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IT WAS 1958. The elderly-looking Dakota of
Aden Airways took off promptly. We were a varied
group that had boarded; I
was the only European passenger. There were immaculately robed
gentlemen, prayer beads passing
busily through somewhat nervous hands as their owners doubtless called on Allah for a
smooth takeoff and an even smoother landing.
Cover image from an Aden Airways
Timetable
Neatly swathed green-topped headpieces indicated their owners were Sada
(descendants of the Prophet
Muhammad), with at least one
visit to Mecca to their credit. There were their
wives, or someone's wives,
shapeless bundles of black
robes, with just the occasional glimpse of a hennaed palm of a hand and sometimes
the flash of an eye. There were babies being held
everywhere. At the rear of
the aircraft, just aft of the strapped bags, bales and suitcases and tin trunks, were
two goats tightly wrapped in sacks; their lustrous eyes
perhaps revealed just a hint
of their concern at being separated from their free-roaming kin on the Aden streets.
I sat back in the narrow seat, gazing through the square window at the broken brown landscape, clearly visible
below. There were two hours
or so of flight over
some of the most
inhospitable terrain I was yet to encounter on the ground.
For the first time I began to feel I was heading out of my depth. At last I sensed the real isolation of being among strangers truly
indifferent to my presence.
Over the roar of the
two engines came the shrill
cries of infants dandled by their mothers. The Aden Airways steward offered me a warm orange drink and a biscuit. The aircraft bucketed suddenly in an up-draft and my
stomach lurched. I focused my eves sternly on Harold Ingrams' Arabia and the
Isles. The aircraft droned on and on.
I must
have dozed off at this point. I opened my eyes as the
Dakota began to lose height. Now there were signs of
habitation. The plane banked and I could see the
airstrips ahead, alongside a cluster of small buildings
that gleamed blindingly white in the afternoon sun. This
was Riyan, a Royal Air Force station manned by just a
few expatriate personnel, a remnant of the old imperial
flying-boat route to India, and now the main gateway to
Mukalla, capital of the Qu’aiti sultanate and
headquarters of the Resident Adviser and British Agent of the Eastern Aden Protectorate.
It was
about 3.00 p.m. and on the ground the dusty scene was
bathed in a mellow yellowness of slanting light. It was
still hot, but the stickiness of that afternoon by the
Arabian Sea had nothing in common with the miasmic
blanket-stifling heat of Crater-clogged Aden. There was
a light breeze blowing; it enhanced a definite feeling
of escape from all the hurly-burly of the last few days.
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Aden Airways Douglas DC-3 at
Dhala
1963. Photo Peter Pickering.
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Our
long-wheel-based Land Rover had been backed with some
difficulty, up to the Dakota. A harassed local official
was engaged in heated altercation with passengers over
the contents of their shiny tin trunks. Two
depressed-looking local policemen in ill-fitting khaki
pushed owners away from their possessions. Torrents of
unintelligible speech passed back and forth; babies
cried and were shrilly consoled by their shrouded
mothers. The packaged goats eyed the scene with
resignation: the Adeni steward loftily surveyed the
jumble of packages and bundles from the vantage of the
aircraft's steps. The two British pilots busied
themselves inspecting various protuberances on the wings
and tail of the machine, which I saw had a towing hook,
denoting it had probably been used to manoeuvre gliders
over Arnhem. Three or four RAF aircraftsmen, stripped to
the waist and burnt dark brown, chatted among themselves
as the Dakota was being refuelled. |
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There was
a 'flash' message on my desk to say that an
Aden Airways Dakota was missing on a flight
from the EAP (which worried my mother in London). In
fact the aircraft had been on a flight from Maifa’ah in
Wahidi and it had been sabotaged by an explosive device
placed in a holdall under someone's seat. On board was
old bin Sa’id, the state secretary, and Tim Goschen the
Assistant Adviser (Wahidi), who had only been
coming to Aden for a break to attend a social gathering.
Eye witnesses on the ground described a violent
explosion: the tail came off and then the nose, and the
remains went into a spin from 6,000 feet. It crashed not
far from Ahwar. Bodies (in bits) and luggage were
scattered over a wide area. Robin had the ghastly job of
identifying what remained of Tim. |
Vickers Viscount VR-AAV
bombed at Aden Civil Airport.
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I turned my attention to the next
problem, which was how to fly people and materials to Mukalla for the coronation ceremony for the new Qu’aiti
Sultan, HH Ghalib bin Awadh bin Salih, a pleasant 19
year-old who had succeeded to the sultanate on the death
of his unlamented father. Ghalib was a sophisticated
British-educated youth who faced every sort of worry for
the future. I wished him well, but how to manage the air
transport to Mukalla? Understandably, the Aden Airways
flight crew was refusing to fly until security had been
improved. They had every reason to worry. Not only was
the Aden Airways booking office under Abdullah al Asnaj,
and therefore a hotbed of FLOSY supporters, but there
was nothing to stop another bomb being placed on board
any flight - it had, after all, been done once with
impunity. I left Aden Airways to sort out when they
would fly: the RAF once again turned up trumps.
Extracts from the Michael Crouch book, 'AN ELEMENT OF
LUCK'
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