The Aviators
Between an estuary on the Indian Ocean and a steep hill looking out towards the Outeniqua Mountains is the small town of Knysna in the Western Cape, familiar to many British tourists who have stopped off there on their way from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth on the Garden Route. Many of the most expensive hillside houses are owned by so-called out-of-towners, those who have become wealthy through working in banking or IT in Johannesburg or Cape Town. Warwick Sparg, who built himself a grand house on the hill with a garage large enough to accommodate his Porsche, his five BMW motorcycles, a Harley-Davidson and a pool table made his money as a bush pilot. He is fifty-six, fit and tanned, and wears his hair raffishly long. On one recent afternoon, after picking me up from the local airport, he talked about how he got his start. He began as a pilot for a scheduled airline but the work bored him; he was seeking spontaneity and adventure and so began to promote himself as a pilot for hire. One of his first clients was Wouter Basson, the cardiologist who would come to be known as ‘Doctor Death’ after he was revealed to have led the apartheid government’s secret chemical warfare project. Another client was Billy Rautenbach, a white Zimbabwean close to the Mugabe government, who, notoriously, was made chairman of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s state mining company, Gécamines, at a time when Mugabe’s troops were helping prop up Laurent Kabila’s regime. But Sparg’s most memorable client was a bearded Angolan rebel leader called Jonas Savimbi.
Known to his followers as O Mais Velho (‘The Oldest One’), Savimbi had led the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola, or UNITA, since its formation in 1966, when it was one of three liberation movements fighting to end Portuguese colonial rule. By mid-1974, independence for Angola was inevitable. Portugal’s fascist dictatorship, first under António de Salazar and then Marcello Caetano, had desperately held on to the country’s African colonies even as France, Belgium and Britain had let theirs go. But in April 1974, Caetano’s regime had been overthrown in a near-bloodless military coup. Instead of uniting, however, the rebel armies in Angola had begun to fight one another in an attempt to assume sole power once the Portuguese had gone.
The Cold War made external intervention in the struggle inevitable. The Marxist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA, which had the support of the intellectual and mixed-race elite in Luanda, received military and financial backing from the Soviet Union and Cuba. The United States took the side of UNITA. Also assisting Savimbi was the South African government, which was as paranoid as the Americans were about the Communist threat in Africa, especially in southern Africa, where liberation movements in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and what is now Namibia but was then called South West Africa and was an enclave of the apartheid state, were being supported by the Soviet Union. It was a peculiar arrangement: a black nationalist and ruthless warlord leading an anti-colonial struggle while being backed by a white racist regime. ‘When you’re a drowning man in a crocodile-infested river, you don’t argue about who is rescuing you until you’re safely on the bank,’ Savimbi said later.
As independence came closer in Angola, and the Portuguese elite began to flee the country, South Africa sent troops north along the road towards the Angolan capital in an attempt to prevent the MPLA from seizing power. Cuba, in turn, successfully sent thousands of troops south from Luanda to deter the South African column from advancing further.
On November 11, 1975 the MPLA assumed power, declaring the country independent. In response, UNITA and the FNLA, the third liberation group, came together to set up a rival coalition government, based in Huambo. For much of the next twelve years, Angola was ravaged by civil war, with young, white South African conscripts regularly deployed deep in MPLA-controlled territory, sometimes fighting alongside UNITA and sometimes fighting alone. (The apartheid government denied that its troops were fighting on Angolan soil; a compliant media at home ensured that few South Africans knew exactly what was going on.)
Savimbi used South African airports as the means by which he could travel out of Africa. Whenever he needed to visit foreign capitals such as Washington on fund-raising missions, a South African military plane would fly him from the Angolan bush to Pretoria, where Sparg would be waiting for him in a JetStar II business jet to take him to wherever he wanted to go. ‘Savimbi was always the perfect gentleman,’ Sparg told me, without irony. ‘He greeted the crew as he came aboard and thanked us before leaving the airplane. He always had a white doctor with him, and as the plane began to descend the doctor would hand each crew member an envelope with one thousand dollars inside.’
