Fly the Zambian Skies!

When I was working as a flight instructor, a Lear Jet pilot gave me some advice on how to move up to his rank.  You just need three things, he said “multi time, multi time and multi time.  Nothing else seems to do you much good.”   Nobody in the first world wants to let you fly a multi engine plane unless you already have lots of multi engine experience, but repeated visits to the embassies of third-world countries in Ottawa produced a contact with the Zambian flying doctor service (ZFDS).

ZFDS has four BN2A3 Islander aircraft, of which only two are in working condition, to attend to the medical needs of four million people.  They fly from Ndola, the second largest city in Zambia, to villages without medical facilities, or telephones, or electricity, or anything else that is modern, except AIDS.  The aircraft were around when the British ruled the country.  They take parts off the two aircraft not flying to try to keep the other two flying.  Sometimes the country runs out of aviation gas for a couple of weeks, then Air BP drives a truck up from South Africa.   The maps they use still call the country “Rhodesia”.

After a bunch of vaccination shots and a few emails, off I went.  No working papers.  If you wait for the third world to deliver paperwork, you are going to be in the next world before it arrives. ZFDS had arranged for me to stay with a missionary, since he was the only other musugu (white) around the 400-person organization.

The checkout on type required an exam and flight test.  It was a type rating.  You need a type rating for each new airplane in Zambia.  Say you have been flying a Cessna 172 and you want to fly a 150.  Another exam, another flight test and another “type rating” are all required.  You write the type rating exam at the capital, Lusaka, which is an overnight train ride from Ndola, where, I was based.  The friendly man doing my test asked for $500 US, cash, for the administration of the five-question exam.  Negotiation reduced this to $100 US, but then he failed me.  It was a performance exam, simpler than the stuff I was teaching as a flight instructor.  No, you can not know what you got wrong.  No, there is no recheck.  You can pay to retake the test in two weeks.

I happened to be staying with the former minister of aviation.  He was heading up an anti-corruption probe at the time.  By a wild coincidence, the day after he heard about my troubles, everything was cleared up with my licenses.  The official who had asked for the $500 US took time to explain that “the money does not go into my pocket.”

How did I get to stay with the former minister of aviation in a place where I knew no one?  Well, it is the inescapable issue of race.  As a white person, you are a tiny minority in Zambia, assumed to be wealthy, privileged and important.  You can not avoid dealing with race and what the color of your skin implies in a black African country.  Being poor and unimportant, I loved it!  Every white person I met, without exception, welcomed me.  A visiting white medical student was who invited me along to the minister’s house.

For the flight test for the Islander type rating, the Zambian aviation authority does not believe in just simulating an emergency—they give you an actual emergency to deal with on the flight test.  First, the altitude is 4000 ASL at Ndola and it gets stinking hot, since it is right near the equator.  Second, the aircraft is loaded with bags of rocks to bring it up to near gross, with near aft center of gravity.  The examiner who came with me, Captain Francis, was reasonable-he let me load the bags of rocks, knowing full well that I would leave out a bag or two.  Now, it gets worse: for the single-engine work, you actually shut down and feather an engine.  The other pilots told me that often, the engine does not start again.  It was strange looking out at the feathered prop while thinking about the bags of rocks in the back.  The examiner quickly commanded a restart, and after three tries, we breathed easier.  Captain Francis had a thin line of sweat on his forehead under his headset.

The Zambian people are super friendly!  Even the guys asking for money are friendly.  Most of the 408 employees at ZFDS would come to work, sit down and relax most of the day.  Refueling an Islander took about 8 people-a couple of supervisors, a hand-pump man, the hose man, the nozzle man-you get the idea.  There is lots of human support for those 2 aircraft, but no spares or fuel most of the time.

Medical Evacuation (Medevac) flights in Zambia are relaxed.  The villages were without telephones or electricity, but Missionary Aviation Fellowship of Canada (MAF) has set up HF radios with solar panels and batteries for communication.   Calls would come in informing us that someone had come into the village with an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound on the bottom of his foot, or in his back, and needed attention.  The doctors and staff were not impressed.  “Forget it-that muntu (man) was a poacher.  The game wardens shot at a few elephant hunters the other day”.   Another call was for a Zairean woman with massive internal bleeding.  This was the time of the Ebola virus outbreak, which causes liquefaction of internal tissues.  We were afraid to go.  Besides, she would surely die regardless of whether she received transport to Ndola.

