The first two weeks of november, I went to South Africa to visit and do some flying. One week around Johannesburg, a little less the one week around Cape Town,
The first 2 days were used to validate my EASA PPL. I chose to fly on a familiar aircraft type so I would not need a difference training, although the jump from a PA-28-161 to a -140 needed a little adaptation time (whoever invented that roof-mounted trim wheel?!?). Two working COMs, 1 NAV but no indicators, ADF u/s, no GPS. The minimum trainer, not much that can break down (checking the circuit-breakers goes quick, there’s only 2 of them).
Radio needed some adaptation too, not for phraseology per se, but due to the airspace structure. Around both Johannesburg and Cape Town, the uncontrolled airspace below the TMAs is split into sectors, which in turn have D-areas inside used for training, each with their own frequencies. No flight following, only aircraft to aircraft.
Two half days in briefing, two flights (2h15) total with the instructor (steep turns, stalls, spins, precautionary and emergency landings, VFR navigation with good old paper maps and the few landmarks indicated on them), then drive to the CAA with all papers, wait for 2h, and there you have it.
Then came the Bush Pilot Training, I took the short version that is done in about 3 days, nothing about survival.
More briefing about short field, soft field, high Density Altitude. Leaning is 2 items after engine start, quite unusual for me at my homefield at 76 ft MSL.
Then flying into a whole bunch of local fields. Narrow strips (8m), short strips (at 8500 ft DA in a fully loaded PA-28-140, 800m is not long), gravel/sand/grass (sometimes on the same strip), with obstacles on final (antennas, power lines, trees, silos…)
or on climb-out (more power lines, mountains you cannot outclimb at the max climb rate of 300fpm…), where you can only land in one direction due to slope or obstacles so you have to take the 8-10kts tailwind, on the side of mountains with windshear and downdrafts on short final, etc etc…
After 20 landings in >25°C heat, I was completely out of energy. To be honest I was probably already out of energy after 17 landings, the last 3 ones were very average.
Overflying the Cullinan mine on the way back, dug entirely by hand, where this was found:
We spent the night at a local game farm in the Pretoria suburb, and started to acquaint ourselves with the local fauna:
One objective of flying in South Africa was to get to the lodges and see wild animals. So on day 2 of the bush pilot course we planned to fly more exercises and end up in a lodge with a private strip. The instructor and I started from Kitty Hawk FAKT with standard tanks and picked up my passenger at Wonderboom FAWB.
That 2000m runway was definitely needed to get us all 3 in the air in the slightly overloaded and totally underpowered Cherokee.
It was warm and choppy in the air, and climbing was not really an option (ceiling was no problem, the anemic climb-rate was). We left my passenger at our evening destination the Kunkuru Safari Lodge, she did not mind too much:
The instructor and I refreshed a bit and then we went on for our air work and multiple landings on multiple fields, except in reverse order vs planned.
More situations I am not accustomed to in Europe:
Not a lot of landmarks, we flew IFR (I Follow Rivers) at 3-400 ft AGL:
power line over the strip at 150m from one of the thresholds, crop duster parked 3m from the RWY
And a silo on the only useable final:
One way in, one and a half way out (we only overflew this one):
We also found some mountains to fly around, above and along:
We trained canyon-turns while we had some height.
Then headed for fuel
And back to the lodge where snacks and a couple of refreshing beers were in order before the evening game drive.
The next day we left that lodge and returned to Kitty Hawk, where we left the instructor, and now we were on our own.
Full tanks and off to the Madikwe East field. The flight was fairly uneventful. After you leave the surroundings of Johannesburg and Pretoria, very soon it’s only very small (and poor) communities here and there.
Funny story, upon arrival I made the low-level inspection and landed number 1 in front of a PC-12 that had to orbit a little off the field to descend from flight levels, he probably burnt as much fuel in his 2 circles than half my trip.
The trip from Johannesburg takes about 5h by car, 1.5-2h by my slow plane. During our stay we saw a Caravan going back and forth 2-3x per day.
The Madikwe reserve has a lot of wildlife:
and some absolutely stunning lodges:
I have a couple hundred pictures of animals, if you really want I can put a larger sample in a follow-up post, this is a flying site after all (I have birds too…).
After 2 days in Madikwe we returned towards FASI, including a scenic tour above town (there is a little slab of uncontrolled airspace between the FAOR and FALA CTRs), drove to O.R. Tambo and flew commercially to Cape Town FACT.
The next day we had a small flight from Worcester FAWC on a PA-28-180. Interesting field with asfalt at both ends of the strip, but gravel in the middle.
