8 minute read
Savage Barn Find in Uganda
Part 1 Craig Lang BARN FIND IN UGANDA Savage
During early October 2019, while pottering around the hangar at our base in Kwazulu Natal at Eva’s Field, my phone rang. The caller, Noel, asked if I was the South African dealer for the Savage range of aircraft as he might have an interesting proposition.
Driving through Kajjansi Village to find the forgotten Savage.
NOEL said he is an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer (AME) who contracts to various conservation organisations around Africa, doing maintenance and repairs on their antipoaching aircraft. He had done some repairwork on a Savage in Uganda that had been ground-looped back in 2015 and had been offered the aircraft in lieu of other work done for this particular group in the past.
Without vast experience on the Savages, Noel asked whether I would consider going to Uganda to inspect the aircraft with him and see if it was viable to fly it back to SA. I agreed – on the condition I had an option of buying the aircraft, should it indeed be a worthwhile proposition.
We met the following week in the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, and spent three nights in a little hotel called the Mak-Queen in a
village on the outskirts of Kampala, called Kajjansi. From the hotel it was a 10 minute walk to the Kajjansi Airfield, home to the Ugandan MAF base as well as KEA (Kampala Executive Aviation), where the Savage had been stored in an outside hangar for more than four years. KEA runs an impeccably neat charter, maintenance and flying training service, with a number of expats employed from around the world. One of these expats is Koos van der Walt, a South African with aviation experience in some really interesting places around the middle east. Koos provided us with great assistance, providing a large clean (could eat off the floor) hangar, tools and logistical help to us.
Noel and I spent two full days cleaning, re-rigging, lubing, checking and doing a really thorough annual inspection on the aircraft. Fuel lines and oil lines were purged, plugs replaced, new ignition systems installed on the Rotax 912 (the original ones were missing).
Knowing Savages inside-out, I was able to make a few adjustments to various controls, pedals and other areas to get the aircraft manageable on the ground and
flyable in the air. We were aiming at getting her flying by the second day. Wasp nests in the wings and other hidden areas were cleaned out, tyres inflated (even though quite badly perished, they held their pressure), brake lines cleaned and new brake fluid administered. Amazingly the French ATF and radio license was still valid!
The panel layout and instrumentation was a little unusual. The aircraft had been manufactured in the Czech Republic by Zlin Aviation, assembled in Poland, and registered in France...making for some interesting reading in the logbooks (which amazingly had accompanied the aircraft, and after some searching, the original Certificate of Registration, Radio License and current ATF were found in a cupboard in Garamba in the DRC!!)
THE AIRCRAFT HAD BEEN MANUFACTURED IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC, ASSEMBLED IN POLAND, AND REGISTERED IN FRANCE.
The ASI was in km/h , and in Russian, the VSI in M/Sec, and amazingly it had an old MGL engine gauge.
On the second afternoon, we started her Rotax and she ran quite sweetly. I wasn’t able to get much more than 3700 rpm out of the engine during taxi tests, so we set about trying to adjust the pitch of the propeller, which ended up requiring the hub to be pressed in a 20 ton hydraulic press. Not having any means to measure the propeller pitch, we had to guestimate it. Once adjusted, we refitted the prop, and I was ready for a test flight.
This time, the prop was a touch too fine, and being careful not to over-rev the engine, I managed to get airborne after a fairly short roll (Kajjansi is at 4000ft, virtually on the equator, and right on the edge of Lake Victoria). After flying 59DOH (the aircraft’s French reg) for about 30 minutes in the circuit, I landed to make a few adjustments. One was to coarsen the prop, which was easier this time without having to remove it and put it into a press, and to adjust the rudder pedals, giving them more travel, and also to re-bleed the brakes, which were almost non-existent.
One more test flight late in the afternoon was enough to show me the potential of this neglected little aircraft that amazingly had only 20 hours on the Hobbs, total time! I was in love.
Rigging and cleaning in progress.
That evening Noel and I were invited to join Koos and his wife for dinner at a little restaurant called “2 Friends”, on a beach looking out over Lake Victoria. A meal of delicious Nile Perch cooked in banana leaves, washed down with some superb local beer was a fitting end to a successful scouting trip, and an amazing little gem of an aircraft hidden away in central Africa…
Uganda really impressed me with its hustle and energy, with thousands of scooters, locally called “Borda borda’s” (named after the taxi service they provide from border to border on the Kenya and Tanzania borders), traders and manufacturers of furniture and all sorts of items lining the main roads. The people are incredibly friendly and helpful, and there was a genuine air of a country on the rise. I would love to return one day to fly and explore some incredible sights, such as the source of the Nile at Jinja and other areas around this tropical paradise.
Noel and I concluded the business end of the transaction while on the Kenya Airways flight back via Nairobi, comfortable in the knowledge that 59DOH was safe in the large hangar at KEA, and would soon form part of my little fleet of Savages in South Africa.
As soon as I arrived home, I set about the task of how to get the aircraft back to SA.
There were 3 possible options - 1. Send it via container (very expensive option as it turned out, even more than shipping from
Europe). 2. Drive up to Uganda, dismantle the aircraft and trailer the plane back (terrible roads, too much paperwork). 3. Fly the aircraft back (most fun option, but also quite scary flying an unknown aircraft over a very remote and unforgiving countryside for over 30 hours!).
59DOH ready for her first flight in nearly 5 years.
Naturally the decision was easy. Once I’d decided to fly the Savage home to South Africa and convinced my long suffering wife that it really was the best option, I approached a few flight clearance companies, and the quotes were ridiculous. Some quoted from R80,000 - R100,000 or more in clearance fees and overflight permits. Frustrated by this I gave James Pittman at Sling Aircraft a call, and his response was “That’s a load of crap - do it yourself and save a fortune.” And that’s exactly what I did. I approached small clearing agents in each country and
managed to get clearances with some help from friends and acquaintances in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania. It quickly became obvious that the more backwards the country was, the more expensive the permits were.
Finally, by early November I was ready to roll. I made flight bookings for the flight to Entebbe and planned to take my 19 year old son along, who was in the early stages of
Late afternoon test flight - spectacular Lake Victoria in the distance.
getting his PPL. However a few days before we were due to leave, he broke his foot, and was home bound for 6 weeks. One of his best friends, and a long-time family friend, Tyron, was close to completing his PPL, and jumped at the opportunity to join me on what would most likely be an adventure of a lifetime.
Flights were confirmed for 13 November, and I set about getting ready
The ASI was in km/h - and placards seemed to be in Polish.
with spare parts, tools, a set of 21 inch tyres and tubes (the original tyres were perished and not safe), and a decent 2 blade Meglin Propeller off one of my other Savages, while I ordered a new prop.
The aircraft only had a 65 litre fuel capacity, giving us just over three hours of endurance at 85 mph, not a great range when considering the vast stretches of African bush we needed to cover. To increase this, we planned to carry along 2 x 20L soft Jerry cans, giving us an additional two hours.
Conveniently, the aircraft had an interesting pump arrangement behind the back seat, which allowed us to pump fuel using a built-in fuel pump, connected via a pipe into the 3L header tank and then up into the wing tanks. We discovered on a long leg across Zambia, with nowhere but miombo woodland to land, that the pump operates just perfectly in flight… but that’s another story.
To be continued…
The Mak-Queen hotel in Uganda.
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