Special Memories from Previous Safair CEO

Contributed by Dave Andrew

My first encounter with a Herc was back in the early 80s as a national serviceman returning from South West Africa following a camp in Ondangwa. Little did I know at that stage, that that aircraft type was going to play such a significant part in my career.

I joined Safair in 1990 and spent the first eight years of my career on the technical side of the operation, firstly in Engineering and Technical Services and later in Quality Assurance and Training before finally moving into a role as Senior Manager of Engineering and Maintenance Planning.

Most of this time was spent working on the Hercs, from developing modifications to the aircraft, upgrading the primary navigation systems from CMC Omegas to Honeywell HT9000 GPS, and developing a system to keep accurate records of hours flown by our customers to prevent them from cheating us on the actual utilisation!

A lot of time was also spent developing interesting new configurations that facilitated much needed commercial contracts for our customers such as air drops for the World Food Program, bulk fuel tank operations and so on. I was also part of the technical team that supported the first operation to Antarctic, for Adventure Network International out of Punta Arenas in Chile as well as the Paris Dakar Rally logistic support operation, to name a few adventures.

During this time the Commercial Team, under Hugh, had secured a contract through Hunting Cargo Airlines and Chapman Freeborn to place a Herc on standby in the UK for a company called Oil Spill Response (OSRL). I was fortunate enough to be responsible for the technical side of the introduction of this contract which included starting the operation in East Midlands along with Neville Desselss, Captain John Pillans and Captain Phillip Roussou. Shortly after this we secured a short-term “damp lease” for one of the Hercs, ZS-JIX, to a UK company call Heavylift for a similar oil spill response contract for a company call East Asia Response Limited (EARL), based in Singapore.  Little did we know at the time that within the year we would have both of these contracts directly through Safair and that both of them would run, with numerous extensions, for more than 15 years.

During that time I also had the opportunity to work with Hugh on Safair’s shortest Dry Lease ever. A one-month lease to North West Territorial Air, based in Edmonton and Yellowknife in Canada.

In 1997 we also met and sold our first Hercules aircraft to Lynden Air Cargo, ZS-JJA MSN 4698. JJA became N402LC and is still in service with Lynden Air Cargo today. The start of another relationship that would last right through to this day.

In 1998 I had the privilege to take over the commercial and marketing responsibility for Safair, when Hugh moved to Ireland to set up Air Contractors, which became todays ASL. I spent the next 10 years placing the Hercs on contracts all over the world including in Antarctica for ANI and the Italian Government, which only ended recently. Other placements included Kosovo for the Austrian Government, Peru, Indonesia and all over Africa.

Safair’s long-standing relationships with the various aid and relief organisations like the United Nations, the World Food Programme, the Red Cross and numerous others has seen the Safair fleet of Hercules aircraft operated in just about every area of conflict and natural disaster over the last 30 years or more.

In many ways the Hercs are probably the last “adventure operations” left in commercial aviation and are totally different in almost every way to normal commercial aircraft operations. Having attended many of the crew briefings at the start of various contracts or missions, it always amazed me at the project nature of the Herc activity. Crew would literally be called in and briefed on what they had to do, be appointed an aircraft, and off they would go to some remote part of the world, where they would perform any number of operations. They would then return a few weeks later to hand over to another equally enthusiastic team whick would continue with the project.

Our teams that operate, maintain and generally take care of the Hercs are a committed team of adventurous professionals that have changed many lives, particularly in the aid and relief operations, for many years.

However, it hasn’t always been easy, and there have been times when we had more aircraft parked than we had flying. Days when we had to hide the aircraft behind the hangers during board meetings so that our shareholders at the time couldn’t see how many aircraft were available. The size of the fleet over the years has also varied significantly from the initial sixteen aircraft that were purchased from Lockheed down to as few as four at one stage and then back up to ten in the mid-2000’s when we acquired a fleet of five additional aircraft. Some of them were original Safair aircraft which had spent some time with Transafrik.