HOME SWEET HOME

BUSH PILOT: HUGH PRYOR

Where is ‘home’ for you? Have you got some place to which you look forward to returning, with warm anticipation? Somewhere where you can unpack, lay back and forget about tomorrow? A little warren which smells familiar and greets you and cherishes you like a long lost friend?

YEARS AGO, BEFORE I GOT married, I used to think that ‘Home’ was wherever my Mum was. Now that I’m married and independent of the family nest, I tend to think that the roof over the pillow where my little ‘Dragon’ parks her head at night is the place I would like to call home.

That means that she and I have quite a few ‘homes’ around the world. We’ve got an apartment in England, a house in Kenya, where I am sitting at this moment, in-laws in Durban, South Africa, close friends in Austria, whoencourage us to treat their house as our home and more of those sorts of people in Australia. In other words, we are more lucky than we probably deserve... in the home department, anyway. There are many, too many, people around who don’t even have a pillow, let alone a roof under which to put it.

And talking about wives - what’s the similarity between marriage and the story of the three little piggies & the big bad wolf? You don’t know? Okay…They both start with a lot of huffing and puffing and end up with you losing your home.

There are quite a lot of people around, even acquaintances of mine, who understand the relevance of that little joke. And a lot of them are pilots.

Pilots often have a problem identifying a place where their roots have had time to take. A bit like those ‘who go down to the sea in ships.’ That’s not very good for marriages either. I have been very lucky, in that my particular Dragon has stayed by me, through firings and furloughs, for over twenty-five years. I frequently wonder why. It can’t be the security, that’s for sure!

The ‘better half’ does not have to be in residence for feelings of homeliness to be present. There are several rather unlikely places I can think of which have represented home for me, over the years…a crumbling RoyalChateau in amongst the high plateaux of Tigray Province of Ethiopia, during the great Famine of 1985/87, for example…or a little box on wheels in the middle of the Sahara in Libya…or a shrapnel-pocked old family home in Huambo, in the war-battered central highlands of Angola.

I think it’s the people who make it feel like home. You can be in the most sophisticated accommodation in the most beautiful area in the world, and the other people are arrogant twerps. Well, you’re not going to consider that ‘home’ are you?...unless you are an arrogant twerp, yourself, that is.

On the other hand, you can be at the other end of the same world, in primitive conditions, working till you drop, but with a great bunch of companions and every night, when you get back there, feelings of warmth and welcome radiate out and grab you, remarkably like home, without a little Dragon, of course. Funny isn’t it?

Some of my more unusual ‘homes’ were in Yemen, which is arguably the very cradle of western civilization. Many of the Old Testament stories and the Adithi of Islam took place there. Yemeni culture spread, through trading in spices, gold, ivory and slaves, from the Far East to the coasts of East Africa, from Sheffield in England to the palaces of Saudi Arabia. Sindibad, the sailor who, more than seven hundred years ago, traded all the way to China in a tiny Arab Dhow made of Murihi wood bound together with coconut coir and anti-fowled with Shahamu shark oil mixed with lime, hailed from these barren shores. So peaceful were its people that their cities were not even fortified.

It has had its fair share of problems since then, however. Aden, the old capital of South Yemen was knownas the whore of Arabia. She was taken by Queen Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, who built her historic water system in the old crater which encircles the ancient Arab Quarter. The Ottoman Empire had a short brutal affair with her. The British had a very soft spot for her, for over a hundred years and the Russians raped her. I just lived there.

One of my ‘homes’ in Yemen was a little three compartment trailer, about one third the size of a European railway carriage. I was flying my old friend, the Pilatus Porter, for an excellent Swiss Utility Aviation Company, in support of a French seismic survey outfit called La Compagnie Général de Geophysique, or CGG to its friends. We were situated in the north of South Yemen, where the Saudi border slopes up from south west to north east. Our camp was at the bottom of a barren escarpment near an old well known as Bir Minwach. The desert plateau, nearly a thousand feet above us, stretched away to the east, excoriated by dozens of wriggling dry canyons and inhabited by wandering Bedoui nomads.

That border had never been properly defined, particularly in the area where we were prospecting. The Saudis claimed large tracts of South Yemen, right down as far south as the fabled Wadi Hadramaut. Only the presence of substantial Russian support for the South Yemeni Army discouraged Saudi incursion into the concession where we were operating.

However, by the time we got there, the Russian military mantle was quietly being withdrawn, as the Soviet empire began to crumble. The Saudis had promised citizenship to any of the Bedoui who would support their claim to the plateau. The citizenship was reportedly backed up by substantial financial benefits to anyone who was interested. By all accounts, quite a lot of the Bedoui, who didn’t see the point of borders anyway, were keen to avail themselves of the financial side of the deal, even if it meant planting a few little ‘markers’ around to discourage the communists from ‘invading Bedoui Territory’. As it turned out, the ‘markers’ were of the explosive variety, as we were later to find out.

