TORINO / ENTEBBE

Was is in the days of President Obote, or President Museveni?

I cannot recall. I Just remember that a non-government humanitarian organization based in Italy had chartered the Flying Tiger Line to carry about 90 tons of rice bags from the Italian city of Torino to the capital of the still-troubled Uganda. With such a heavy load, a B 747-200 was assigned to the mission. The country was one more time undergoing severe food shortages and had been plagued for many years with a deteriorating economic situation. The charter briefing received from the Charter Department indicated that there would be a passenger coming along with us, so I had catered the airplane accordingly and prepared the passenger area in order to accommodate the representative of this “NGO”. The rice bags had been palletized using 96” pallets and the load was really heavy, rice being an extremely dense commodity. Shortly before the loading of the airplane was over, I remember seeing a Volkswagen van pulling by the passenger stairs. The door opened. My passenger got off the van with the help of two people. This man, who was suffering from a rare form of obesity, weighed certainly over 290 lbs and my first challenge was to find some kind of a makeshift safety belt to ensure that he would be strapped over the width of three seats, prior to the take-off being conducted. On the upper deck of some of our B 747 inherited from the SWA days, passengers seats had been retained thus allowing deadheading crews or other non-revenue personnel to enjoy a free ride back home or to wherever. It must have been sometimes during July. I remember the flight engineer carefully looking at the take-off performance charts for Torino-Caselle airport, worrying about the fact that the airplane would be heavy and the temperature quite hot. Airplane was closed, and pretty soon, we were on our way to Entebbe. Grossed out at MTOW, the airplane needed the entire runway and climbed heavily in the Italian sky enroute to Africa. I Had not been there since my early days with Seaboard World Airlines, during a coffee transport operation and had mixed emotion about returning there. After a seven and half-hours’ flight, the plane was on final approach for the Entebbe International airport located on the verge of Lake Victoria. About ten years before, operation "Thunderbolt" had unfolded in the same airport after the hijacking of an Air France flight and subsequent events involving terrorists . Landing in Entebbe was cleared but the shortest of the runways was to be used. With a heavy B747, slowing down the airplane after it touched the ground required both reversers and heavy breaking. Even with this, combined with the captain’s talents, the big airplane went all the way to the end of the runway before slowly making its way to the spot assigned for the offload. Landing a heavy jumbo jet on a short runway in a hot place is really like calling for trouble, sometimes. On that very day, we had landed exactly at Max Landing Weight and of course the flight crew was fearing hot brakes and the consequences. As soon as the passenger stairs were put in place and our passenger picked-up by the airport to proceed with immigration formalities, the charter mechanic and myself went for a quick walkaround of the aircraft landing gear.

(A Uganda Airlines B 707...If you look just behind, the is the tail of a Pan Am B 707)

As a result of strong braking required to slow down on a short runway, four of our main landing gear wheels had "fuesed-out" and would require to be changed. Tiger airplanes assigned to charter flights always carried special spare parts, crated and loaded on the bulk belly just under the tail. Some flight instruments, some electrical components, and a couple of wheels could be considered as “standard” as no one would ever have expected to blow four wheels during a single landing. A couple of brakes were also always loaded as spare parts. We were stuck in Entebbe and the crew was sent for rest in the Lake Victoria Hotel. It was time for me to offload the airplane in any case and for the charter mechanic to find a way out of this predicament.

(Uganda kids and humain remains : Uganda was a war ridden country for many decades, especially in the days of "Field Marshall President Idi Amin Dada", a delusional dictator who brought the country to bankrupcy)

The only direct flight connecting continental Europe to Entebbe was operated by SABENA, a Belgian airline having historical ties with East-Africa and the next flight would leave Brussels in a few hours. Maintenance Control, in Los Angeles had been advised through HF radio of the status of the airplane. The required wheels would then be on the first possible flight but till spares would arrive in Entebbe, the airplane could not move. My own concern remained with the offload of the airplane, using a rather decrepit main deck loader probably used also on the SABENA combi airplane or other cargo aircrafts transiting in Uganda. This day of work was not amongst the easiest day of a taxing job!

(Entebbe airport in the "old days"....a "not-nice" place to go)

As we were in the midst of offloading the main deck, and I was trying to motivate a Uganda Airlines cargo crew, black smoke invaded the main deck, just behind me, sending the cargo crew flying away; one of the PDU was starting an electrical fire. The charter mechanic rushed down to take care of the problem, and for safer operation it was decided to switch all the PDU in the “freewheel” position to avoid stress on the electrical motors powering the deck’s automated loading system. At 5:30 the next morning, our spare wheels were offloaded from the SABENA flight, an exhausted Tiger mechanic had been accompanying the wheels all the way from Brussels and, after a coffee break, was ready to help us with the wheels changes. Being a loadmaster with the Flying Tiger Line, there was never a dull moment.