TO PARIS FOR LUNCH

One morning I arrived back at Lanseria from a two day charter to a dreary Northern Cape iron mine. Entering the terminal, I removed my wings and epaulets, thrust them into my flight bag, and headed for the restaurant.

- JEFFERY KEMPSON

THERE, IN FULL VERBAL FLOW, was the American, Ben Drew, AKA Captain Fantastic, expounding on the tribulations of operating an aging DC-3 Dakota fleet for minimal profit.

He waved me to a seat and continued his oration to a couple of his off-duty pilots.

I ordered a Coke, then observed the silver-haired American and marvelled at his luck.

When flying a P51 Mustang during World War 2, he had descended below cloud, somewhere in Europe, on his way back to his UK base, when he came upon an enemy airfield just as two jet-powered Messerschmitt Me 262s (nicknamed Schwalb: ‘Swallow’ in fighter versions, or Sturmvogel: ‘Storm Bird’ fighter bombers) were lifting off the runway, and climbing away ahead of him.

He armed his wing cannons, or whatever fighter pilots did back then, and as the Messerschmitts were at their most vulnerable, clawing for altitude and slowly gaining speed, he came up behind them and shot them down, one after the other.

This earned him a DFC, mention in dispatches and probably a lifetime supply of free hotdogs and hamburgers.

At the drop of a hat, thirty-plus years later he would hand you a large signed black and white photograph of himself in USAF uniform. And, if you were a special friend, he’d go out to his car and fetch you a Revell plastic model kit of the ‘Drew P51 Mustang.’

I sipped my Coke as he turned to me and said, ‘Hey Jeff, did you hear that they want to move three Daks down here from Europe. But they can’t actually buy them and deliver them themselves because of Apartheid sanctions.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘The SAAF’ he said. ‘They are some of the youngest DC-3s in the world. They want to convert them to turbine engines and then use them to replace the Shackletons for maritime surveillance.’