Bush pilot known as ‘All-weather Heather’
Heather Stewart, pilot: b London, March 3, 1939; m (1) Maurice French,
(2) Tony Irwin; 2s, 3d; d October 21,
2017, aged 78.
In 40 years of flying missionaries, mercenaries, armed rebels and the liberators of slaves, Heather Stewart developed a few tricks of the trade, such as stuffing her nostrils with cotton wool dipped in camphor when airlifting wounded fighters who had contracted gangrene.
The dangerous and physically uncomfortable war zones of the Horn of Africa were her bailiwick. She put herself in the line of fire as a matter of course to deliver goods and rescue the afflicted in Somalia and what was then southern Sudan. When calculated risk dissolved into a brush with death, she laughed it off.
Home for her was the Africa that wrings the heart or sets it thumping – hundreds of thousands of square miles of wild and untrammelled bush, forest and swamp inhabited by militiamen, child slaves, 7ft-tall Dinka generals, priests and aid workers.
Stewart honed her skills by putting down her aircraft on landing strips so dubious that many male colleagues refused to use them. Her reputation for unflustered flight in dodgy environments was such that it even overshadowed her striking looks.
She started her career in aviation ferrying tourists and businessmen around the game parks of east Africa. Tired of the monotony of life as an airborne taxi, she got a break in 1990 from a Somali businessman. He offered her a position in the lucrative trade in miraa, which is also known as khat, a leafy bush sought after by teetotal Muslim Somalis for the amphetamine buzz that comes from munching on the stalks.
Stewart’s job was to ferry sacks of the narcotic to an airstrip on the outskirts of Mogadishu, taking off at first light from Wilson airport in Nairobi come rain or shine. It was to earn her the sobriquet ‘‘All-weather Heather’’.
A year later President Siad Barre was toppled and his country descended into anarchy. The Baledogle airstrip outside the capital was now patrolled by militiamen in stripped-down vehicles mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Intoxicated and unpredictable, they were armed with AK-47s and hand grenades.
Stewart often unloaded to a background riff of gunfire as rival militias squabbled over the take. On one trip she was about to taxi down the runway when yet another gun battle erupted.
This time she was the target. Her aircraft, a Navajo Chieftain, took a bullet, which passed an inch from Stewart’s head, then emerged from the fuselage and took a chunk out of the propeller blade. ‘‘I couldn’t see any leaking fuel, and the engine seemed to be running OK, but I sat there for 10 minutes because I knew that if I moved, they’d shoot me,’’ she said.
Back at Wilson airport the plane was patched up and three days later Stewart was in the air again. She continued to fly to Somalia for a few more years to pay for her second son, Christopher, to go to an English boarding school. He later graduated from Sandhurst and subsequently joined the Army Air Corps and served in Iraq as a helicopter pilot.
His mother was born Heather Tarbutt, the younger of two sisters, in London in 1939 to Jean and Arthur Tarbutt. Her father fought in France during World War I and was awarded the Military Cross. In 1921 he settled in Jos in the northern highlands of Nigeria, where he managed the family tin mine.
In keeping with the mores of the times, Jean gave birth to her daughter in England and was trapped there with her two small girls for the duration of World War II. In 1945 Stewart and her elder sister, ‘‘Roro’’, flew unaccompanied to Lagos in an RAF DC3 transport aircraft via Portugal, Morocco and Sierra Leone. The journey took three days. Stewart was six.
Once at Jos, she embarked on a colonial childhood replete with pet donkeys and servants. She was first sent to the local mission school and then to South Africa. By mutual agreement with her father, who saw no profit in educating girls, she abandoned school at the age of 15 in favour of flower arranging and cooking at Eastbourne Ladies’ College. By her own admission, she never passed an exam.