Working for Savimbi was Sparg’s introduction to the war in Angola and soon, using a Malawian passport, since South Africans were officially not allowed in Angola at the time, he began to operate from inside the country, flying UN officials on various missions. When he saw the potential of being a pilot for hire in a country in which it was too dangerous to travel by road, he set up his own charter service. The work was dangerous – Sparg’s first aircraft had bulletproof material on the floor and he wore a flak jacket when flying into trouble spots – but it was also lucrative.
By the early Nineties, Balmoral, in which he had a fifty per cent stake, was a thriving business servicing the World Food Programme and other humanitarian organizations with its fleet of small aircraft. Whenever he was back in South Africa, on holiday or maintaining his aircraft, Sparg was approached by pilots looking for work in Angola. Some were attracted by the money: a newly qualified pilot would receive a tax-free income of $5,000 a month. (One of Sparg’s pilots flew with a one-dollar bill taped to the instrument panel. ‘That’s my boss,’ he’d tell people. ‘George Washington.’) Other ambitious pilots wanted to accumulate their flying hours so that they could apply for jobs at large commercial airlines in other countries. Most of them, including the pilot who arrived in Angola with his surfboard, had no idea how difficult and precarious flying was in a country devastated by twenty years of war.
When a slender, smooth-cheeked young man approached Sparg outside the Turbo Prop Service Centre at Lanseria airport on the north-western outskirts of Johannesburg in 1995, there was little to suggest he would be any different from most other youthful pilots looking for work. Hilton was twenty-one. He had completed a year’s military service, but had abandoned his ambition of joining the air force after being told he needed a degree. He had earned his private and commercial pilot’s licences and had had his tuition fees paid for by his father. He had 210 hours in his logbook. He was ready to fly. ‘He was very respectful. He said: “Are you Mr Sparg?” and I said that I was. He said he wanted to fly in Angola. I looked at him and thought: You are very young and very skinny. I said to him: “What do you know about Angola?” He said: “My dad flies for Transafrik.” I hired him on the spot.’
Before he had completed his first year of flying in Angola, Hilton was captain on both the Cessna 208 Caravan, a single-engine plane that took nine passengers, and the Beechcraft King Air 200, a twin-turboprop aircraft. His instructor at Balmoral, Graham Woodhouse, told me in an email from Kabul, where he was delivering a plane, that Hilton’s ‘flying ability was well above average’.
The work was intense and exhausting. Hilton flew for up to seven hours a day, five or six days a week. It was nothing like flying school. Many of the airstrips were littered with the wrecks of crashed or abandoned planes. The gravel runways of Angola had been eroded by heavy freight planes and were perilous for smaller aircraft. Hilton learned how to spiral in and out of dangerous areas, how never to trust the Russian pilots when they reported their altitude and positions, and how to remain calm even when the windscreen of his King Air shattered in mid-flight, as it did on one occasion soon after he arrived in Luanda.
But his most important lesson was how to avoid being hit by ground fire or surface-to-air missiles. When flying short distances between airports, the trick was to fly fast and low, just above the tree line, giving the rebels no time to line up a shot. For longer trips it was necessary to spiral up above the airport to get out of missile range. Though Angola was experiencing a lull in fighting when Hilton first arrived in the country, UNITA still had a large stockpile of missiles, as his father knew well. In the early Nineties, Johnny had often flown alongside Don Rogers, an American flight engineer who had worked aboard Hercules aircraft since the late Sixties, when he supported US ground troops stationed in Saigon for the Vietnam War. Immediately before joining Transafrik, Rogers had worked for a small American air charter company called St Lucia Airways, whose main customer was the Central Intelligence Agency. ‘We were contracted by the CIA to fly Stinger surface-to-air missiles from Kelly Air Force Base in Texas to an abandoned Belgian airfield in Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo],’ says Rogers, who is retired and these days lives in Florida. From there he flew with the missiles across the border to Savimbi’s military stronghold in Jamba, in south-eastern Angola. ‘It did occur to me when I joined Transafrik that I could be taken down by one of the Stingers that I had delivered.’
