Ukraine air disaster: SA pilot felt lucky to get seat upgrade
DURBAN helicopter pilot Cameron Dalziel could hardly believe his luck. He had been upgraded to business class on his flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and sent a “brag photo” to his family to tell them.
His wife, Reine, and the couple’s two sons were waiting for him in Miri, Malaysia, looking forward to welcoming him back after a working trip in the Netherlands.
A few hours later, Dalziel, 43, was among the 298 people who died when the Malaysian Airline flight MH17 was shot down in eastern Ukraine.
Dalziel, his wife and sons Sheldon, 14, and Cruz, 4, moved to Miri in December, where he worked for Canadian company CHC Helicopters. His job included flights to offshore oil rigs owned by Shell and Petronas, as well as emergency operations.
The family planned to fly home to Durban in two weeks for a holiday.
Dalziel’s brother, Campbell, 38, with whom he shared many hours surfing on Umhlanga Rock’s Durban View beach, is deeply shocked.
“I can’t believe it. It’s senseless, but I keep asking myself why,” he said.
Reine was “besides herself, but she has to be strong for the boys”.
Their parents, Meryl, 72, and Doug, 76, were devastated by the loss of their eldest son. “No parent should bury their children,” said Campbell.
Campbell last spoke to his brother two weeks ago. His mother spoke to him on Wednesday — just a day before the flight that claimed her son’s life.
Their sister, Candice, 46, flew from Dubai on Friday to be with the family.
Cameron’s long-time friend, Neil Noble, a Durban paramedic now living in Australia, said he was devastated.
“He had a wicked sense of humour, one of the few people in this world that I know who was really genuine,” said Noble. “Before his flight took off on Thursday, he messaged his wife and some friends to boast about being upgraded to business class. He couldn’t believe his luck.”
Noble, who struck up a friendship with Dalziel 20 years ago when they both worked for emergency services in Durban, said they had been on thousands of rescue missions together over the years.
More reports on Page 4
THEY lie among the sunbleached wheat. The bodies. Torn. Broken. Burnt.
Some are like manikins — twisted, turned and rearranged, their joints bent at impossible angles, their skin like dull yellow plastic.
There is no easy way to describe the final, scattered resting place of flight MH17.
It is a scene of horrors that stretches over many acres of this corner of eastern Ukraine — testimony to a plane being ripped up by a missile and then thrown 10km down to earth.
By Friday morning, many of the passengers had been found in one field and what remained of them were marked by wooden stakes flying small white ribbons.
Some are tangled in their seats, but others have been flung far away from the debris.
One woman’s body is unimaginably scarred, but the red paint on her toenails is still smooth and unchipped and the skin of her one remaining foot has retained its lifelike lustre. The blonde hair of another passenger is in perfect condition, but her body has been split and torn.
A young boy’s corpse is nearby. His white Tommy Hilfiger shirt is still clean, marked only by the blood near his head and shoulder. His face is well preserved and he has a strong brow and dark straight hair. But he has suffered a traumatic head wound.
Among the debris, the banal seems to be as striking as the death. There is an “I Love Amsterdam” T-shirt, a souvenir Paris picture frame, toiletries, food and clothes. All seem so fundamentally human and yet so far removed from the bodies scattered around.
Also there are books — a biography of former British soccer great Kevin Keegan, another of Ron Atkinson.
Here, the golden colour of the fields has in places been broken by uneven swaths of black. There is a summer rain and the sky is grey, but in one spot the field still smoulders. There is no freshness in the air. Instead, among the globules of melted steel, among the great turbines and pieces of fuselage, one smells only kerosene fuel.
The dreadful scenes affect not only the journalists here, but also some of the rebel soldiers on patrol. One, dressed in camouflage, moves among the wreckage, head bowed, gun by his side. He refuses to speak. He simply shakes his head.
A group of men, most of them wearing miners’ helmets, march solemnly down the road, refusing to speak. They return in the same manner five minutes later.
This hell is not free from politics, though. Pavel Gubarev, the “people’s governor” of the rebelheld Donetsk region, arrives with bodyguards and says he believes Ukrainian forces may have been responsible for the disaster.
“And here we need to be very careful, especially the international community, not to turn this into an international political scandal until the investigation is completed,” he said.
Asked whether international investigators were on the scene, Gubarev said: “I haven’t seen any yet. We are not going to hinder their work.”
Nearby, two boys, a 15-yearold and another aged 16, play by a stretch of water. They claim to have seen the explosion.
“We saw how a missile was flying and then it blew up . . . It [the plane] flies for another 20 seconds, then all pieces break off and it falls down,” said one of the teenagers.
As the sun set on Friday night, the grim search for bodies continued. But tracking down the fragments of MH17 is a mammoth task. In a huge field of chest-high sunflowers behind the village of Rosipnaya, a large chunk of fallen wreckage has flattened the crop and created a grim clearing. Here appears to be the place where the section of the Boeing 777 which carried mail has fallen.
On the ground amid the metal are letters and parcels. One box has burst open, showing a new pair of bright pink trainers.
A stick with a white piece of cloth marks the spot where a body was found. Next to this are envelopes. One reads “Priorite” and has been posted to a man in Perak, Malaysia. Another is to a doctor in Perth, Australia.
And then there is another body. — © The Daily Telegraph, London