Speedbird follows the swallows

[hawkeye52]

Edit: "Rome", not "Alex".
- H52

 

[tgibson]

Hi Ralf,

You have a PM.

Tom Gibson

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Oh, and by the way, that "pic" of you and Tony at "Alex" -- there were no roll-ons back in the Fifties. LOL!!!
- Hawkeye52

That's what I thought, Hawkeye52 - and you're right, the picture was taken at Ciampino; but a strange thing had happened in Rome earlier that day...

One of my old suitcases was getting a bit shabby and I thought I should look out for a nice replacement. On my way back from that visit to the Vatican where I got the postcards, noticed a shop which sold baggage, plus a lot of women's overcoats, headscarves, scent, etc. It seemed kind of expensive, but no harm in window-shopping. While I was browsing round, the owner started talking to me and asked my name. He couldn't manage 'Roggeveen', but was pleased to inform me that 'Ralf' is 'Raffaele' in Italian.

'You are piloto?' he suggested, and I admitted that it was true. 'Ah, Capitano! I 'ave justa da ting for you!' (I'm afraid those were his exact words - we had to speak English as I don't know much Italian). He went to the back of the shop, quickly returning with that roll-on case in the picture - the first I - or anyone - ever saw. My new friend, Aldo, explained that they had only just developed it.

'It is a wonderful idea, but I couldn't possibly afford this,' I said, admiring the brilliant concept with its fantastic Italian styling.

'For il Capitano, it is free, gratis! Only condition is you must testa da roll-on and reporta back to Aldo in Roma.'

So it was a deal - and I promised to drop by every time I was in Rome and let him know how the marvellous new invention was doing.

Well, it must be very good indeed because I STILL HAVE IT and IT HAS TRAVELLED ALL OVER THE PLANET.

(My only slight criticism is that I got one with the wrong initials on it. As you all know, my correct initials are "RR", but unfortunately I took a case with "GG" on it. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers; it was, and remains, a great gift.)

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

African Night Flight

Wondered what to call this leg of the journey, which is HSSS - HUEN. Thought of things like 'Darkest Africa' (ha, ha), but have settled on African Night Flight - which is also the title of a very good Bowie song off the terribly under-rated 1979 album Lodger:

African nightmare one-time Mormon
More men fall in Hullabaloo men
I slide to the nearest bar
Undermine chairman
I went too far
Bent on a windfall
rent a Sony

Wonder
how the dollar went down
Gotta get a word to Elizabeth's father
Hey no, he wished me well

Seemed like another day
I could fly
into the eye of God on high

His burning eye will see me through
One of these days, one of these days
Gotta get a word through one of these days

Asanti habari habari habari
Asanti nabana nabana nabana

It's more about treetop bush flying than a big passenger aircraft, but very atmospheric and conjours up a whole story in just a few words (as a 'one-time Mormon', I'm sure he's a good pilot and will get word to Elizabeth's father alright). There is more, do get to hear it.

Our slot was 21.00, everyone in Khartoum preferring to do everything at night as the day is far too hot for anything. Some interesting airlines to be seen there at that time:

A Sabena DC-6. The Belgians were still big in Africa in the 1950s, as we shall see...

Someone from neighbouring Ethiopia, his name written in Amharic as well as English.

One of the local DC-3s which we already clocked by daylight. You can see our friend from Sabena leaving to take off one slot ahead of us. Here's me between those two, just getting clearance:

At the end of the runway...

...and we're outa there!

I'll be posting some more in a few hours' time.

 

[hawkeye52]

"GG", huh? Very cool, Signóre Capitano.

- H52

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Flying over endless desert in the dark is even more boring than going over it in daylight. The only extra detail is the stars...

'I wonder if anybody is flying through the night on any of those other worlds?' mused Tony, getting uncharacteristically philosophical for an Englishman.

'I doubt it. Anyway, if they are it certainly won't be in such a superb machine as this de Havilland DH.106 Comet...'

'For all we know, nothing is real. This whole world - us, the aircraft, the desert, the skies - could just be the figment of somebody's imagination...'

