AWAprofile
AWA captain looks back at 40 years of flight Captain Victor Elcis Aryeetey When Captain Victor Elcis Aryeetey landed his AWA Embraer E145 jet at Kotoka International Airport on May 28, just a couple of days shy of his 65th birthday, it called time on a glittering 40-year career as a pilot that has included 11,000 flights and 20,000 flying hours. His arrival in 2012 at AWA, as pilot and head of safety, was pivotal in entrenching world-class safety standards in the then fledgling airline, which it has maintained to this day. Here, in his own words, the father-of-three looks back on his life in the skies. I have been fascinated with
Science subjects were always
aircraft since I can remember…
my favourite at school and
I grew up in the Kaneshie suburb of Accra. At that time my uncle was a top government official and would often travel abroad with his job. Whenever he was going to take a flight or was scheduled to fly back to Accra, my mother would take me to Kotoka International Airport to watch the aircraft taking off and landing. It was the early 1960s then and there were hardly any buildings surrounding the airport so you could get right up to the fence and watch the aircraft taxiing on the runway. I was hooked. Science also fascinates me and developing an understanding of the physics of flight made me even more determined to be a pilot…
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PILOT At the controls
I learned theories that have proved crucial to the
I went on to take a degree
development of air flight, such as
in physics at the Kwame
Bernoulli’s Principle. It explains
Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Kumasi before teaching the subject to ‘A’ level students at Accra’s prestigious Achimota School.
how an aircraft, which is heavier UK STAY Captain Aryeetey learned to fly at the Oxford Training Centre in the 1980s
than air, can fly, with two air streams at different speeds causing lift on the wing. The curved shape of the top of the
