Word: biafra
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...take off, McGuire notes, though the air-crews often suspect a flight is in the offing when the maintenance on a plane is finished and night approaches. Once the crews in their respective bars are alerted and "poured out into their planes," they take off on their flights to Biafra, juggling flight plans so as to fly always at night, when the Egyptians piloting Nigeria's MIG's refuse...
...complete round trip from Lisbon to Biafra takes 30 hours, so two pilots and two flight engineers sleeping in shifts are on every flight, he says. The planes generally fly straight from Lisbon to Biafra, unload and then fly to Bisau. Portuguese Guinea, or St. Isabel or St. Tome, Fernando Po (also Portuguese). Once there, they sometimes fly a short triangle, carrying only food, between Biafra, Bisau, and Fernando Po before returning to Lisbon...
...Finding the airstrip (in Biafra), that's a problem sometimes," McGuire says. Biafra's sole airstrip is a hard-top road slightly widened by cutting away at the jungle on both sides. It is lit by two rows of lights, none of them very strong. The outboard engines of the four-engine Constellations hang out over the brush, which, if it fouls the engines, means an abrupt end to the flight...
McGuire does not mind talking about his closest call while flying to Biafra and one might even suspect that he takes a certain delight in it. Scheduled as a crew member on one flight, he transferred to an earlier one partly because of a quarrel with the other flight engineer, but mostly because of "a certain feeling; you get to be like a cat or some kind of an animal sometimes." The flight to which McGuire transferred was supposed to be a dangerous one. Its pilot, since given other duties, carried the sobriquet of "Mr. Magoo." It landed safely...
...only thing you can see, sticking up in the jungle." Aboard were Augie Martin, a black American pilot earning a little extra money while on vacation from Seaboard World Airlines; Martin's wife Gladys, whom McGuire thinks had come along to gather material for an article on Biafra; Jess Meade, also an American; and a Rhodesian with the pseudonym of "Bill Brown." Mr. Martin's head was never found, McGuire says, so "the missionaries buried what they could find of him." "Bill Brown" reportedly had a wife and family in Rhodesia, who are vainly attempting to collect the money...