It was planned over Cape Town and around Table Mountain. But the weather was not too great, Table Mountain dams clouds coming from sea depressions in the south and lets them sip over for the whole day, so we focused on the north side and flew to Saldanha FASD instead. Still very scenic along the coast:
We still saw downtown, Table Moutain and Robben Island, but from a distance:
The final flight 2 days later had to be cancelled due to weather. The landscape NE of Cape Town is very mountainous, with valleys at 600 ft MSL separated by peaks at 6000 ft, and the ceiling was below the tops, so I called it a day.
We were land-going tourists for the last 3 days. Cape Town and its immediate surroundings don’t feel more foreign than Barcelona, but fairly compact and with a different history
The Cape of Good Hope is not too bad from the ground:
We left Cape Town FACT where the weather was SKC 25°C for Johannesburg FAOR where a thunderstorm was stationed over the airfield, our flight flew various holds before landing 45 minutes late. Originally we had a 1h50 connection, domestic arrivals and international departures are of course at diagonal opposites, one suit-case had to be rechecked and we could not get electronic boarding passes so we had to go through checking and security again. So we essentially ran through the complete terminal at O.R.Tambo. It takes 15 minutes, take my word for it. Luckily it takes time to stuff all passengers in an A380, so we made it. The flight back to Europe was rather uneventful, except for some early turns to avoid the weather on departure.
Arrival the next morning in Paris CDG: 6°C, rain, grey; still in short pants, T-shirt and open shoes. Final arrival in Copenhagen just before noon: Sunny, 0°C and snow on the ground. Bloody hell….
The trip to South Africa was quite ok. It’s the same time zone, we took a late flight from Paris and landed in the morning, it’s just a night in a plane seat.
Flying is not more difficult than elsewhere, except for DA and finding fuel. Now that I have a validated license valid for 5 years, I will likely return, but focus on one area or the other, this trip was a lot of one day here and two days there. Probably good for a first time, to get to know what to see where.
SkyDemon has maps for South Africa, they were quite useful. The paper maps I got were only 1:250 000 or 1:1 000 000. The former has only rivers, roads and villages, no mountains, no power lines, and whole lot of empty white background. The latter has a few mountains and roads, but nothing look more like a dirt road than the next dirt road.
In late spring the weather was quite predictable, but can still be a hindrance: in the north east mornings warm up quite quickly, at noon CU start to form but high ceiling, starting around 2-4PM thunderstorms start here and there, to just explode by 5-7PM especially around Johannesburg. Latitude is 26° south, you can see the atmosphere is thick, CBs are ginormous, climb incredibly high and are very active, during the TS the clouds just keep on blinking for 2-3h. Microbursts and severe downdrafts in clear air under TCU are not infrequent.
Don’t forget that the sun goes on the north side of the sky, but it’s so high you never have it in the eyes. At sunset however the sun just plummets out of the sky, 20 minutes and it’s pitch dark.
Some thanks and advertising to:
The team who prepared my trip: Andrew and Werner at Scandic Aviation
The ATO who did my validation and BPC: Tony of Aviator Training Academy at Springs Airfield FASI (I can’t seem to find a website).
They also do validations and training for SkyAfrica, who organizes longer trips, also around neighbouring countries.
Cool trip!
Excellent, Arne. Thank you. I plan on doing something like this in the future, so very helpful.
Just a suggestion: please use a proper camera the next time. 
Great report Arne; very scenic 
Thanks for posting it.
Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?
boscomantico wrote:
use a proper camera the next time
Peter wrote:
Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?
It takes a lot of work to process a lot of photos, especially if multiple people took pics and their cameras are set to different times, and it’s even more fun if pics are taken with phones which set themselves to the local time
I have a little prog called Jpgtime.exe which makes it very easy to change multiple files’ time stamps, especially if mostly it is in 1hr increments. I also change the EXIF with it at the same time. But one still needs to know whose camera was set to what time…
The limiting factor on picture quality is the type and condition of the windows.
Thanks very much for posting. It looks like a fantastic trip
Grear photos and report. I have some relatives from SA and we’ve often discussed how the landscape is similar to many areas of the US. But the wildlife is somewhat different!
In that kind of environment, a simple plane with a non-injected O-320 is indeed a very good choice. You don’t need avionics. The Cherokee looks good in its original paint scheme too, a nice old bird doing good work.
Thanks for making the effort to post that! I really enjoyed it!
Peter wrote:
Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?
That aircraft doesn’t look like a wreck to me. It looks perfectly well presented, of course we can’t know its maintenance history, but a simple aircraft like a Cherokee 140 isn’t hard to maintain to a standard where it’ll be reliable.
