Hugh Pryor
Dan joined us in Angola. He was tall, athletically built, with a boyish hair style which sported what we suspected were carefully applied sun tints. His hair also disguised quite successfully his age which was nudging fifty.
The Red Cross girls fell for Dan in a big way and this hero-worship aroused a certain amount of antagonism among the more heavily married crew members and even some of the unmarrieds who saw Dan as a trespasser on their territory.
Pure jealousy of course, but then there’s nothing quite like a bit good old-fashioned spite to add spice to the social pantomime. Dan could not, of course, lavish his attentions on all the girls, so there were quite a number of the neglected ones who joined the “Green Party” as we were known…..not green, as in “Green Peace”, you understand. In fact almost the opposite, really, as in “Green with Envy”.
Quite unnecessarily, Dan felt that he had to boost his reputation still further with the crews by dwelling at enormous length upon his long years of experience in the Royal Navy. He never actually claimed to have been a Pilot in the Royal Navy, but he always used to wear the white kid gloves, suitably soiled and grubby, which are the exclusive preserve of front line military pilots.
His conversation was always laced with words of avuncular advice to those who had not yet entered the arena of “Active Duty”…..”Always carry a spare set of boot laces,” he would suddenly insert, half way through a discussion on Bar-B-Q’s, “Because if you get taken alive, you’re going to have a lot of walking to do.”
These instructions actually came from the Red Cross Standard Operating Procedures, which Dan knew hardly anybody had read. But it all proved that Dan was one step ahead of the game, which implied that he was several steps ahead of us plodders.
In actual fact, Dan was quite a low-time pilot who, we discovered, had never left Terra Firma during his time in the Navy, as he was always much too busy cleaning lavatories and Senior Officers’ cars…..No, that’s a bit unfair. I believe he did occasionally get to clean the odd helicopter as well…..well Somebody’s got do it, haven’t they?
One of Dan’s more peculiarly quirky pieces of advice concerned the use of head-sets in the cockpit and purported to come from his long experience in the line of fire. “You should never ever wear your head-set during take-off or landing!”
“Why not, Dan?”
“Trust me. If the little bastards are going to get you, that’s when they’ll do it. And if you have to disembark in a hurry, believe me, you don’t want to have all those wires wrapped around your neck as you bail out!”
All sounds pretty authentic stuff, but if the truth be known, the only time you really need a head-set in a Twin Otter is during Take-off and Landing. So I suppose it really comes down to this: do you want to die because of the remote possibility that you survive the crash after “The Little Bastards got you”, only to be garrotted by you headset cables as you exited. Or alternatively, would you prefer to die because the headset-less pilot never heard the copilot’s call for the control locks to be removed before takeoff. (I know of at least three disasters caused by this very problem.)
Whatever the pro’s and con’s of these procedures, Our Dan continued to go through the ritual, every flight. Just before take-off he would laboriously remove his head-set and, without looking, he would hang it on the hook on the cockpit wall behind his head. After take-off, before requesting the climb checks, he would ceremoniously reach back with practised ease, to retrieve his head-set.
The only problem with this manoeuvre was that the little cockpit fan was right in the path of Dan’s searching fingers and every time a coconut! The loud FFRRRRRRRRRP!! as the little plastic blades chewed at Dan’s finger would inevitably be followed by the soft sniggering of the co-pilot.
Absolutely infuriating as I’m sure you will appreciate.
One day it happened once too often. We were doing rotations into Kwima, a small town about twenty minutes flying time from our base in Huambo in the central highlands of Angola. Kwima had been isolated for weeks. surrounded by rebel bandits.
The gardens had been extensively mined and, after the first few deaths, the locals had given up trying to cultivate them. Food ran out and we were called in.
We could normally fit in ten or eleven rotations a day to Kwima because, with the loading and unloading, the average time for a round trip was about an hour, sometimes a bit less. On the sixth rotation, Dan got airborne, nude-headed as usual, and when he reached up to get his head-set for the climb checks, the familiar “FFRRRRRRRRRP!!” added itself to the roar of the engines, as the co-pilot knew very well it would. He couldn’t contain it this time. A gale of laughter escaped from his lips as he turned, red-faced to study the passing countryside outside the cockpit window.
Dan pretended not to notice the co-pilot’s amusement, but inside he was a burning cauldron of humiliation. The fan had caused him to look like a complete fool in front his subordinate…..the fan would have to go!
So, reaching up, while the co-pilot was studiously examining the landscape, he grabbed the offending fan and tore it out of the roof, wires and all. The co-pilot’s eyes still appeared to be glued to the outside world, almost as if he did not want to witness the goings on inside the cockpit.
Dan, seizing the opportunity, opened the cockpit window and heaved the dead fan out into the passing slipstream, slamming the window back into place as he did so. The co-pilot’s attention was instantly attracted by the opening of the window and he turned round just in time to catch the departure of the fan.
“Bloody stupid things these fans! Bloody dangerous too! Should be bloody banned!” said Dan as he saw the look of disbelief on the co-pilot’s face.
Unknown to either resident of the flight deck the fan flew straight back to be caught deftly by one blade of the number one propeller. It was then whirled violently round and hurled at close to the speed of sound, back through the ice shield and the skin of the fuselage, into the cabin. The sound of its re-entry was deadened by the sacks of maize-meal stacked in the back.
They off-loaded at Kwima and flew back to Huambo. There they closed down the engines in order to refuel and reload with more maize-meal. A passing engineer immediately spotted that there was an enormous piece missing out of one blade of the number one propeller. He ran up to the loaders and shouted “Stop loading. Stop loading! this plane is grounded!” Then he noticed the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.
“Must have picked up a rock in Kwima.” said Dan nonchalantly, as another engineer mounted the airstair door into the cabin.
“Do you always carry rocks bolted to your cockpit roof?” asked the second engineer, “‘Cos that’s where this one came from.” he said, holding up the remains of the fan which had been presented to him by one of the loaders who had found it on the cabin floor.
The new propeller cost twenty-three thousand dollars and the repairs to the cabin wall, the ice-shield and the cockpit ceiling cost another five thousand so Dan thought that maybe it would be better if he took a job in the Seychelles while tempers cooled off a bit.
A year later he was re-employed by the company, but he was a changed man. No more stories about “Fast-Jets” on the front line, no more white kid gloves, and now he puts his head-set on the moment he takes his seat on the flight deck and they are inseparable until he leaves the cockpit at the end of the flight. I’ve watched him. Funny how people change as the years pass by.
It’s probably just a coincidence, but I noticed that the aircraft he was given to fly after his return to the company, was not fitted with a ventilating fan on the captain’s side! *Kisasi Tamu!
*Kisasi Tamu means sweet revenge in Swahili
