Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:39:32 +0000
By Philip Chirwa
“DO you have a valid passport?” my manager asked me in a rather non-committal tone. I had to keep pace with him because he was walking fast towards his car.
“Yes, sir,” I answered without much gusto.
“A valid one?” he insisted.
“It’s valid.”
‘’If I had to send you to a foreign country tomorrow, would your passport work?’’ he probed further.
Again I answered in the affirmative.
By now we had reached his car. I was standing by his car, not knowing what he was up to when he pushed his head out of the window and threw these words to me, “We will talk tomorrow.”
This short conversation triggered the opportunity to fly for the first time in my life. In Africa, air travel is mainly an exclusive preserve of the well-to-do.
Even if you were in formal employment like in my case, working for a very large mining conglomerate, you would never think of travelling by air throughout your entire working life.
This was a very rare opportunity for me that the company, on my manager’s recommendation, was sending me to South Africa to attend a three –day workshop in Johannesburg!
It’s a two-hour flight but the thought of flying when I least expected it, was daunting for me.
For days, I envisioned my flight. Many questions kept popping up in my mind. What would it feel like riding those high clouds? How safe would I be? Would anything happen during my first flight? There were those intimidating stories I had been told before about flying.
One that vividly came to my mind was the one my brother had narrated to me many years ago when he had flown to London.
He had told me of this white woman who kept screaming and lambasting the husband about his poor judgment to travel by air. She raved and raved until the crew intervened but that did not help matters.
In fact, shortly after taking off, she vomited while imploring the crew to stop so she could get out of the’“hell” she was in!
How would mine be like? One piece of advice I was given was not to eat anything or else I too would throw up. Fear made me stick to this advice and so, I ate nothing on the morning before my departure.
When the time finally came I wobbled towards the epitome of technology that would take me to my destination – Johannesburg the commercial capital of the Republic of South Africa, also known as the Rainbow Nation.
Its metallic appearance glittered in the hot sunshine; wings proudly flapped outwards like a vulture in full flight.
With a heavy heart and pregnant anticipation, I climbed up the short stairs and entered the plane.
I stared at the strange faces which told me I was looking extremely nervous. A gorgeous stewardess welcomed me warmly and for a brief moment took away my anxiety. I studied my new environment.
A deep feeling of solitude engulfed me. When the door slammed shut, the pilot and the stewardess gave a thumbs down gesture, akin to a military salute; their eyes locked into each other as though they were soldiers sharing a secret oath and about to launch the most ferocious attack of their lives. I thought about that body language.
“Could it mean we can’t go down?” I asked myself.
Or would it be interpreted as, “whatever the case, we will conquer the air…as usual?” Or plainly, “here we go”?
My heart incessantly kept kicking against my body. So rigid and uncomfortable was I. I started to visualize all sorts of horrors that would soon befall me should something go wrong.
I had read a lot of horrifying stories about crashing planes and I was certainly scared.
Soon the engines coughed and we were on the runway. The high pitched, rending and roaring sound of the engines pierced my eardrums as though about to shatter them to nothingness.
I could feel the air being ripped apart as the plane roared and accelerated at an incredible speed. Now, the moment of truth had come – the detachment from mother earth into empty space that was supported by nothing.
As this epitome of invention entered this new phenomena, I felt my bowels yanked out of their dwelling place and gravitating towards my throat.
For an instant, I knew I was going to retch out like the white woman my brother had talked about. A choking wave was strangling me. With super human effort I fought back against this adversary until the plane stabilised.
A feeling of serenity descended upon me and I knew that my worst fears for now had passed. When the snacks were served, I ate with relish. Remember I had not eaten anything prior to the flight.
Little did I realise that this was only a temporary relief in the midst of my current situation. In a sudden twist of events, the plane started to lose its altitude. Clearly, I could feel the plane coming down as if it had lost control and was now going to plunge us to our ultimate death. That really put my heart into my mouth.
I thought this was the moment I had been dreading days before the journey had started. I knew panic was etched all over my face and spasms of dread were piercing through my system but I dare not display it. So, I gazed down to avoid any eye contact with anyone.
Then I heard the voice; the voice of an angel.
‘’Don’t panick, and please fasten your seatbelts,” it announced. ’’We are crossing the Limpopo River and soon the turbulence you are experiencing will be over.’’
This angelic voice was so assuring. It was like a whiff of wind hitting your face on a sweltering day. And true to her prophetic word, I felt the plane ascend once more into the higher altitudes of mother earth.