We kept the aircraft almost inside the laager formed by the camp trailers at Minwach, because the Saudi border patrols used to race past our camp, every night, forty kilometres inside what we thought was our border, andlet off a hail of 50 cal. over our heads as they went. Every eighth round was dipped in phosphorus to make it sparkle as it left the barrel of the jeepmounted machine guns. These tracer rounds made a very impressive pyrotechnic display for us to watch, as we sipped our Becks beers of an evening. They looked quite dodgeable too, until one remembered that there were seven rounds hidden between each of the sparklers.

After some days of this intimidation, it was decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and we withdrew south west, down the edge of the escarpment to another old water well at Bir Zamak. We would stay back at Minwach, with the aircraft, and cover the retreat, just in case there were any mishaps. It was then that the weather joined in the fun.

Just after myself and Werner, our engineer, got airborne in the PC-6 from Minwach, a great wall of white dust came rolling in, out of the north west and engulfed the whole area. It was moving so fast that we were enveloped before I realised what a challenge it represented. The turbulence, exacerbated by the ferocious winds and the proximity of the escarpment was frankly intimidating. I shouted to Werner to keep an eye out for anything solid-looking which appeared to be coming dangerously in our direction from his side, while I strained every optic nerve-ending to decode the visual messages swirling at us through the dust in my half of the windscreen. Directly below us we could make out the scrubby thorn bushes as they scudded past close beneath us.

Our saving grace was that it was a very short flight, only a matter of ten minutes or so, and some of the trailers would already be in place when we got there. If we couldn’t find Zamak, we could always climb to altitude, pick up the Riyan VOR and chicken out. We had lots of fuel. Mind you, the beer in camp was imported and free, which narrowed the options to a certain degree.

“There they are!” shouted Werner, “We’re right over the top of them!”

I hurled the plane around to the left and just caught sight of the mess trailer as it dissolved away into the storm. We could still see the grounddirectly below us and I shouted to Werner to give me a yell if he lost ground contact. He nodded with a grin. He appeared to be enjoying the show. I have to admit that, with success almost in the bag, I was having fun myself.

We straightened up on a north-easterly heading, which I reckoned should take us back towards the mess trailer. I had flaps down, the prop in fully fine pitch and landing checks completed, so that I could seize any opportunity to put our friendly bucking bronco on the ground. We were almost hovering. Both of us were instinctively fighting the controls against the buffeting we were getting off the rocky crags the other side of the camp. Frequently we were forcing the stick to full deflection just to stay the right way up. Hard work?…yes!…extreme entertainment?...None better!...Adrenalin rush?...Absolutely!

Suddenly an anomaly appeared out of the milky wall up ahead. The mess trailer materialised out of the murk. A little shiver of elation tickled my diaphragm. We were not going to Riyan. The beer would be free tonight.

We were now travelling so slowly into the wind that it was a question of whether we would ever get as far as the mess for that beer, so I pulled off the power and the old girl just gave up and settled into the soft dust by the wall of the trailer.

We were down. Now to try and prevent the heroine who had delivered us to this new ‘home’, from being rolled up in a ball and blown away into the Empty

Quarter. I wrapped the flaps away as quickly as I could to kill the lift and just kept flying her, although we were, in fact, already on the ground.

“Werner!” I shouted, “Could you hop out and get a couple of vehicles for us to tie Golf Alpha to. Otherwise we’re going to lose her.”

The wind tugged urgently at the aircraft, as if to reinforce my message. Werner nodded vehemently and stuck up a thumb. “I’ll keep the engine running, so that I’ve got control of her. If you can come up round the back with the vehicles, then you can secure her before I cut the engine. But MIND THE PROP!”

Another thumb was raised, and Werner dived down into the cabin, before hauling the door back and disappearing into the howling dust.

The tail was lifting off the ground as I sat there, flying the old girl with the main wheels on the ground. I wondered idly whether I should log this and, if so, how? It was definitely Quality Time, if not actual Flying Time.

I was not left alone for long. The first indication that we were safely attached to Terra Firma was when Werner’s bearded face appeared at my window, like a Wagnerian wraith. He was slicing his throat with a knobbly right index finger. I switched off the generator, feathered the prop and pulled the fuel lever back into Idle Cut-off, to kill the engine.

The silence of spool-down, which normally accompanies that manoeuvre, was broken by the thunder of the wind and the thrashing of the sand as it stampeded past the plane, seemingly spooked by whatever was to follow.

I decided to wait and see what this wild weather had to offer. The others had anyway run for cover, after lassoing the lift struts to a couple of Land Cruisers.

Suddenly there was a loud tapping at the windscreen. I looked up, expecting the wraith to have reappeared. For perhaps two nanoseconds, I was convinced that there were large drops of blood, splattering onto the plexiglass. In that tiny space of time I had a chilling nightmare that Werner had not heeded my warning about the propeller. Then I realised that the engine was not running and that the blood was, in fact, rain and the rain was mud.