Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly this way . . .
MARK Oostingh blames it on the beers. One moment he was enjoying a drink with friends during a Botswana sunset, the next he had agreed to a 6 500 nautical mile (12 000km) transcontinental aviation rally from Crete to Cape Town in an opencockpit 75-year-old plane.
“You know, when you’ve had a few beers you throw caution to the wind,” Oostingh told the Sunday Times this week. “My wife had drunk quite a bit of wine, and she said she’d fly with me. I woke up in the morning and thought: ‘Should I really do this?’ ”
But encouraged by their Botswana friends, also aviators, Mark and Lauren Oostingh, of East London, went out and bought a vintage Tiger Moth for the historic journey, the first of its kind featuring 16 vintage planes and a large squadron of support aircraft.
Leaving Greece in midNovember, they will visit 16 countries, crossing lawless territories and crocodile-infested swamps before touching down in Stellenbosch just before Christmas.
They will be joined by highprofile aviators, including South African-raised former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz, who will fly one of two new-generation “bush planes” — called BushCats — in a support capacity.
UCT computer science graduate Maritz, who was considered a possible successor to Bill Gates, is also sponsoring the rally’s “grand arrival” party at Stellenbosch Airfield, along with BushCat. He owns South African aircraft manufacturer SkyReach, which produces the plane.
So far, four heads of state are due to attend a variety of other rally events en route.
Billed as the ultimate vintage air rally, Crete2Cape seeks to recreate the pioneering spirit of early aviators, whose small biplanes flipped from one bush landing strip to the next as they made their way across Africa – with unexpected landing places not uncommon.
“It has never actually been done before,” said Londonbased rally director Sam Rutherford, who initiated the project and likens it to the ParisDakar car and motorcycle rally. “There have been similar events, but only around southern Africa or Australia, and usually a single aircraft.
“What makes this different is the sheer scale of it, both the number of the aircraft and the route. It’s a difficult thing for a modern airplane today, but ours are aircraft not in the prime of their youth — the oldest one is 96 years.”
The rally will traverse natural and man-made wonders such as the pyramids in Egypt, Mount Kilimanjaro and Victoria Falls. At one point the route crosses southern Sudan — “not an area to fly too low”, said Rutherford — and a lawless part of South Sudan.
It also traverses a swampy part of the Congo where, should there be an emergency stop, “they would more likely be dealing with crocodiles than people”, quipped Rutherford.
Oostingh, an insurance salesman turned businessman, re- cently sold a dealership group “which essentially gave me a little bit of time [off]”.
He is taking no chances, though; he has fitted his plane with an auxiliary fuel tank to allow him to make the 250-nautical mile journey across the Mediterranean.
“It is a bit terrifying — I have never flown out of sight of land,” he said.
“If I had to I would just land it in the sea — it shouldn’t sink immediately and I will climb on top of it and hope that somebody extracts me.”
Other modifications include a modern communication system — “otherwise we’d be deaf after five weeks of flying” — and a wind-powered generator fitted beneath the plane to power the battery.
As if Crete to Cape Town is not adventure enough, the South African couple are planning a “pre-rally rally” from London to Crete, a trip of about 1 500 nautical miles, through France, Switzerland, Italy and the Balkan states. Their Tiger Moth will have an additional voyage — on a ship from South Africa to England, where it will be re-assembled.
Maritz, who could not be reached for comment this week, made his name in cloud computing. He will probably have to be content with more voluminous clouds when he teams up with a pilot friend for the African odyssey. A colleague, Michael Gill, general manager of SkyReach, said Maritz was an “adventurer at heart”.
Oostingh, meanwhile, is adopting a cautious approach by flying solo across the Med. A former national aerobatic champion, he won’t let his wife join him for the crossing: “I just think it is too risky. If I go down in the Med I rather want to look after myself, and not have other liabilities.”