Word: airstrips
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...remotest evidence of violence by the Nigerian Federal forces." Henrik Beer, secretary general of the League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva, doubted that there had ever been wholesale starvation in Biafra. But hunger remained a very real threat. Gowon adamantly refused to let relief groups use Uli airstrip, a symbol of Biafran resistance. One result of his decision was that many of the 3,500,000 people in Biafra were going hun gry. According to some estimates by churchmen and physicians, as many as 1,000,000 Biafrans were on the verge of starvation. Ignoring pleas to stay...
...relief agencies did so at night to avoid marauding MIG-17s and Ilyushin-28 bombers, supplied to Nigeria by the Russians and flown by Egyptian pilots. Food planes from the Portuguese island of Sao Tome, Red Cross flights and gunrunners from Libreville in Gabon circled over the airstrip only briefly, then dropped swiftly through the African darkness for bumpy landings during the ten seconds in which the runway lights were flipped on by a camouflaged control tower. A Nigerian night fighter nicknamed "Genocide" tried to pick them off as they landed; occasionally he was successful. All told, ten cargo planes...
...center of Calabar and Port Harcourt, with its airport, harbor and oil installations. For the remainder of the fight, Biafra was a landlocked island. Apart from radios, its sole contact with the world was a 75-ft.-wide strip of highway at Uli that had been converted into an airstrip with the code name Annabelle...
...airstrip by that time, half the runway lights and some of the runway itself had been knocked out by Nigerian guns. The control tower began to wave off flights; they dropped from 17 a day to three, and soon were discontinued. The last pilots to get in with dried fish and other food had to unload their own planes because workers had fled. Often food moved from Uli was brought back because distribution centers had been overrun. The last telex message from Biafra to Markpress, a Geneva public relations firm that has handled the Biafra account with skill, said tersely...
Died. William T. Piper, 89, light-plane pioneer whose ubiquitous Piper Cubs put flying within reach of thousands and earned him the sobriquet "Henry Ford of aviation"; of heart disease; in Lock Haven, Pa. Piper's first Cubs lifted off the airstrip in 1931. Though slow, drafty and frail, they were easy to fly and, more important, cost only $1,325. By 1940, four out of every five pilots had learned to fly in Cubs; after World War II, thousands were sold to weekend flyers, starting a light-plane boom that has now grown to $425 million annually. Piper...