Hugh Pryor
I have had a lot of fun during this past few years of flying. I have sneaked a Twin Otter out of Algeria, over Libya, to Tripoli and thence, across the Mediterranean, to the historic twinkling jewel box of Malta, at night.
It was an exciting start to a ferry flight, right down the length of the world’s longest river, the Nile.
When we finally arrived at the headwaters of that mighty waterway, the southern reaches of the Nile were to be our home for a couple of months, while we flew the sturdy old Twin Otter in support of the United Nations World Food Programme.
We were bringing food and other essential supplies to a population starved by twenty seven years of civil war. When I say ‘we’ I mean my crew and I and when I say ‘my crew’ I mean JP, our greatly valued engineer and Chrystal, my Senior Co-pilot who was hovering on the brink of command.
JP was one of those engineers whom I trusted implicitly. If he said it was OK to fly, I’d fly it, without question, even if there were bits missing. If he said it was NOT okay, then I wouldn’t touch it, even if my wife told me to!
The pleasure of flying with Chrystal was something I had not experienced before. She was from that tragic disaster area, Zimbabwe. She still referred to it as her home, although her family had been dispossessed, along with so many other unfortunates who dared to disagree with the megalomaniac pensioner whose regime brought that once prosperous and envied nation to its knees.
Chrystal was a gentle tom-boy. Her tough exterior was at odds with the delicate fineness of her hands and fingers. The ‘Number One’ haircut failed in its attempt to disguise the attractive femininity of her face, but there could be no doubt about the strength in her shoulders. Her trim, loose-limbed figure obviously worked for a living. Her laughter was generally reined in by shyness, but when it got out, it tickled my ribs from the inside. The pleasure of hearing it was only enhanced by its rarity. I could go on, but….well… what I really meant to say all along was that Chrystal was a genius at the books!
She almost made the filling and filing of ATC Flight Plans, Navigation Logs, Weight and Balance schedules, Daily Flight Reports (one for the company and one for the UN…not copies…different forms!) and Flight Folios, UN Voyage Reports, Weeklies and Monthlies, Summaries Of Hours, Passenger Manifests, Cargo manifests and returns, Fuel receipts and records and Personal Flying Log Books, look fun.
Anybody who can do that, and still smile, scores very high marks in my book to start with. Oh yes…and one more thing about Chrystal…she loved the old Twin Otter and, judging by her landings, it liked her a lot, too.
I have flown with really quite a few members of the so-called ‘Gentler Sex’ and I have yet to meet one who didn’t have that special relationship with the aircraft…that chemistry between pilot and aeroplane which is something absolutely without price. In our particular branch of aviation, we spend a lot of our time away from ground support. “If you want fuel, the drums are over there,” was very much the attitude of the starving masses whom we were serving.
Chrystal’s only concession to her gender was that she would always wear a pair of hard leather gloves, to protect those hands when she was rolling the 200 litre drums of JetA to the aircraft.
In other more privileged climes, there are ‘people-who-do’, all the little ancillary jobs, like flight planning, checking the met report, cargo loading, weight and balance calculations, emptying the seat back pockets, crossing the seat-belts and briefing the passengers.
So how, you might ask, do ladies fit into the rough and tumble of the ‘utility’ end of the aviation spectrum? I have to say, they fit in just as well as, if not better than a lot of their male counterparts. It appears that having bumps in the right places tends to elicit a strong positive, even protective, reaction from the masculine passengers. The female passengers, on the other hand, seem to exude a kind of quiet pride in the fact that there is one of their own sex up at the front.
You may be under the impression that this state of affairs is absolutely normal on the flight deck of a commercial aircraft, but the serenity is actually surprisingly fragile and can fall to pieces in seconds in the presence of an unexpected and unrehearsed emergency. Let me give you an example.
We were in flight, Chrystal and I, in our old friend, the UN Twin Otter, somewhere between Pulmok and Brong, in Southern Sudan. We had finished with the ‘After Take-off Check List’, called all the people we needed to call and were settling into the climb for a relaxing two hour trip back to our base in Lokichoggio in north west Kenya.
Our thirteen passengers in the main cabin assumed various levels of inertia, and in most cases, the eyelids down the back were closed before we reached cruising level.
All was tranquillity personified, in fact, until…the appearance over the glare shield… of a Large and Very Furious Hornet. This one was not just large, it was gigantic, and it was buzzing with fury. The wings gleamed with a menacing bronze iridescence, as if plated in some high technology alloy. The antennae protruded like target sensors from the front of the turret-like head. The thorax wore a belt of livid blood red fur. The skeletal waist only accentuated the size of the pendulous abdomen, whose interlinking plates tapered back to the housing for the machine’s daunting main armament, The Sting. Everything about this creature reeked of the potential to deliver unlimited quantities of excruciating pain, whenever an opportunity presented itself.
My eyes were hypnotized by the menacing dance as the giant insect probed our defences.
It was time for us to reveal our secret weapon. Hidden between Chrystal’s seat and the aft cockpit bulkhead is the covert stowage for ‘The Evacuator’.
This is a five-foot length of one-inch clear plastic hosepipe. In emergency situations such as the one we were experiencing, a humble piece of hosepipe can be worth a thousand ducats.
The simple action of opening the window and sliding one end of the hose outside, puts a weapon of chilling effectiveness, against members of the insect world, into the hands of a pilot.
The hornet seemed to realize that now the gloves were off, and it shrank reluctantly into the far, unreachable recesses of the demister vents. This is a place normally reserved for tiny screws and the desiccated remains of Tsetse flies which have succumbed to the baking sunlight during long-ago missions in Southern Sudan. But it provided no sanctuary from ‘The Evacuator’.
Nothing could resist the powerful vacuum generated by the slipstream passing the end of the hosepipe, outside the window. Chrystal aimed the ravenous maw into the hornet’s hiding place. The insect battled bravely against the roaring wind and then suddenly, as if in one final act of defiance, the former terror machine relinquished its grasp of the vent fairings and braced its whole structure across the voracious jaws of ‘The Evacuator’.
The titanic struggle could only end one way, of course. The insatiable power of the air, rushing past the quaking limbs of the insect was unstoppable. Gradually each claw gave way and then, suddenly, in a blur of speed, our worthy foe was hurled from the helter-skelter, to start a new life at eleven thousand feet, in a part of Sudan of which he could not possibly have dreamed, until he came face to face with Chrystal and ‘The Evacuator’.
And the moral of this tale? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? Always check that you have a five foot length of one inch clear plastic hosepipe on you when you travel by air. No-one should be caught without their ‘Evacuator’!