Ghosts of Sao Tome

Flight Journal, Dec 1999 by Cook, Steve

The operation

On Sao Tome, Joint Church Aid (JCA), CANAIRELIEF, Cataris and The World Council of Churches had begun to transform the sleepy island airfield into the largest airlift base in Africa. A huge, new warehouse was soon packed to the rafters with bags and crates with "UNICEF" or "A Gift from the People of the United States" stenciled on them.

The mercy flights, piloted by a ragtag collection of Scandinavians, Canadians and Americans, were mostly carried out at night. Around sunset, the crews would arrive in rented cars. Dressed in dungarees and button-down shirts, they looked more like a pickup softball team than the would-be saviors of a starving nation. They were paid extremely well, as much as $5,000 per month, but considering the hazards they faced, they were bargains.

While the ground crews completed the loading of the night's cargo, the pilots would preflight and wait. As soon as the sun sank into the jungle, the engines of the first aircraft would be started. In the CANAIRELIEF Connies, the R-3350s would slowly turn over in the time-- honored sequence: number 3, then 4, then 1, with 2 being last. First belching balloons of black smoke, then clattering to life with tongues of flame licking the wings, the big Wrights shook the ground beneath. Each night, their pilots would be given a new password to gain clearance to land at Uli airfield. The departures were at 20-minute intervals, allowing time for each to land, unload and depart before the next arrived-a good system in theory, but one that hardly ever worked.

As the last functional airstrip under Biafran control, Uli would inevitably be stacked up. On some nights, flights would arrive at the same time from other relief groups in Gabon and Guinea Bissau and from the International Red Cross headquarters on Fernando Poo. The inexperienced, harried Biafran controller would order all aircraft into a holding pattern while he sorted things out. In a marshaling area 20 miles north of Uli, as many as 20 aircraft at once, in total darkness, would circle a directional beacon strung from a tree. This terrifying scene frequently continued for hours, with each pilot nervous but unaware of how near he was to a midair collision. Swedish flier Ulf Engelbrecht described it thus to Time: "If all the pilots some night were to turn on rotating beacons and clearance lights, a dozen of them would die of fright at their proximity to one another."

Adding to the tension, a Nigerian pilot the relief crews dubbed "The Intruder" would circle farther above, taunting the pilots in broken English via their radio headsets: "This is Genocide Baby! Come on down and get killed .... One at a time, the pilots would break off and follow a crude ILS beacon to the Uli airstrip, where they were allowed only dim kerosene lantern runway lights for the final few seconds of their approach. The instant their tires touched, the lights were extinguished. Occasionally, the Nigerian pilot carried small bombs and lobbed them randomly at the aircraft on the ground.