Vintage Air Rally: old planes in the African skies
Smiling, Lita Oppegard extricated herself from her cockpit with the elegance of a “lady” from another century. Impeccably dressed in her sand-colored suit, she has just majestically landed her biplane on the grass of Johannesburg, as part of the Vintage Air Rally.
Lita Oppegard's testimony
Begun on November 12, 2016 in Crete, its backfiring journey in the African skies is coming to an end. And even before reaching her terminus in Cape Town, South Africa, the sexagenarian's flight log is already overflowing with anecdotes. “It was a fantastic adventure, we had so much fun. And the people we met on our trip made it really special ”, enthuses Lita Oppegard.
The hand affectionately resting on the wing of his Travel Air 4000 model 1928, eight-cylinder star engine, it is inexhaustible. “I was born and raised in Alaska. With us, they say it's the last frontier. It is very vast and very wild. But by flying over Africa as we did, I realize how immense this continent is, it is magnificent ”.
With her co-pilot husband, Nicholas, the American is part of the happy squadron of the Vintage Air Rally. Eleven crews of “flying fools” who took up the challenge of reliving, in the old-fashioned way, the daily life of the pioneers of the last century.
Egypt, Kenya, South Africa ...
Since November 12, their “cuckoos” have crossed the Mediterranean, landed at the foot of the Cairo pyramids, played leapfrog in the Kenyan savannah, greeted Kilimanjaro or admired to splash the Victoria Falls… before reaching the 'South Africa.
White mustaches in the wind, Nicholas Oppegard walked for forty-five years his stripes of captain in all the skies of the planet. But he swears it with his hand on his heart, his journey to the level of African daisies exceeds in emotions all that he had lived.
“We didn't know each other and off we went for the greatest odyssey of our lives,” he is surprised. “Honoring those who opened the skies of Africa is a joy, a privilege”.
A journey full of adventures
Their route was, however, punctuated with many twists and turns. Some crashes, spectacular but not serious, a pilot reported missing for forty minutes and two days of “police custody” in Ethiopia for a dark affair of paperwork.
There were also a few moments of pure technical bravery. Like this series of landings on the edge of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, on the edge of a void ...
So much for the officially documented incidents and anxieties. There are also these little daily fears that some pilots are careful not to confide in their peers.
This is the case of Keith Kossuth, who would not have given up his dream of trans-African air transport for the world. Not even his obvious lack of experience behind a broomstick. “I had dreamed of it for twelve years but I only recently got my plane back”, admits the Californian at the foot of his red Travel Air called “Barnstormer”, from the name of these stuntmen who competed in audacity during “circuses” aerials of the 1930s.
“All I got was four landings with the guy who owned the plane and four more on his own. And hop, ahead! ”, Plastron Keith Kossuth.
“Piloting to the buttocks”
More his boast almost came to an end after taking off from Zanzibar. “I was a little too confident, surely,” he blurted out. “The plane went into a spin and I only got it after two and a half turns. It opens your eyes, whaou ”, continues this collector of… motorcycles. “It takes a lot of practice and experience to fly such a plane”.
This raw pleasure of driving “in the buttocks”, as amateurs say, in the age of GPS and automatic piloting, is precisely what Ingo Presser, 72, came for.
The German rally veteran has spent XNUMX years in electronics-packed cockpits. But he still appreciates the uncertainty of à la carte navigation and the smell of hot oil splashing on the flight goggles. “It happened to me to pilot an Airbus in the morning and this plane in the afternoon, just for the pleasure”, he says still strapped on the rustic seat of his. Bücker Bü-131, vintage 1936.
The sky is not a limit
“In an open-air cockpit, you become one with the environment, you immediately know when the plane is flying perfectly and when there is a problem. You can feel it ”, continues the pilot, his blue eyes shining with gluttony.
Nick Oppegard does not disdain, either, these nostalgic and often solitary pleasures of the privileged. But he also hopes to have aroused some vocations, according to his encounters with the curious at each landing of his biplane.
“If we have succeeded in making even a child want to lift their heads and tell themselves that the sky is not a limit, so this trip was definitely worth it".
