Vintage Air Rally highlights stunts and landing skills
The Vintage Air Rally features planes dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. PHOTOS | COURTESY
What you need to know:
The Vintage Air Rally seeks to raise awareness about and fund several charities such as BirdLife International and Seed Bombing, which is working with Seedballs Kenya.
Foreign pilots flying vintage aeroplanes across Africa, have been showcasing different stunts and landing skills in the different cities where they have been making stopovers.
The Vintage Air Rally features planes dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. The rally involves flying from Greece’s Crete Island to South Africa’s Cape Town. It started on November 12 and is expected to take five weeks.
The teams which are made up of spouses, fathers and daughters or friends, are testing their skills and aircraft to the limit by attempting to fly more than 12,500 kilometres across 10 African countries. There will be 37 stops in 35 days.
The trip has had a few twists and turns with the crew being detained by Ethiopian authorities and another pilot crashing into a farm in Kenya. According to the organisers, the landing permits for Ethiopia were requested on time but the Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority took time to issue them.
“Vintage Air Rally filed flight plans, which were accepted by Addis air control, and were then given clearance to take-off in Khartoum and we headed to Gambella in western Ethiopia. However, a small misunderstanding led to our crew being detained until the Ethiopian authorities realised that it was a genuine mistake and the crew was permitted to continue to Kenya,” said the Vintage Air Rally organisers.
On Sunday, November 27, John Ordway and his daughter Isabella, who are representing Ireland, crash-landed in a farm in central Kenya after their 941 Boeing Stearman developed a mechanical problem.
Belgian pilots Alexandra Maingard and her husband Cedric Collette Belgium, who have been flying for more than 10 years, are flying a vintage Stampe OO-GWB, which was made and designed in Belgium in the 1920s.
The aircraft are flying low along the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum, past the highlands of Ethiopia, down the plains of Kenya and over East Africa.
They will pass over Kilimanjaro to the Serengeti, then the island of Zanzibar and on further south, crossing Zambia, over the Victoria Falls to Bulawayo in Zimbabwe.
They will then go to Botswana and end the trip in Cape Town, South Africa.
The Vintage Air Rally seeks to raise awareness about and fund several charities such as BirdLife International and Seed Bombing, which is working with Seedballs Kenya.
BirdLife International supports the conservation of Africa’s vulture species as seven out of 11 vultures are on the verge of extinction.
