Emergency

Thursday started as a normal day in the hangar but at 11am I got a call from Daniel to come and join the emergency crisis team because one of the planes our engineering team maintain was heading for Dodoma but was unable to get the landing gear down.(don't worry I wasn't involved in the technical side of this, my job was to document everything that happened, action taken, decisions made etc..

Soqui the pilot had done several take offs and landings already that morning with no problem, but when she tried to land in Mahale (to pick up some passengers) she could not get her landing gear down. The nearest place to land which would have some kind of emergency response team was Dodoma, so she decided to divert to Dodoma, another 2 hours flight away.

She was flying a 210, but had no HF radio in the plane and so we had no way of working out where she was and what time she would arrive. The crisis management team rushed around calling the fire engine (there are only 2), getting a doctor; setting up an extraction team; calling the control tower; getting one of our other planes on standby to do a medevac if necessary and so on. Without the landing gear she couldn't land on the runway, so we took the pickup to check out the grassy areas on both sides of the runway to find a place for her to land.

We could only manage to communicate with the plane when she was very near the airstrip. By this time she had been flying for 5 hours and she was not sure whether she was going to make it. Her voice was very wobbly and quiet. Stephan (one of our pilots and former German secret police) went to the control tower to talk her through the landing) He was excellent, explaining the landing procedure to her and trying to get her to relax and keep her head together. We thought the problem was due to a fluid leakage from the hydraulic system, so he told her she needed to get some fluid into the system and manually pump, to get the landing gear down. Any liquid, water, coffee or if you're desperate, urine! It was very tense because she couldn't put the liquid in until she was a certain distance from the airstrip. Stephan wanted her to gain more altitude to give us more time to think if the liquid didn't work. She didn't mange to gain any altitude because, we found out later, she was so low on fuel. She reported (about 6 minutes before reaching Dodoma) that the landing gear light was on, but only faintly. However, the landing gear had fully deployed. There were a lot of people praying that plane down, and she managed to make a safe landing at Dodoma. She had a very big reception! Many MAF staff were around, as were both fire engines, at least three trucks of police and a whole bunch of airport staff and even some press! We do not at this stage know the reason for the problem that occurred, but we can all thank God for his mercy in saving both Soqui’s life and the aircraft. It was an exciting, adrenaline filled morning but I am glad that that doesn't happen too often!!