BUSH PILOT HUGH PRYOR
PART 2 In last month’s story, Hugh recounts how he came to be flying far out into the Libyan desert to set up a Magnavox, the forerunner of the GPS receiver. Now he had to get back to their remote camp – and a fearsome Gibli wind was beginning to raise a massive dust storm.
T
HE TRIP BACK FROM the Ubar Hills was one of those flights from which pilots' nightmares are generated. I could see that it was going to be a bit of a challenge, but at the back of my mind I always had the way out of going to Sebha, where the Instrument Landing System would always get us in, unless, for some impossible reason, it went unserviceable...and it wasn't until we were well past the Braspetro Rig that the big Russian cargo plane failed to get airborne from Sebha. Not only did he fail to get airborne. He went right off the end of the runway in his desperate efforts to abort the take-off, removing the wheels of his left undercarriage and smashing the antennae of the Instrument Landing System.
FlightCom: October 2021
I could not climb up through the fury of the storm, otherwise I would lose sight of the ground and we would never find the camp. Our only hope was to keep going until we found some recognisable landmark.
He had kept a diary. You don't want to read it.
My 'Way out' had thus been neatly eliminated and we were by this time right in the thick of it. Visibility was down to about two hundred metres and we were being thrown around all over the place as the wind howled over the crests of the big dunes. Paul was, thankfully, speechless as we thrashed on southwards. 6
Above the sandstorm the sun still shone and by its dimmed light it was just possible to make out the hunched shoulders of red sand, braced like vast stationary waves in a raging red sea. Sand-spume spattered against the windscreen like dry spray.
Already we had been going for twenty eight minutes from the rig and I had not even seen the 'Double Ess', a white gypsum formation in the shape of two esses and they were still eight minutes north of the camp.
Maybe I had missed them in this mad maelstrom of screaming sand. Maybe we had been blown miles off course. I called on the long-range radio to try and find out the weather at Sebha, only to receive the disturbing information that Sebha Airport was closed due to the accident. Our windows of opportunity were closing
