Word: grounds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...young-as young as the girls who crowd with the boys-but how innocent their faces and how full of light! Ten women sing and walk in serried ranks. They are as triumphant as though all around them were people crossing themselves, praying, repenting, bowing to the ground. These women do not smell the cigarette smoke, their ears are closed to the obscenities, their feet move across the yard not sensing that it has turned into a dance floor...
...another beacon erected in a treetop where they hover in holding patterns. Here the danger is perhaps greater. Other planes from Gabon loaded with arms and ammunition also join the pattern; sometimes as many as 20 ships are circling simultaneously, some assigned the same altitudes by inexperienced Biafran ground controllers. The sight of fire-bright exhausts in the African night is slim comfort to other flyers. Says Swedish Pilot Ulf Engelbrecht: "If all the pilots some night were to turn on rotating beacons and clearance lights, a dozen of them would die of fright at their proximity to one another...
Leaving the pattern for the harrowing descent into Uli, a plane threads through Biafran ack-ack thrown up by gunners who confuse friendlies with the Intruder. As they near ground level, crews must maneuver in darkness for all but the final 30 seconds before touchdown. The runway is really only a section of the road between Uli and Mgbidi that has been widened to 75 feet. "That's a nice wide road," comments one flyer, "but a damned narrow runway." Airplanes' wheels have no more than a 20-ft. margin on either side. Wingtips brush treetops...
...near sunup on the third run and dodging dawn-patrol Nigerian MIGs. But three flights are almost impossible. Diversions because of the Intruder eat up time; so does the fact that Uli can accommodate only eight planes easily and gives priority to the gunrunners. Weakened by hunger, Biafran ground crews sag noticeably unloading second or third flights. When the Ilyushin drops one of its bombs, the Biafrans vanish, leaving the plane crews and church officials to offload the cargo themselves. Twenty-four missions in one night is the squadron record. The average is closer to half that many...
...month. The Portuguese businessman who rents the beds and leases the cars is referred to, unaffectionately, as Al Capone. Returning from a night's work, crews breakfast-usually on whisky to untangle their gut knots-sleep, swim, send money home. Like all airmen, they do a lot of ground flying: when their ecclesiastical employers are out of earshot, they talk of bombing Lagos or heroically knocking down the Intruder by maneuvering a wingtip under his wingtip in the darkness and "flipping his ass to kingdom come." They joke grimly over the fact that their nightly flights mean only...