Her private life was a little complex. At the age of 18 Stewart took a job as a salesgirl in the toy department of Harrods and met and married Maurice French, a captain in the Royal Fusiliers. A year later, in 1958, he was seconded to the King’s African Rifles and they moved to Kenya with their son, Dominic. Soon after giving birth to a daughter, Nicola, at the age of 21, she was introduced to Tony Irwin at a lunch party.
He was a jaunty bachelor about 20 years her senior who had fought in Burma and had more recently been in charge of the imperial stables in Addis Ababa. After an aborted coup against the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in 1960, Irwin drove his Land Rover to Kenya, accompanied by his dog.
By 1963 Stewart, who was now 24, had married Irwin and added two more daughters, Susie and Tara, to her brood. Her second husband was a keen pilot and took his young bride on safaris around the country. She realised the moment she soared up beneath the clouds and looked down on a landscape of fissured mountains and khaki plains that she had found her calling. She had to fly.
Irwin scoffed at the prospect of his wife calculating compass readings and air speeds, and posed a question that, she said later, made her freeze. ‘‘If one sausage costs five cents, how much do 20 sausages cost?’’
Despite her sketchy maths, Stewart eventually persuaded Irwin – through characteristic determination, some said obstinacy – to pay for flying lessons as a belated wedding gift. Her instructor was James Stewart, a handsome former policeman who would soon be the father of her fifth and last child, Christopher.
As children piled up and husbands fell by the wayside, Stewart’s career as a commercial pilot blossomed, but her bank statements left something to be desired. She flew from dawn to dusk to put food on the table.
Stewart’s fortunes turned in her fifties when, single once more, she stepped into the civil war in southern Sudan.
Alively character with a pronounced sense of fun, Stewart rarely drank or went to parties because of her flying schedule. She was that social rarity, an attractive woman liked in equal measure by both sexes. As for the legions of suitors who held out the promise of a comfortable future, they fell by the wayside because of her passion for flying.
Stewart’s fortunes turned in her fifties when, single once more, she stepped into the civil war in southern Sudan. She won contracts with the United Nations to fly food and medicines across the border from a staging post at Lokichoggio, a flyblown settlement in northern Kenya. The UN had negotiated a deal with the Sudanese government that allowed its agencies to operate in some areas. Any aircraft flying in forbidden airspace was likely to be attacked.
While carrying out sanctioned flights for the UN, Stewart also ran the gauntlet to supply the Comboni Missionaries, who were building a mission in the rebelheld town of Rumbek. She would take off at 4am to avoid detection, charting her course with a Shell road map, compass and clock. She flew beneath the stars, without the benefit of radio communication or GPS, over a ‘‘Bermuda triangle’’ of countryside where there were neither buildings nor roads. A roast chicken for the priests nestled in a basket on the co-pilot’s seat.
Minutes before first light she ‘‘painted’’ her aircraft on to a length of dirt lit at each end by a kerosene lamp.
It was a sweet deal for both sides. Stewart, a Protestant, risked her life for the Catholic church. In return the diocese of Rumbek lent her the money to buy a twin-engine Cessna. It was the first aircraft of her own and the cornerstone for her charter company, Trackmark. At its peak Trackmark operated 18 aircraft. Stewart built a camp for her 22 pilots at Lokichoggio, which she turned into an oasis of such good taste that aid workers stayed for R&R.
Her daughters Tara and Susie worked for Trackmark for many years, running the camp and the Nairobi-based operations.
At the age of 69 she retired as a commercial pilot and moved to the Kenyan coast, where she hosted an expanding brood that included 12 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
At the end of it all, she had logged more than 20,000 hours’ flying time, the equivalent of 800 days in the air.
Her courage, coupled with her windchime laughter and ever-present sense of the ridiculous, inspired many people. To honour the work she had done for the Catholic church, Bishop Cesare Mazzolari took her to Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II. She was perhaps best appreciated, though, by those who had been forgotten.
The Turkana children of northern Kenya called her Nakitana – ‘‘The One Who Cares’’.