I heard with a sickening sense of foreboding the news that an airliner had come down somewhere in Central Africa shortly after take-off from Cameroon’s main airport at Douala. Any airliner coming down anywhere in the world fills me with this kind of dread. The feeling is fuelled by hundreds of take-offs and landings across four continents in a long travelling life.
I love flying. I especially love those moments of departure and arrival. They are described in all the safety literature as the most dangerous part of your flight, but the sheer thrill of being thrust back in your seat as the engines roar and push the metal, rubber and plastic flying machine, held together by miles of insulated copper cable, fuelled by tons of burning kerosene pumped from fuel tanks just under your feet, along the runway to the point of no return, is something else.
And when the plane finally takes to the sky, and leaves the humdrum world in its rapidly vanishing wake, you really feel like some wondrous bird on the wing — secure, invincible, ecstatic.
Along with the sense of elation comes a suppressed feeling of fear, I suppose. I have flown with complete strangers who dig their fingernails into my arm at this point of trying to get airborne, their eyes shut tight, not wanting to be part of the adventure. You become the brave, almost smug comforter. And yet, touch wood (where’s wood on a plane?), it has always turned out fine.
When it became clear that the flight that had vanished shortly after take-off from Cameroon’s commercial capital was on the same Kenya Airlines route that I had taken several times with my family between Douala and Nairobi on the homeward leg to Johannesburg, the sense of horror became more acute. For some reason, you feel you can relive every moment of the disaster, because you have, theoretically, been in that same space. There, but for the grace of God— It scarcely bears thinking about. But still, you relive every detail.
The journey to the point of take-off begins with a drive in a luggage-laden vehicle through the dark, pot-holed streets of Douala, in the dead of night. The plane is due to take off for Nairobi at midnight.
Arrival at the airport is a moment of dread — not for the flight itself, but for the gauntlet you have to run to get to the departure gate. Always too many people, standing around, snoozing on the terminal floor, babies yelling or sleeping, oblivious to all the chaos, huddled among cheap suitcases and bulging bundles and television sets wrapped in cardboard, secured with pieces of string. The smell of myrrh and incense on sweating bodies, waiting for the check-in counters to open.
You push and fight to be first in the queue to present yourself to surly airline officials. Finally, like a cork bursting out of a bottle, propelled by desperate would-travellers from behind, you find yourself in the relative tranquillity of the departure lounge. There is almost nothing here — no refreshment, sparse neon lighting, and waiting. Finally, you know you will be allowed to board, and breathe a sigh of relief. The worst must surely be over.
Douala airport is the African dream gone sour. Its huge, concrete causeways lie limp, unfinished in the punishing heat. The concrete is literally rotting in the humid, tropical air. Where moving walkways should have been installed, corruption has evaporated the resources to make it happen, and you drag your children and your cabin luggage along what seem like miles of rutted, sweltering corridors towards the welcoming door of the plane and its air-conditioned interior. Relieved passengers slump into their seats.
The captain of flight KQ507 had grown impatient, having already waited for an hour beyond his scheduled departure time for the fierce tropical storm to blow over. Defying the caution of two other pilots waiting to take their airliners into the ether, he had decided to brave the surge along the runway and fly into the eye of the storm, trusting the slick technology of his spanking new plane to lift him out of trouble and above the clouds, all the way across the massive continent.
The elements over Central Africa give little mercy. Cars and trucks on the roads have been known to be blown over by the fierceness of the winds and the driving rain. What chance do the wings of an aeroplane, dwarfed by the fury of the heavens, have against all this?
In spite of my love of flying, there have been times when I have silently begged and prayed for the pilot to listen to my advice and leave things be till we all felt more secure about embarking on this adventure. The captain decided to go ahead — probably against his own better judgement, too.
It took almost two full days to find the wreckage — less than 10km, and just a few minutes’ flying time, beyond the end of the runway. Of course, with that shabby infrastructure, the flight controllers had no idea what was unfolding literally just in front of their noses. Radar tracking is something that happens in glamorous American movies.
In those first and last few seconds of flight, I can imagine, as if I was there among them, the dread, the inconceivable feeling of impending doom among those passengers, as the African elements smashed flight KQ507 into the earth, gone forever.