'I don't care, as long as he or she isn't crazy. Check the Mach speed, Tony. We should be making 0.72 by now.'

And sure enough, we were. As you can see, we are also heading rapidly towards the Equator, eating up those lines of Latitude.

Here's the route map:

In geographical terms the southern part of Sudan will turn from desert into swamp, the Sudd, from which the whole country (about the size of Europe) gets its name. Then we fly into the top of the Great Rift Valley where, the scientists tell us, human beings first emerged. There we change heading to fly southwesterly and land almost on the Equator at the top of Lake Victoria. This was named in 1858 by the British explorer John Hanning Speke, enabling Queen Victoria to beat Nasser, Rameses II and Alexander the Great in terms of getting your name on the map (a large chunk of the Pacific between Chile and Easter Island is called the Roggeveen Basin, so I'm not unduly impressed). Obviously the local people around the lake will have other names for it; but bordering several countries must help when it comes to making up the internationally-accepted name.

Thought it might be interesting to label the map politically:

Here are those countries today, all independent and all in varying states of stability or anarchy. Somalia, as you may be aware, is now actually defined as a FAILED STATE and has no proper government. Here's how those countries were in the 1950s:

Blue for the French, black for Belgian and red for British territory. Ethiopia was the only independent nation in NE Africa then. Most of the others were due to get their freedom in the early '60s, with varying happiness or failure as nation states ever since. Oddly enough, Kenya, now quite a successful African country, was in a State of Emergency for most of the 1950s, with the Mau Mau nationalists fighting a guerilla war of independence against the British. Note that the British took over Somaliland from the Italians after (well, during) WW2 and Tanganyika, now Tanzania, from the Germans after WW1. Everything looks lovely labelled in Comic Sans, doesn't it? (Mike will never forgive me, he is busy waging a personal war against that font).

We fly on through the night...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

After an hour or so we crossed the border into Ethiopia and were in contact with Addis Ababa Centre. As you'll have seen from the maps above, we then crossed briefly back into Sudan, before Kenya. Off on our port side was Lake Turkana, which I could just make out in the darkness:

On night flights like this aircrew always hope that all the passengers will do the sensible thing and just try to sleep. Unfortunately, on that particular occasion, not a bit of it. Not only did they all stay wide awake, but worse, some of them started causing trouble. Jackie came and told me about it.

'Oh, Captain Roggeveen, you'll heff to deal with this, I simply can't menage,' she said, sounding very like Olivia, well-known daughter of our 'plane's designer, Geoffrey de Havilland. 'It's the, um, coloured gentlemen, you know, those Effrican lawyers; they've UPSET another of the pessengers.'

'Well, what have they done? Lawyers are often fairly irritating, but surely they haven't started getting legal with anybody at 29000 feet?'

'Please go and speak with them; they won't listen to reason!'

So I left Tony (and George) in charge and went to investigate.

Jackie told me they were called Mr Oliver and Mr Nelson, so I walked down the aisle and introduced myself. They were sitting quietly, having a smoke (as everyone did in those days), pouring over a lot of typed documents. Obviously they had brought plenty of work with them. Oliver was a small man with eyeglasses and a receeding hairline, but Mr Nelson was rather younger, with a parting in his thick hair, smartly-dressed (as everyone who went in aeroplanes always was in those days), well-built and very strong - as I found out when I shook his hand.

'You seem more like a boxer than a lawyer,' I ventured.

'Ha, ha, it's funny you should say that Captain, I do, indeed, box; but only in an amateur capacity. Most of my real fighting is done in the courtroom.'

'And what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen? My stewardess tells me that you have been involved in some sort of, er, altercation?'

'Oh, that,' said Mr Oliver, 'It is not us. It is that awful Boer over there. Oh, sorry, of course you must be an Afrikaaner yourself with a name like...'

'Don't worry; I'm Dutch, but no insult taken. I'll go and have a word with him.'

The person they had indicated was a stocky, rather scowling older white man sitting with a very pretty blonde who I knew to be his secretary, if not also his mistress. (But he was een echt Afrikaaner, a real Boer, so he probably spent his spare time rummaging through a Bible rather than her pantyhose.) It later occurred to me that I should have addressed him in Dutch, but perhaps because I was captaining a British aircraft, we both spoke English.