But there was one more thing that was still boggling my mind – the landing. Far below, I could make out the small dots that looked like the minutest manifestation of objects. We were now circling round like a starved eagle scanning the waters below for its first meal.
Soon, we too would be swooping down – another dreadful moment. And before I knew it, we were surely going down at a terrifying velocity.
The heavy thud with which we hit the ground sent waves of shock through my body and shook me like a thin leaf. As the plane gradually came to a stop, I felt a sigh of relief. We had landed at Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo International Airport.
I had experienced both sides of the world – the bowel yanking take off and the heart –
throbbing landing. ….
AND WHAT A MEMORABLE JOURNEY!
“Will the passenger travelling to Harare please leave the aircraft,” the sweet voice of the senior stewardess on the Zambia Airways Flight QZ 604 piped through the public address system. She repeated the message, after which she said, “Thank you.” This was towards the end of May, 1985.
The passengers on the flight looked at one another to see which one of them had boarded a wrong plane. By that time, the plane’s doors had been shut ready for takeoff. Flight QZ 604 was bound for Manzini, Swaziland, via Gaborone, Botswana.
Suddenly, one of the passengers stood up, quietly collected her luggage and made for the front door, which had been reopened especially for her. As soon as she got out, she ran towards another plane about 50 metres ahead but as she was approaching, the plane was also taking off. But then that did not mark the end of the drama on that flight.
I happened to be one of the passengers on the Lusaka-Gaborone-Manzini flight. I was travelling to Maputo, Mozambique, together with a colleague of mine, Sam Ngoma (now late), to attend a seminar on the role of the mass media in southern Africa. We went there as representatives of the Press Association of Zambia (PAZA), of which I was the founder General Secretary.
On arrival at Matsapa Airport in Manzini, we were supposed to make a direct connection to Maputo by Royal Swazi Airlines at 15:30 hours that day. The Zambia Airways flight was expected to land at Matsapa Airport by 15:00 hours if everything went according to schedule.
Unfortunately, we were delayed for one hour at Lusaka (now Kenneth Kaunda) International Airport, which meant that instead of taking off at 11:30 hours, we took off at 12:30 hours.
After an hour’s stopover in Gaborone, we took off at 15:00 hours, arriving in Manzini at 15:30 hours, by which time the flight to Maputo had already left!That was the last thing we expected, especially that we had only 50 American dollars each for incidental expenses in Maputo. The money was inadequate to enable us to book into a hotel for the night.
So, having missed the Maputo flight and knowing we had insufficient funds, we told the woman immigration officer attending to us at the airport that we wished to spend the night in the transit lounge.
The officer looked surprised at our request. “Is this your first time to come to Swaziland?” she asked, to which we replied in the affirmative.
“I am very sorry gentlemen,” she said sympathetically.”We don’t allow people to sleep at the airport in Swaziland. You have to go and book yourselves in a hotel in town.”
“But we don’t have money,” we protested. “We are prepared to sleep here until tomorrow morning.”
“And who’s going to allow you to do that?” she asked. “We don’t keep people in the transit lounge here. It’s just not allowed.”
It later transpired that it was after all not our fault that we had missed the Maputo flight but that of Zambia Airways. So a Zambia Airways representative at the airport was approached and he arranged for our accommodation at George Hotel in the town centre. This was to be at the airline’s expense.
We were told that there would be two flights to Maputo the following day, one at 09:00 hours and the other at 11:00 hours.
By sheer coincidence, booked with us in the same hotel were two Chinese nationals who had an even more serious problem: they had landed in a wrong country! What happened was that the duo, a father and his son, had been booked on a Lusaka-Harare-Gaborone flight which the Harare-based passenger in Lusaka was supposed to take and missed but they jumped on Flight QZ 604.
The son explained to us: “We have never been to this part of the world before. All we knew was that according to our tickets, Gaborone was to be our last stop.
So when the plane landed at Gaborone Airport, we took it for granted that this was Harare and so we remained on board with other passengers bound for Manzini. It was only after we had got off the plane at Manzini that we realised we had overshot our destination.”
Unlike us, the duo had paid for their own accommodation at the hotel. At 09:00 hours the following day, we were aboard a tiny seven-seater Royal Swazi Airlines plane bound for Maputo, arriving at our destination 35 minutes later.
There were only seven of us on the plane – four whites, including the pilot, and three blacks.
The author is a Lusaka-based media consultant who also served in the foreign service as a diplomat in South Africa and Botswana. Email:pchirwa2009@yahoo.com