Sparg was proud of the young man; he saw Hilton not just as a good pilot, but as a kindred spirit in the bush-flying world. ‘Many pilots can only “drive” a plane,’ he said. ‘Hilton could really “feel” the aircraft. I could identify with him. We would drink hard, smoke hard and play hard. But you could not frighten us with work.’
Hilton lived with six other male Balmoral pilots and crew in a house in downtown Luanda, which had armed security guards at the door. The only female in the house was the local cook. While some of the crew members argued over who should have the largest rooms, Hilton was content with the smallest, little more than a storage cupboard beneath the stairway, where he slept sprawled out and naked on a mattress on the floor with the air conditioning on high. The cold air against his skin helped him wake up in the morning, he said, even though he was always the last one to rise, drinking only a Coke, his ‘Black Magic’, for breakfast, before hurrying to the airport. On a Saturday night, the flying crews and humanitarian workers in Luanda usually gathered for a house party or headed out to a pub known as the Pink Palace or to one of the nightclubs on the beach road, where whores loitered.
Sometimes, at Luanda airport, Hilton watched Johnny take off in the Herc, and he would ease back on an imaginary control column, as if mimicking his father’s actions. The other pilots noticed how Hilton had unconsciously adopted Johnny’s body language: the slightly sagged right shoulder, the cigarette hanging on his lower lip. Given their hectic flying schedules, father and son seldom saw each other, except on Sunday evenings, when Hilton would drive a Korean-made Rocksta jeep from his downtown digs to the Transafrik camp. It was against company policy to drive alone at night, but a safety rule was not going to stop him from seeing his father. Out at the camp, alone together, Hilton and Johnny talked about flying, just as they had always done at home, to the irritation of Marie and the girls. ‘We would worry about Hilton, thinking that he’d had an accident or something,’ said Riaan Theron, a South African pilot who flew with Hilton at Balmoral. ‘But at two or three in the morning we always heard him come rumbling back in the jeep from visiting his father.’
The Transafrik camp, which was originally built as the Filipino Consulate in Angola, was situated on a dirt road twelve miles south of Luanda, in an area called Corimba near the coastal highway. Most of the 150 staff seldom ventured beyond the nearby village that they named ‘Smokey Mountain’ because of the haze caused by all the cooking fires there in the morning and evening. Some of the Transafrik workers had local girlfriends in the village. On Sundays, a few of the Filipino personnel organized cockfights there and many of the pilots and crew would go along to bet on them, returning to camp with pockets stuffed full of near-worthless Angolan kwanzas. During weekday evenings, if they weren’t flying – Transafrik was a twenty-four-hour operation – the pilots listened to Voice of America or the BBC World Service in their cabins, or sat on plastic chairs under the mango tree, drinking Castle Lager flown in from South Africa or the local Diamond Beer. Back in South Africa, Marie tolerated her husband’s long absences from home even as they strained their marriage. She was concerned that Johnny had begun to drink too much, that on his visits home he was oddly ‘distant’ from her and that, when he wasn’t busy repairing something, he would simply sit in silence in the lounge, reading.
Hilton defended his father when Marie complained of Johnny’s strange silences. ‘He’d say: “Mum, there’s stuff that has happened to Dad while flying that he just can’t talk about,”’ Marie told me one afternoon at her house near Johannesburg’s main international airport. Marie knew that Hilton was at least partly right; Johnny did not want to alarm her by revealing just how dangerous his job could be. While he discussed his more bizarre assignments, such as when he flew pot plants from South Africa to Zaire for Mobutu Sese Seko or when he was arrested in Libya while transporting spare parts for drivers in the Paris–Dakar rally, he never told her how his plane was shot up while flying over Mogadishu. She learnt of the narrow escape only years later when one of Johnny’s colleagues showed her a photograph of the bullet-sprayed plane.