'It's not me, it's those Kaffirs!' he spat. 'Why 'aven't they got siperate toilets?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, they're Kaffirs. Must 'ave siperate toilets. I'm not sharing a toilet with any Kaffirs!'

'You don't have to use it at the same time as anybody else. Actually the British Overseas Air Corporation takes a very dim view of that sort of thing, Mr Du Toit. As for 'separate toilets', we are pleased to offer a separate Gentlemen's Valeting Chamber and a Ladies' Powder Room. This is a British aeroplane and no distinction is made as to the races. In fact, everyone on this jet-engined Speedbird service flies First Class!' And I turned on my heel and stalked back to the flightdeck before he could add anything else offensive.

When I sat down and strapped myself back in, Tony told me that we were now over Uganda (except that it's flag, and that of Kenya, was, of course, still the at the time).

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

This map shows the approach into Entebbe:

This looks simple enough, but we were to land facing NW on Runway Three Zero, so swung south and our final was from over the lake. Also, despite proximity to a large body of water, the airport is still nearly 4000 feet above sea level.

Entebbe was one of the world's great airports, put in this fantastic spot by the British for exactly the use we're now making of it, a stopover when you fly down Africa. Older readers will remember the hijaking of an Air France Airbus in June 1976 by a charming combination of Palestinian & Baader-Meinhof terrorists. As it was supposed to be flying to Israel, more than 100 passengers were Jewish. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin sought to befriend the Arabs and Soviets by allowing the aircraft to land at Entebbe. The Israelis then managed a brilliant rescue, sending a commando unit by Hercules transport (they also blew up the Ugandan MiG Air Force on the ground while they were about it). Hijacking, terror crime of choice during the '60s and '70s, suddenly became extremely unfashionable after that. (One funny detail is that an Israeli firm had been redecorating the old airport, so they had a complete set of highly accurate plans!).

We fly over the capital of Uganda, Kampala, which is about 20 miles NE of Entebbe:

Over the lake and getting close. There is a very useful lighthouse flashing away there:

FS98 had a flying lesson of a night landing in a Cessna (somewhere in Arizona I think), which I became obsessed with & practiced thousands of times, so coming down in the dark holds no terrors for me.

This picture shows that the buildings were quite a distance from the runway and, once stopped, you have to turn around and drive back down it to get to the old terminal.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

I thought I dealt with that little incident rather well. All part of being Captain.

Mr Oliver

Mr Nelson

Mr Du Toit

The Secretary

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

So here we are at 1950s Entebbe, DC-3s guaranteed...

There are three of them neatly lined up in front of the terminal. Tony wouldn't take on the bet that they'd be from EAA, East African Airways Corporation.

Always more exciting to arrive somewhere at night, isn't it?

Sure enough, East African. Our ETA had been 23.30hrs, but we were about quarter of an hour late, so it was nearly midnight. Yet there was more going on here then than there had been at Khartoum in broad daylight. Parked neatly at the end of that row of Gooneybirds and saw the passengers off...

But I'd noticed that something interesting was coming in to land soon afterwards...

I stayed on the flightdeck with the lights off and watched him come in.

Like us, he had to turn round at the end of the runway and come all the way back.

There he goes, a Hunting Clan DC-6. This conjours up an image of a lot of Scottish people stalking deer on some sort of Highland mountainside, but in fact it was an amalgam of two British shipping companies, the Clan Line and the one run by the Hunting family. They did quite well in the 1950s by getting British army contracts to carry troops to places like Singapore. Later they merged with Airwork (one of whose fleet we saw back at Cairo, was it?) and formed British United, but ceased to operate during the 1960s. He parked up at the end:

You can also see a mysterious Piper Cub coming in there at about 00.00hrs, but I didn't hang around to find out what that was all about. Rather enjoy this shot of Yoke Peter's tail from the hangar corner:

And a general view of Entebbe by night:

Expect it'll be even more interesting in the daytime, and I guess we'll get to see that lake.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Flying to FLLI

Here's the map of the next bit:

We're going to cross five countries. When we leave Uganda we'll clip the top lefthand corner of Tanzania, overfly Rwanda and Burundi, then go down Democratic Republic of Congo and into Zambia for our destination Livingstone on the Zambezi River. It is very near Victoria Falls which are three times bigger than the Niagara ones and which I was hoping to see this flight, having downloaded enhanced scenery, not just the old airport.

