Every job has its hazards, its risks; some more than others.  It’s a risky thing to land 65 tons of airplane and cargo on a dirt road, or a dry riverbed, or just a flat patch of ground.  I learned that lesson the hard way in a place called Thiet, where the top crust of a peanut patch we had been assured would support the weight of the Hercules gave way, stranding us for a couple of days.

The problem was the nosewheel.  It was buried deep in the powdery “Black Cotton Soil” and we couldn’t get out.  Try as we might, each time we attempted to break free, the nosewheel plowed the ground like a disc –harrow.  We probably turned up a couple of acres of that peanut patch before we swallowed our pride and called for rescue.  As we liked to say, “You ain’t really stuck ‘til you have to call for roadside assistance.” And, we were REALLY stuck.

Later than afternoon a Dehavilland Buffalo came to our aid with a cargo of shovels and plywood airdrop pallets so we could build a ramp to get the nosewheel back on solid ground. 

Being probably the most interesting thing that had been seen in Thiet for three generations, the whole village turned out to watch, and to help.  In the way that so typifies the African approach to doing things, the village elders commandeered the shovels as if they were the badge of some high public office and they leaned on the handles, watching, while the villagers dug the airplane out with their bare hands.  It took all of that afternoon and into the next morning before they were done.

Then there are the mechanical failures.

An engine failure on takeoff out of Juba began a cascade of events that ended with N911SJ veering off the runway on the return landing, and crashing into some steel shipping containers.  The storage containers had been left behind by the French contractor who’d been building the new tower and terminal facility when Sudan’s civil war reignited back in 1983. When the shooting started the workmen dropped their tools, abandoned the containers and left town.

In an interesting reversal of fate, just before the airplane crashed headlong into the Conex Boxes, which would have killed everybody,  the right wing hit the only tree on the airfield not yet harvested for firewood causing 911 to pivot 90 degrees and smash into the steel containers sideways.  The shipping containers penetrated the airplane from the cargo bay to just behind the Captain’s seat but, miraculously, the crew only received superficial injuries: some bruises and cuts.

Lastly, and the hardest to guard against, are the hazards of negligence or malice.

N521SJ was destroyed by an anti-tank landmine planted in the runway at Wau, a fortified town under the control of Sudan’s army.

Airdrop

Certainly blowing up an American airplane chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross and clearly marked with the ICRC logo has to be a desperate and despicable act.

Was it done by rebels from the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army who had infiltrated the airfield?  Did the Sudanese Government order it done? Or was it a local affair done at the behest of the merchants, unhappy that the flow of free food was driving down their profit margins? To this day there is no satisfactory answer.

Because of these events, and also because of the increasing unease of the Khartoum government at the thought of a fleet of C-130 Airlifters roaming around their rebellious provinces, out of view, and unsupervised.  We switched from landing to Airdrops as a way to deliver the food.

The challenge was to keep the grain-bag from exploding when it hit the ground.  To survive the bag has to hit vertically, with no forward motion, otherwise it tumbles and breaks apart. To solve this dilemma some crews went out into Florida’s Everglades, a place very much like Southern Sudan, and tried dropping bags of grain from various altitudes and speeds.   The grain bags were stacked on pallets made from sheets of three-quarter inch plywood, cut in half. The bags were tied in a way that insured they'd separate from the pallet upon exiting the aircraft, and free-fall individually. As insurance against loss, we doubled-up the grain bags with a tight inner bag and a loose outer bag to contain the kernels if the inner bag exploded on impact. The test crews found the optimum combination of height and speed was to drop from 700’ at 130 knots.  Using this technique, we averaged in excess of a 95% recovery rate.   This has held true for more than a decade of operations by Southern Air Transport and their successors, Transafrik and Safair.

So, what’s it like to drop twenty tons out of the back of an airplane?  Without a doubt, it’s the “E-Ticket” Ride!