Every now and again, there would be fuel available and the aircraft would be airworthy, and we would take some doctors, nurses and dentists out on a tour of various villages.   Navigation consists Global Positoning System, only.  No other navigation aids are serviceable.  However, the weather is always VFR, with a haze layer at 9,000 feet.  During the dry season, slash-and burn agriculture puts a lot of particulates into the atmosphere.  Maybe the red laterite soil is blown around a bit as well to create the persistent haze layer.  The solitary paved runway at Ndola would drop behind us, and after the thundering, vibrating climb to 8000 or 9000 MSL, the Islander would settle down into a 130 kt cruise.

5000 feet below, the tropical Savannah rolled by, mostly grassland, broken by large swampy lakes choked in weeds.  To the south, one flies over the edge of the plateau and into the lower, tropical country.  It is like dropping off the edge of the world as the tropical forest is spread out below.   Below, in the forest, there appear to be roads through the jungle, very straight, pushed through the trees.  But the local pilots told me “No, there are no roads, they are elephant trails.  You see, they all go to the river.”  And so they did.

At the destination, usually named something mundane, such as “east 7” or “west 3”, there is a grass or dirt runway.  Termites build mounds on this open space.  Children ride bicycles on it.  Villagers line up on the runway to watch the plane come in.  You land in the middle of this.

For vaccination flights, the word would be put out via HF radio days in advance, and there would be a crowd of mothers waiting, some of whom had walked several days with their infant children in order to be there.   The doctor builds a small charcoal fire under a pressure cooker in order to sterilize his needles.  This is the real efficiency of the flying doctors, where a 15-cent injection can prevent all manner of misery among many people. The nurses at ZFDS told me that the HIV (AIDS) infection rate was 80% at a mining station where testing was performed on all pregnant miner’s wives.  For educational purposes, there were also big, full-color photographs of various rashes and sores brought on by other sexually transmitted diseases.  A big part of ZFDS was education of village people as to the dangers of poor sanitation and bodily fluid exchanges.

Each station was a little different.  At the place where they grew oranges, there were thirty people waiting for the dentist, all with cavities from the sugar.  We had only a couple of hours before going to the next station.  There was no dentist chair, or filling of cavities.  Just a lineup of people, one person inside the room getting a tooth pulled while the one next in line received an anesthetic shot.  By the time the first patient came out with a lump of cotton in their mouth, the anesthetic had taken hold for the next one in line.  It was heartbreaking to leave before they were all seen to.  At the next station, they were fishing people, so there were only two cavities, but much malnutrition, as shown by the thin, balding children in rags.

Zambia is a rich country.  It has vast reserves of copper, and one section of Ndola was in the Guinness book of world records for the most Mercedes-Benzes per square kilometer.  Like most of the third world, there is a huge gap between rich and desperately poor.  In the cities, crime is rampant and the stores are locked with a solid row of bars and barbed wire at night.  To counter a wave of car theft, the government hired a group of men known as the “flying squad”, who, apparently, drove around with AK-47 assault rifles at night, shooting at suspected car thieves.  When I expressed concern about this, people laughed “You have no worries.  White people do not steal cars.”   In stark contrast to the city, at the remote villages, the aircraft with all its equipment and supplies was left with the doors wide open (it was hot).  There was never any theft.  After all, would you not welcome someone who brings free medical treatment that you might need to save your life?  There are many stations, and few aircraft.

At a place where it took three days to reach a road, I met a nun and a priest running a station.  The nun wore a full habit out in the jungle.  She road around on a three-wheeler ATV with her robes flapping in the wind.  One nun, one priest, both healthy and vibrant in their 40’s, all alone out in the middle of the jungle, in their station together.  It looked like a husband and wife team to me.  The priest gave me a huge stalk of bananas, four feet high.  All the pilots, doctors and nurses bought things out in the bush—bush meat, corn and peanuts—since it was so cheap.  The plane gained in goods inbound what weight it lost in fuel outbound.

There were so many things out there that seemed just surreal.  After all, this is close to the place described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.  For example, at the end of one runway, there was a house in burned-out ruins.   The doctors told me that “the woman there was a witch, so the villagers killed her and burned her house.”   There were stories of the health minister stealing and selling donated medical supplies.  Every ex-patriot has stories of corruption on a grand scale.  It is the kind of place where one forgets not only the objective, but even that there ever was an objective, other than to live the experience.