14.40hrs at Entebbe, one of those EAA DC-3s is just off and another seems to have been replaced by a Viscount:

Did I show this Entebbe landing map already? apologies if I did, but it's useful to show how the airport has water both sides:

We'll be going out the way we came in, from Runway Three Zero then swinging southwesterly across the lake.

The building the hostages were held in in '76. The Tower looks similar to many British ones, including the old Heathrow one. Must have been a standard design.

Did anyone else ever have that computer game where you could BUILD an airport, inside & out? You had to do stuff like arrange contracts shops in the Duty Free airside, as well as attracting airlines. I got fairly addicted to (and therefore good at) it and eventually managed to create a vast, hideous complex with several terminals and runways, hundreds of flights coming & going. As you played on, it got more & more detailed. I stopped when I finally installed a bouncy castle in the children's play area of Terminal One. I thought: has my life come to this? Who thought THAT game up?

Back to Reality. Watching the DC-3 leave:

He rumbles by and smoothly takes to the air rather sooner than we will from that particular runway...

Yesterday I caught Mrs RR watching a very bad movie on afternoon TV, The Iron Petticoat (GB, 1956). At the end you see Katherine Hepburn & Bob Hope pilot a 'Russian' DC-3 from England to Moscow. It's terrible, but reassuring to know that someone else thinks up such daft ideas.

(Kate is wondering what the H she let herself in for; but don't worry! She made On Golden Pond 25 years later.)

What was that about Back to Reality? Oh yes, there goes the EAA DC-3, no doubt full of Coffee planters, Copper prospectors, Copra miners and their long-suffering wives:

OK, so I'm touching the grass? It isn't Wimbledon. Anyway, I lined up quite well:

Do you mine Copra?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Now you can see the lake (and another DC-3 arriving) behind...

...more lake in front of us:

We're on our way into the Heart of Africa.

I was so disappointed that the lake was in pitch darkness last night, that I took a few screenies of it daylight:

It's bordered by Uganda (N/NW), Kenya (E) and Tanzania (S/SW).

The Uganda/Tanzania border runs through the middle of the lake at 1 Degree South. Here's a map with us crossing it:

BK is Bukoba in Tanzania which has an airport. Note the Latitude!

'Look at the jungle below,' said Tony:

'It's more likely to be tropical rainforest,' I suggested (being Captain). And there were still plenty of lakes, but not as big as Victoria:

We also saw cleared & cultivated areas where people live:

Everything looks so neat & tidy & beautiful from the air, doesn't it just?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Unfortunately we are just passing over Rwanda; nice flag, shame about the 1994 genocide. The situation was that this small country, with the borders of a pre-colonial kingdom, had always tended to be controlled by its English-speaking, better-educated Tutsi minority. The French-speaking Hutu majority, encouraged by their politicians (some of whom have since been indicted for Crimes against Humanity), armed themselves and went on a murderous rampage, killing hundreds of thousands - possibly up to a million - of the unfortunate Tutsi. (Hotel Rwanda is quite a good film about these horrors.) Disgracefully, there is some evidence that the French government colluded with 'their' Francophone Hutus, giving them more effective weapons than just machetes. When some unlucky tourists were also murdered, the Hutus only spared the ones with French passports. Tourists, of course, go to places like that to look at the wildlife & the scenery - but wherever there are people there are also politics.

I think this must have been the Mitumba Range which runs down one side of the Great Rift Valley:

A fine view, but I was going in the wrong direction at that point, due to mishearing a heading change! Managed to turn right round and keep going south to Lake Tanganyika:

We are now over Burundi, its capital Bujumbura being at the northernmost end of the long lake. We picked up Bujumbura Centre after about 20 minutes with Kigali in Rwanda.

