Learning to fly and becoming the owner of a Cessna 182 were two of the happiest and most exciting times of my life.
Over the next few years, I could scarcely be kept out of the cockpit, flying friends and relatives wherever and whenever they wanted. What I did not do, however, was expand my skills with an instrument rating—all my flying was VFR. That was because of the benign weather in the country where I lived in the heart of Central Africa, and in truth, there was only one occasion in more than 1,000 hours when I regretted the omission.
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Taking my wife and two children to the sea for a summer holiday one year involved two legs, both of about three hours. We left home early and expected to be at Margate, our South Africa destination, by about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, refueling at Lanseria International Airport (FALA) in Johannesburg, which was about halfway. As usual, it was a bright, sunny morning when we took off, and, as forecast, we had open skies all the way to Lanseria. There, after topping up the fuel tanks, I checked the weather: “cloudy, 5 oktas,” but not expected to change en route to the coast. We took off full of cheer at the prospect of taking a dip in the sea in just a few hours.
Midway it began to rain, but I could see things looked clear farther ahead and pressed on, unconcerned. A slight niggle for me was that the landscape below was beginning to change much more dramatically than my rather cursory map reading had suggested. Instead of the soft, rolling hills and valleys I expected, it was now all very mountainous and rugged. But with long-range tanks on my Skylane there was no chance I would have to find a safe spot to put down for running out of gas, I thought. Nothing prepared me for what might happen to confound that warm feeling of security.
Ten minutes after leaving the rain behind, the weather ahead changed suddenly. The clouds began to swirl ominously in my face and the base dropped, forcing me to drop with it. Within a minute, I realized we could not carry on to Margate but must divert to the nearest strip available. I had been map reading all along the way, so I already knew where to go. It was a small town called Howick, only about 15 miles to the left of the track and surrounded by mountains but easy enough to find because there was a huge dam close by. Although unmanned, the strip was a good, long one, and I thought it wouldn’t be hard to spot if the increasingly lower clouds allowed me a reasonable view of the area.
They did not.
By the time we could see the dam, the surrounding countryside was largely obscured in a rolling mist. The airfield had to be close by on my right, but all I could see was a green hillside partly hidden by low clouds, and I didn’t want to go into that as it would then likely force me to go up and up and up.
I called flight information to declare an emergency and set about looking for somewhere to put down. There was not much to choose from, but while circling the dam I found a dirt road that I thought would be long enough—very narrow and bounded close on one side by a farmer’s fence, but reasonable, even, and obviously in frequent use. Best of all, as it turned out, that dirt road was on the side of the dam nearest to where the airfield must surely be. I had kept the family informed as best I could throughout this little drama, and they all handled it calmly, helped along by my young son telling the other two not to worry: “Dad practices things like this all the time.”
One more look around and I was on final, which would be a short one, for we were already way below normal circuit height. Then, with no more than 30 or 40 seconds before we would touch down, I saw out of the corner of my eye and on the right a yellow airplane side-slipping out of the clouds on a final of its own. I did not hesitate. A full-power pullout put us behind that yellow plane in seconds. Where there was an airplane there was an airfield. Sure enough, it was the Howick Airfield (FAHC) and we landed safely.
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It turned out the plane was a glider, and he had been up in the cloudy sky for 20 minutes or so, directly above the Howick field, which, astonishingly, was not itself completely covered in as I had supposed. The reason I couldn’t find it had more to do with our altitude and the fact that the airstrip was on a saddleback—only a small portion of it could be seen from the side we were on and at the altitude forced on us.
Of course, each one of us thought of it as a miracle intervention of fate. It certainly was weird. The coincidence of timing is quite extraordinary. But perhaps more important for me and my flying future was that I learned a lot from the experience. As soon as I could, I began studying for my instrument rating, but I also learned to be much more painstaking and thorough about map reading terrain that I would be flying over for the first time, or was unfamiliar with.
I was reminded how rapidly anything can change, especially the weather, and thus always to be prepared and never surprised. And I was doubly reminded how fascinating flying can be.
This column first appeared in the April Issue 957 of the FLYING print edition.
