Mortar Attack in Ethiopia

Contribution by Chris Bester

Our adventures on the Hercules aircraft have seen our teams operate in some pretty severe circumstances, and perform some interesting repairs as a result.

Rapid decent operations meant that flap track replacements were a pretty regular task and bad runway conditions often resulted for pork chop fitting replacements.

One interesting repair job followed a mortar attack in Addis Abba in Ethiopia, which resulted in pretty severe damage to one of our aircraft as a result of holes created by shrapnel. 

Proper repairs had to be done back in Johannesburg, but the challenge was to get the aircraft down from Ethiopia to Johannesburg for those repairs to be carried out. Safair sent a technical team up to meet the aircraft where we patched the holes as best we can, mostly plugging the holes with high-speed tape. We then had to ferry the aircraft back at low altitude all the way back to Johannesburg where the final repairs could be done.