Page 203 - Demo

199animals, I cannot remember what they were, perhaps some kind of deer, heard us coming and raced round a tree to get away. Unfortunately, they went different ways around and banged into each other head-to-head on the other side. When I looked at the map I had been given to go back with I found that the minimum height in game reserves was 1000ft.We landed at Harari and after a chat with the engineers went out to air test the aircraft I was to fly back in on Monday. The first part of an air test is usually a timed climb to height noting engine temperature and pressures at various heights. This we did with me noting down the readings. The next thing was a high-speed dive. Well, it was lucky that the aircraft was OK as he pulled out of the dive between 2 barns in his brother in laws farm. He then did a quite impressive aerobatic display there at very low level. It would have been very impressive from the ground but as far as I was concerned it was terrifying. At last, all the other things that had been done were completed and we flew back to Harari where he did another low-level display. The groundcrew thought it was great but the senior Air Force officer at Harari was not so impressed and so I had to wait while the Wing Commander got his bollocking. When he came back, he just laughed as there was nothing they could do about it. They needed him as a QFI and he was leaving anyway. That weekend I stayed in Harari with one of our students and his wife. He had flown Dakotas and was a bit more mature than many of the others. A couple of months later he was flying to Harari with an engineer in the back. He raised the undercarriage too early and sank back on to the runway. It was the engineers first flight and it lasted all of 5 seconds. If too much weight was put in the back of the aircraft it was rather twitchy to fly and I was in one once when, as we taxied up a bit of a hill, the nose wheel came off the ground making it impossible to steer. Someone had put a car wheel in the back that he wanted us to take somewhere and had pushed it too far down the back. There was never a dull moment.