Bush Pilot - Hugh Pryor

from April 2020

AME Directory

MISS INGLEG

THE Northern Government used to chuck home-made bombs, made out of oil field well casings, with a grenade as a detonator, out the back of Antonov 26s... not particularly accurate, but who cares, as long as it scares the living daylights out of people down below and I speak from experience...it is far more scary if you do not know where the bomb is going to go off.

Another game they had was to sow any populated areas and their gardens with anti-personnel mines. These were painted green, to blend in with the local vegetation and were known as ‘Little Green Apples’. They were quite small, about the size of a cricket ball, but if you had the misfortune of standing on one, you would lose a leg at best and some other important bits and pieces, if you were less lucky. Most of the fatalities were children, of course. Most of the adult victims survived, with gruesome injuries.

The logic of bombing villages which had no airstrips was that any injured survivors would have to make their way to somewhere where the Red Cross could land to pick them up. This is where the good old Twin Otter came particularly in handy, because of the five hundred destinations we had in South Sudan, only about twenty of them had proper airstrips. With all the rest, we just used to find somewhere reasonably flat and plonk the old girl down. The nice thing about the Twin Otter was that you could normally get out of anywhere where you could land, as long you were not silly with the load.

One such place was a little village called Lankien.

One day we received news of a major inter-tribal punch-up there, resulting in many casualties, men, women and children, so we had to go in with a full ‘Triage’ team to sort out the mess. Trying to find somewhere to land was tricky because there were so many bodies lying around all over the place...and to be brutally honest, if we hit one of them, they might cause serious damage to the aircraft.

Eventually we managed to get down without hitting anyone and then the work began. The first job was to clear a path for our departure. That was a harrowing experience, because we found no survivors amongst the people whom we had to move. Surgical gloves and masks were essential since the combatants had obviously run out of ammunition during the conflict and had reverted to more primitive means to dispatch of their victims.

Eventually people began to appear nervously from the surrounding bush but when they discovered who we were, the news soon spread that the Red Cross had arrived and the trickle became a flood. Soon we had a full complement of critically injured.

One of them was a girl. She was not actually from Lankien at all. She was from a village called Duk Fadiet where she had stepped on a ‘Little Green Apple’, which basically destroyed her left foot and shattered her lower leg. Despite her horrific injuries, she had managed to get to Lankien. The trip took her a month, and did I mention that she was also heavily pregnant at the time... well she was, and the new arrival was imminent. After about three hours, the team had identified sixteen cases that needed urgent surgical treatment, including the girl. They patched up dozens of other wounded and promised to return the next day with more bandages and disinfectant.

We took off and headed for Kenya and relative civilisation leaving behind the grim During the seemingly endless war between North and South Sudan, I spent several years flying Twin Otters for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The skies of South Sudan were pretty ‘lively’ in those days, or perhaps ‘deadly’ would be more accurate, because we lost sixtyeight aeroplanes that I know about.

There were so many bodies lying around.

 horrors which we had witnessed in Lankien. We had to give ‘Position Reports’ to the UN Flight Following Service every half hour. The report consisted of GPS position, altitude, remaining fuel endurance, estimated time of arrival at destination and Souls on Board.

It was during our fourth report that, to our Flight Follower’s considerable amusement, we had to increase our Souls on Board by one, because our wounded girl quietly gave birth to a delightful little baby girl.

When we got back to Lokichogio, the patients were transferred to the Red Cross Hospital in Lopiding, just outside the town. Here the surgeons decided that they had to amputate our new mum’s leg, because Gas Gangrene had set in.

It was then our job to take the amputated limb down to Nairobi so that the pathologists could ascertain whether the surgeons had amputated far enough up the leg, to be clear of the infection. If only the smallest remnant of the Gas Gangrene infected tissue remains, re-infection will be swift and lethal.

We packed the specimen in a body bag for the trip to Nairobi and entered it on the passenger manifest, so that investigators would not waste valuable time looking for the rest of her, if we had a bad one on our way to Nairobi

The name on the manifest was entered as ‘Miss Ingleg’. She later came back to Lopiding to get a new left leg, made out of Acrylic plastic and bits of old car tyres... Those guys in the ‘Prosthetics Workshop’ were magicians and our mum ended up teaching survivors how to service their prostheses for the future.

I went to the Christening of our new ‘Soul on Board’ and was moved to find that she was Baptised with the name ‘Redcross’. Sometimes we do get things right.

Quote of the month:

Retired SAA Captain Karl Jensen has continued his lover affair with flying – and is a key figure in the Experimental Aircraft Association in particular. Of particular relevance to those who will not be flying regularly due to the pressures of the Covid-19, Jensen writes:

“Any flying is deeply rewarding, it makes you feel competent. If you do not stay proficient, that feeling of competence can turn into anxiety and frustration.”