Two Impala MK1 fighter pilots died almost instantly on Wednesday morning when their jet crashed in Mpumalanga’s notorious Crocodile Gorge.
One of the pilots was flung through the roof of a passing truck after an apparent attempt to eject from his burning plane.
“All I saw was a flaming fireball coming right at me. I swerved wildly, and then heard a big thud on our roof. It all happened at lightning speed,” said the visibly shocked truck driver, Enoch Nkosi.
“We immediately stopped, and found parts of the body of a badly [maimed] man in some kind of uniform. His body smashed right through the roof into the cargo bay, with his parachute still sticking out of the truck. It took us a while to understand there had been a plane crash.”
The fighter jet itself appears to have slammed into boulders less than 10m from the N4 highway 20km east of Nelspruit.
Wreckage, including an ejection seat, have blocked the busy highway, which is South Africa’s major road access to neighbouring Mozambique and Swaziland.
The second, still unnamed pilot’s body was reportedly recovered from the banks of the Crocodile River by the first police patrols on the scene. Witnesses said it appeared he was flung into trees before falling on to the rocky river bank. His tattered parachute is still tangled in tree-tops metres from the burning wreck.
The first police officers on the scene were alerted by a massive explosion heard from 3km away, and were guided to the site by a plume of smoke above the shattered fighter.
“It’s still very chaotic on the scene, but we’ve secured the accident site and are waiting for joint military and Civil Aviation Authority investigators,” said local police spokesperson Captain Mtsholi Bhembe.
“We have no indication yet what caused the crash, or what the plane was doing in such a place.”
The nearby Kruger Mpumalanga International airport tower refused to comment, saying a military gag order had been imposed.
South African Air Force spokesperson Colonel Martie Visser would only say the flight was a navigational training mission from Hoedspruit’s 85th Combat Flying School and was probably piloted by trainee pilots scheduled for graduation on December 4 2003.
“We still know very little. There wasn’t even a mayday, so we won’t know much until after a thorough investigation,” said Visser.
The identities of the pilots will be withheld until their relatives have been informed. A joint air force and Civil Aviation Authority board of inquiry will probe the incident.
The crash is the second reported disaster involving an Impala in the past 18 months.
Captain Brett Burmeister was killed in April 2002 when his fighter jet went down near Limpopo’s Albasini Dam during a low-level tactical navigation exercise.
Burmeister was also flying out of Hoedspruit for the 85th Combat Flying School.
The two-seater Impala fighter was first bought from Italy for the air force as a light attack aircraft in the early 1960s to replace older, propeller-driven fighters.
South Africa upgraded and built its own versions of the versatile plane in the 1970s, when it became a stalwart of the country’s fighter training programme.
After almost 40 years of active service, the Impala has finally been scheduled for replacement in 2005 by British Aerospace’s Hawk jet fighters.
The Hawks will be used for both jet and weapon delivery training for pilots of the country’s only fighter squadron, based at Louis Trichardt in Limpopo, which is scheduled to be equipped with Swedish made Gripen jets. — African Eye News Service