Come on Down and Get Killed

By day, Sao Tome Island drowses in tropic torpor. Toward evening, however, the diminutive Portuguese colony off West Africa's underbelly in the Gulf of Guinea suddenly rouses. Along its single airport's runway can be seen a motley squadron of DC-6s, a C-46, a Super Constellation, and lately bigger but nonetheless obsolete C-97 stratofreighters, wheezing into readiness. Trucks dash up, hauling crates of food and medicines. Eventually, crews as varied as their airplanes -- Swedes, Finns, Americans, a stolid Yorkshireman, a not so dour Scot -- screech up in cars and climb aboard. One by one, at 20-minute intervals, the cargo planes lumber down the runway, turn northward toward the Nigerian coast. Late afternoon sunlight splashes on little blue and gold fish, the fuselage emblems of the interfaith airlift organized by the World Council of Churches and the Catholic relief organization Caritas to shuttle food to starving Biafra.

Since Uli airport, 90 minutes' flying time from Sao Tome, is shrunken Biafra's lone remaining link with the world, the night shuttle frequently hauls passengers as well. A visitor has to be nerveless to endure the trip. Approaching the coast at dusk, the planes are occasionally shot at by Nigerian antiaircraft batteries. When they reach Uli, homing in on the airfield's radio beacon, they face worse harassment from a twin-engine Nigerian Ilyushin the pilots call "the Intruder." The Ilyushin hovers over blacked-out Uli every night for four hours, drops 500-lb. bombs from time to time, and forces the food planes to pull up and scatter. Its pilot breaks into their radio frequency in mocking, accented English. "This is genocide, baby," he taunts. "Come on down and get killed." Some do. Two mercy planes have crashed in the eleven months since the airlift got under way. The eight crewmen killed in the crashes lie in simple graves at a nearby village called Mgbidi.

A Nice Road But. To avoid the Intruder, planes travel 20 miles to 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, and to avoid running out of runway, pilots reverse their propellers and "stand" on their brakes. Not infrequently, an incoming pilot discovers that the control tower has blithely sent a plane out above or below him.

Whisky and Al Capone. To soothe their psyches, mercy pilots turn the shuttle into a competition. Each tries to make three flights a night; this means leaving Uli 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.

Pay for facing such hazards ranges upwards of $5,000 a month. Even at those wages, most U.S. crews of the C-97s that reached Africa in January are already refusing to fly any more and are returning home. The Europeans, mostly veteran pilots too old or to flaky to be hired by regular airlines, are thus still bearing the brunt of the shuttle, though they have been flying only two nights out of every four instead of every night, as they did before the ex-U.S. Air Force C-97s arrived.

Life on Sao Tome between flights is expensive and dull. Hotel beds cost $9 a day and car rentals in some cases are $250 a 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 a trickle of food for Biafra's famished population. Then, as day begins to vanish over Sao Tome, dinner is served, the cargo trucks depart, the ancient aircraft cough into life, and the shuttle resumes.

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