Dak down in the Drak

Cape Town's excellent V&A Waterfront was the scene for Red Bull's Flugtag today and 40+ aircraft of all shapes and sizes strutted their stuff. These events never fail to impress with their ingenuity and pure sense of fun. Some of the planes were destined from the start to plunge straight into the water, from the 6-metre high ramp protruding off Jetty 1. And so it was with concoctions that paid barely no attention to basic aerodynamics but were still propelled into the abyss with great abandon. My son Matt's plane was a serious effort by the Cape Town Flying Club with an 8-metre wingspan and a rear flap that enabled them to get some lift. For pilots, this week has been tragic with the SA Air Force 35 Squadron (based near Cape Town) C-47 going down over the Drakensberg with 11 on board. This was a modified Dakota, basically a DC-3 with turbo engines. The Dak is an amazing survivor, the first being built in 1935 and widely used ever since for many purposes. They were built in plants in California as well as Oklahoma City, 10 000 in all over the years. I had quite a few flights in Daks during the 1970s, mainly in what was then South-West Africa, flown by young pilots who used to throw the planes around like toys. They were built to take punishment, which makes the 35 Squadron loss all the more mysterious. It will be hard to determine just what went wrong because there was no black box on board. The QSL is from KOMA Radio in Oklahoma City, heard on a trip to San Francisco in 1993. One of the great US AM stations.