06 July 2006
Dubai: A daredevil jumbo jet pilot was this morning due to set off on a hazardous eight-day long flight to his native South Africa.
Jaco van der Merwe, whose day job is flying Emirates SkyCargo Boeing 747s for Atlas Air, is taking his Yak 18T single-engined plane across a string of countries in the Middle East and Africa.
The 35-year-old said his family, including his father who is himself a pilot, have urged him not to undertake the mission.
One of the toughest parts of the trip, which van der Merwe is doing with friend Riaan van Helsdingen, will be flying 900km down the length of the Red Sea.
"You don't do that with single-engined aeroplanes. If the engine stops, you go down. My father asked me: "Do you know what you're doing?" He said it's a very dangerous thing.
"I would like to think that I know what I'm doing. If it was straightforward a lot of people would have done it before," said van der Merwe, who is married with two daughters and has lived in the UAE for seven years.
Van der Merwe bought the acrobatic Yak 18T, which is worth about $60,000, (Dh220,380) seven month ago, and wants to take the plane to South Africa and keep it there because the country has lighter restrictions on the use of small private aircraft.
"Yak flying in South Africa is very big. It's a very popular aeroplane there. With big aeroplanes, the aircraft does the job for you, but it's very different with a small plane and there's no autopilot.
"I could have put it in a container and got it sent down, but I thought I would fly it there instead," he said.
The mission was due to begin at 2am today at Umm Al Quwain Airport, from where the 29-year-old plane was set to fly to Al Ain.
From there van der Merwe will go to Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia before flying over the Red Sea to Djibouti, the capital of the country of the same name.
Other stopoffs will be in Lilongwe in Malawi and Pietersburg, Johannesburg and finally Cape Town in South Africa.
For van der Merwe and his co-pilot there will be more than 60 hours of flying, much of them spent cruising at a modest 12,000 feet, a height limited by the fact that the aircraft's cabin is not pressurised.
It has taken six months to prepare the aircraft for the trip and this has entailed fitting a 400-litre additional fuel tank to increase the flight range from 600km to 1,500km.
Comparison
Yak 18T
Boeing 747
By Daniel Bardsley
Gulf News 2006. All rights reserved.