Flew right over the airport...

And you can just make out tiny aeroplanes parked down there!

DC-3s no doubt. Once you're over that lake it's into Democratic Republic of Congo. Have you noticed how countries with 'Democratic' in their names never are democracies? It is not to be confused with Congo, another country to the west. In the 1950s the Belgians were still, hopelessly, trying to hang onto their 19th Century empire here in the middle of Africa. This had originally been acquired by their bad King Leopold II who owned, and robbed, it privately! In the early 20th Century he was forced to hand it over to the Belgian government, when horrible exploitation and atrocities against the Congolese people were exposed. Still a major headache for the United Nations - is there any end to these flags?

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Yet the trouble with those pretty little flags is that they eat up picture download space! Got excited when we saw this river and hoped it might be the mighty Congo/Lualaba itself, but looking in the atlas I'm afraid it was only a tributary:

The atlas says Réserve de Hippopotames about there, so that must be where they come from (the French-speaking ones at least).

This map, south of the hippo's, shows Lake Tanganyika and that place, Kalemie, to our east:

Then something pretty, but annoying (like Cheryl Cole & Danii Minogue on X Factor) started happening. It went dark (slowly):

And I wanted to see Victoria Falls! This was caused by leaving three hours later than originally planned (and not remembering how quickly dusk comes in the, er, Tropics).

We did, however, cross the border into Zambia (Northern Rhodesia, part of the snappily-named Central African Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland (!) in the '50s).

Even virtual worlds have their nightfall...

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Friend of mine, Frank, had a sabbatical job teaching art in Tanzania a few years ago. He was put up in a hotel for a few weeks. Noticed there were some interesting fish dishes on the menu. He likes fish, so decided to try a different one each evening. The first day he tried the cheapest and it was truly delicious. Tried the others each meal after that; all more expensive, none so good. So he had the cheap, tasty fish several times again during the remainder of his stay. He even enjoyed it on his final evening there and, paying the tab, said to the waiter:

'How come the very best fish is so cheap?'

'Not many people have that fish, Sir.'

'Well, they're stupid! It's superb, and the best bargain.'

'That fish comes from Lake Tanganyika, Sir; the rest is from Lake Victoria.'

'But we're right by Lake Victoria, surely the local fish should be the cheapest?'

'Local fish hasn't fattened on dead Rwandans floating in this lake, Sir.'

We fly right by Lusaka, capital of Zambia:

This country has been very fortunate to have had a good leader, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, since independence in 1964. He led the United National Independence party and was (relatively) democratically re-elected President several times until 1991 when he did agree to retire. Although Zambia had plenty of problems, Kaunda generally handled things well and, unlike lesser men, did not rob and betray his people or become corrupted by power. He is still alive, living a modest and Christian life, including much charitable work. (And he's very good at ballroom and has danced with the Queen of England.)

I think this was Chilanga, shortly after the heading change over Lusaka:

And you can see both cities in this shot:

Approaching Livingstone:

Unfortunately I didn't get down quickly enough and they kept me flying around for a while. This is an annoying picture of going right past the destination airport (by now at the final approach altitude of 2000ft above ground level):

We were AN HOUR later than our ETA, even though Yoke Peter had made a very good Mach 0.71 - 0.74 during the cruise. Time was only lost in climb & descent, both of which are more difficult than with the more sophisticated Comet 4.

What was even more irritating was knowing that Victoria Falls was thundering away down there in the dark! Finally made it (going a bit slow here, but safely down & didn't stall!):

Makes Khartoum look like Schiphol. Nobody about:

There IS a bar somewhere in those bleak-looking buildings, so we parked up (not difficult under the circumstances) and went off in search of a nice cold beer.

Airport Livingstone, I presume.

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

A Thursday morning in November at Livingstone in the early 1950s:

Deliberately chose to go around 11.40 as aeroplaney things would be happening then. Quite apart from another airliner, that cheeky little fellow slipped out in front of us.

