I love flying. It all started for me in 1966 when I was in the South African Air Force. The Apartheid government of the time was just starting its propaganda that there was a Communist hiding behind every bush. As a gunner on a chopper I shot up a lot of ‘bossies’ (small bushes) and the odd sheep.
This May, when my publisher in The Netherlands suggested that I do some aerials over the Roermond area, in the Province of Limburg, I was thrilled like Lucy in the sky. The man has as many ideas as he has horsepower parked in his yard. The last time I had shot from a chopper was a few months ago in the Kimberley’s in Australia. Here, I was doing a feature on the Mornington Wilderness Sanctuary. The two flights were as opposite as Lucy in the sky and the bones of Lucy Australopithecus that lived 3 million years ago. The Mornington was pristine wilderness that covered an area of 3,000 square kilometres the same as the Dutch Province of Limburg. I love opposites as I come from a country of contrasts. In Oz, (except for an isolated road), there was not a mark made by man, whereas looking down at the Limburg landscape —- man had changed and redesigned every patch of earth.
Ah — then the pilots. The Dutch one wore a full flight suite with all the avionic paraphernalia possible and spent most of his time avoiding other aircraft. The Ozzie was a tough Outback woman called Sally not Sheila. When I accidently called her ‘Lucy’ she said, “No worries, mate”. She also wore a T-Shirt that that read ‘look at the landscape, not my tits’ on the front. Well, that’s what I thought it said because I was looking down at the landscape. She also had some tight cut-off jeans with pieces of healthy flesh pushing at the tears. Incredible landscape, I thought. She flew me along the Canyons of the Fitzroy River that we sprayed up the water; so close over the Leopold Ranges that I started hyperventilating. “No worries, mate”, it cracked in my earphones. The Dutch pilot spoke to other planes and stuck to his flight plan and programmed height.
Just before I enter any helicopter or plane, I spend a minute looking up at the sky. This is a little homage that I must always pay to my friend Herman Potgieter who died in an air crash in Kenya. He was a world-class aviation photographer. We had such similar theories on photography that Lucy often waved down to us from the sky. We photographed what we loved and didn’t really worry much about the art. He called everyone ‘Schultz’. He would have loved Miss Schultz and the landscapes over the Kimberley’s. On the 13th of February 1998, he was returning from the Masai Mara in bad weather, when the Pilatus PC-12 hit the Ngong Hills outside Wilson Airport, near of Nairobi. All nine people on board were killed. People around the world and those that loved him were devastated.
In 1999 I was working on a story to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Hemingway, which also included aerials of his old hunting ground in southern Kenya. In Nairobi I went in search of a bottle of Möet and Chandon Champagne. This turned out to be far more difficult than finding the child, (as rumour has it), that Hemingway fathered in Kenya or getting Crocodile steak in Holland. When I finally bought it from an Indian trader, the bottle and my bodyguard would cost me more than my pending helicopter flight. Schultz, the pilot made me sign a indemnity form because I was going to fly with both my feet on the chopper’s landing bars with only the safety belt holding me to the seat. He knew exactly were the wreckage of the Pilatus plane still lay. After a mere five minutes flight he brought the chopper down and hovered over the wreckage. I remember clearly how the downdraft draft moved the tall grass between the bits of metal. I turned the cork of the Möet Champage till it shot out into the blue African sky. I slowly drank half the bottle and threw it down for Schultz. Then, out of the blue, I started to cry. “Hakuna Matata”, the pilot shouted, as he pulled the chopper back into the sky. ( Hakuna Matata in Swahili means: No problem ).
So if you are ever flying around Africa with a bodyguard and a bottle of Möet and there’s nothing between you and the open sky —– you might feel this extra blast of air passing you. That, I promise you, will be my friend Schultz. Flying around in that big sky with Lucy.
