FIRST FLIGHT INTO TAKOTAKWANE

Takotakwane is a tiny village in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, which nestles against the edge of a huge salt pan. No proper roads served the village, only a track created by Bedford J5 trucks taking out Water Affairs drilling equipment and the occasional hunter. The tiny Bushman settlement slowly grew to village status over a number of years and it was David Inger, a Kweneng Rural Development officer who felt it would now benefit from some financial input to establish a medical clinic, a reliable water source and a primary school. David asked if I would be able to fly a group of World Bank officials to the village with literally bags of money to pay labourers & contractors on site. In addition to building the school and clinic they had also created an airstrip on the adjacent pan. Ralph Nickerson, a colleague of David's who was a forestry officer had been mainly responsible for this work and he planned to come along on the trip as well.

I took a Cessna 206 from Kalahari Air Services for the trip and flew out to Molepolole where our daughters were born and met the party on the airfield. Once the introductions had been made and we were settled into the flight I began to quiz Ralph about the airstrip he had built.

I should say here that I was well used to flying into short, rough unmade strips in the bush. In fact I found the huge expanse of tarmac at Victoria Falls for example quite intimidating and tended to land in the short space between the start of the runway and the "piano" markings which indicate the ideal touch down point - this meant I had to taxi along the runway for miles! However, there are minimums below which one starts to get a bit careful, runway length being one of them. Generally speaking, 800 metres I consider very generous, 700 metres require care and 600 metres is about the limit.

Ralph described how he had cleared the strip on the surface of the pan running from where it skirted the village to a point about 1/3 the way across, avoiding any rough and depressed areas, cutting away any scrub round the edge of the pan and removing all large stones. I had to ask for the length and he eventually replied "Oh it's ever so long, the pan is over a kilometre wide so it must be at least 400 metres long! We were already 3/4 of the way there so turning back did not seem worthwhile at that stage, we may as well have a look, while I dug out the manual on the 'plane and checked on take off & landing figures in a little more detail.

I also asked about a wind direction indicator, since if we had a go at the landing, it would be important to land into any available headwind. He told me that he had not yet got a wind sock organised but he had asked a young lad to stand on the runway holding a white sheet over his head so that it would indicate any breeze; OK better than nothing I suppose...!

On over flying the village it was apparent that the whole population had arranged themselves at the edge of the pan to welcome the inaugural flight into Takotakwane Airport so that at least confirmed the accuracy of our navigation. As soon as we passed over the strip, sure enough a young lad ran out onto the strip carrying a white sheet but the trouble was he didn't stop running and the sheet billowed out beautifully behind him as he ran up and down the strip, completely defeating the object of the exercise!

The other factor dictating landing direction was the crowd; if I flew over the village and onto the start of the strip at that end, then at least if I over ran then I would not be ploughing into a crowd of people, so wind direction then became academic.

I had decided that the minimum take off distances that I had burned into my brain were the "safe" ones, i.e. those which assumed that there was a 50 foot stand of trees at the end of the runway and in this case this definitely did not apply. Although very rough, the rest of the pan had no obstructions over a couple of feet high so I decided to give it a go. When you give a landing plenty of thought there seems to be a lot more time to get things right and I completed a standard 1000' left hand circuit, got my speed down to around 90, engine revs at the bottom of the green and put on maximum flaps. With speed stabilised around 65 mph and rate of descent 300f/m I managed to touch down only a few feet beyond the threshold of the runway with very little surplus speed. The huge flaps on the 206, the relatively rough surface of the pan and our weight brought us to a safe standstill well beyond the far end; white knuckles refilled!

We had a tumultuous welcome from the throng, partly I am sure to celebrate the first landing but even more likely due to the bags of money they knew we were carrying! We spent a few hours having a look round the facilities and meeting the village elders and I am sure I was the only one who had any cares in the world; I was wondering who I could ask to stay behind 200 miles from nowhere to lighten our take off load! As take off time approached I broached the question of the abandonment of one or two of our party but everyone pooh poohed the idea saying in what I took to be ignorance that there was no problem, the landing was fine, what are you worrying about? I reasoned with myself that we had burnt off a lot of fuel, the strip was fairly smooth, the over run was quite clear and if we failed to get airborne the worst that could happen would be that we would maybe damage the undercarriage and I had a trick up my sleeve that I had never tried before.

We all duly climbed into the plane at around 4.30 p.m., by which time the temperature had dropped from its peak of 43 degrees C at mid day to around 36 which would help our density altitude situation and we made our farewells. I obviously had to take off in the same direction as landing so we did not make ourselves popular with the onlookers when in order to have maximum power available I applied full power (300 HP) with the brakes hard on at the very edge of the village, creating quite a respectable unseasonable sandstorm before quickly releasing the brakes and hoping for a rapid acceleration. The "trick" I had in mind was to accelerate with no flaps at all to reduce drag while on the ground and get maximum acceleration, then when flying speed was reached, lower the flaps to convert speed into lift. While I still don't know if this does reduce take of distance requirements, in this instance it seemed to work! at around 60 mph when the flaps began to come down, instead of climbing out in the usual nose up attitude, we lifted off the strip more nearly horizontal and at a very low flying speed but at least we were off the rough strip and our air speed was not reducing; in this condition we passed over the end of the prepared runway and by easing the stick forward, airspeed began to build very slowly until it was safe to take off some of the flaps and we were "out of the woods" so to speak; - trouble was no one else seemed to notice that we had done anything clever; it all seemed routine! I decided not to enlighten anyone!