The (1937) Ercoupe Erco, probably known as a Club-Air by this time. It pops up all over the place and has been known to land in dangerously close proximity to the big boys too. Katherine is letting Bob drive in this case:

"The Ercoupe is novel in that it dispenses with rudder pedals, being flown entirely by the control wheel" Green &/or Pollinger tells us in my old book. Realistic for flightsimmers who are also without rudder pedals then.

Here's the flightplan down to Jo'burg. I have made some political maps, labelling countries then & now, but won't inflict them on you just yet.

Rare Central African Airways visitor to Livingstone:

They were the carrier for the Central African Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland (phew! Its government probably collapsed due to massive ink shortages) 1946 - 67, so the local airline, as the CAF included Zambia which (as the political map below will show) was then called Northern Rhodesia. There goes the Erco:

I tried to shove in before the Viscount, but...

OK, OK, age before beauty. Then it WAS our turn:

Where's he gone? Back to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (as Harare in Zimbabwe was then known)? I don't care.

It can be done with less runway & less pitch than the Comet 4 requires...

And there's the Zambesi River just south of the airport.

 

[Cowboy1968]

God I love the Comet. To bad it never fully recovered from its disasters and following grounding......it could have grabbed the market that Boeing stole from it. I fly the Comet but in Canadian Pacific liveries from that time......This is a flight leaving Seattle heading to British Columbia.....

 

[Ralf Roggeveen]

Beautiful. You've given me an idea Cowboy1968! (My poor old Canadian Pacific DC6 might be getting a long rest soon.)

Meanwhile, back in Africa, we need to know what we're flying into. The map today:

All independent countries. The tiny Kingdom of Swaziland is good fun. When the King wants a new wife he just gets all the good-looking girls to dance with not much on in front of him and picks a few (well, it's good fun for the King, at least). But in those far off 1950s:

The British are still in red, but this time we've got Portuguese colonies in that fetching pink shade.

South Africa is, of course, the big one. After the Second World War it was obvious that the British could not hang onto their Empire, notably India, which was independent as early as 1947. Much of the rest of the Empire had been acquired in order to protect routes to India anyway (e.g. Egypt & the Suez Canal and indeed, South Africa itself). Attitudes towards countries like South Africa, with its useful ports and bays, changed when gold & diamonds were found inland). We already saw that Federation of the two Rhodesias & Nyasaland which the British were anxious to grant indepedence to. This was fine with the North and Kenneth Kaunda, and also with Nyasaland which became Malawi under the eccentric but effective Dr Hastings Banda. Problems arose in the countries where white settlers, who had often been there for generations, didn't like the idea of black majority rule. Southern Rhodesia came up with a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI 1965) against the British, was expelled from the Commonwealth (no Queen!), and ran as Rhodesia right through to 1979 when, amazingly, it was a British colony again for a few months before becoming Zimbabwe.

South Africa was even more complicated because of the originally Dutch Afrikaner population, about 60% of the whites, who had never liked the Brits at all. In fact they had fought two wars against them (teaching the British army some useful lessons about firepower & manoeverability and giving them the idea of Commandos). It was effectively an independent settler colony, the Union of South Africa, from 1910 and fought alongside Britain in both World Wars. In 1948 the Afrikaner Nationalist Party gained a majority and formed the government in whites-only elections. They set up the notorious apartheid system of 'separate but equal development' for the white & black populations. At its craziest this meant that because of the colour of your skin you had to live in a racially-segregated area (called a Bantustan) and go to work for the whites in a 'foreign' part of your own country, showing a hated 'Pass Card' to travel there! And of course the black majority had no civil rights whatsoever. This was resisted by the African National Congress, formed in 1912 but a banned organisation from 1961 after which many of its leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were imprisoned. (South West Africa/Namibia, an ex-German colony, was still administed by South Africa in the '50s.)

 

[Cowboy1968]

I love the this flight. i look forward to the next installment....

 

[Cazzie]

Wow Ralf, just by happenstance I clicked on this, super travelogue.

Where would I be without CalClassics? I probably would have never ventured into the craft of skinning.

Caz