon we drink beer with the Kenyan sales rep and talk about the Twin Otter and the demo the next day, while caravans snarl in and out of the airport, coming and going from grass strips and safari lodges and small communities far-flung across the face of the savanna.
We discover that on our way into Wilson Airport we flew right over a wildlife park on the outskirts of Nairobi. Konstantin, Norbert and Mick saw elephants and giraffes while Christophe and I had our eyes skinned out the windscreen, scouring the unfamiliar vista for the airport.
That night massive thunderstorms rear monstrously in the dark and rain falls heavy and continuously upon Nairobi.
Comentarios