Teams plan 10,000-mile trip across Africa to biplane event
AN INTREPID pilot from Selby is set to take part in the biggest ever biplane rally which will see his team fly more than 10,000 miles across Africa.
Martyn Wiseman, from Selby, his wife Julia, and crew members Stasys Naujalis from South Africa and Liutaur Dziuzas, will depart from Crete on November 12 before arriving in Cape Town five weeks later.
Mr Wiseman, managing director of Condor Projects in Hull, was born in Zambia and learned to fly in his homeland before moving to the UK to study.
He is flying the historic route in his Antonov biplane – a five tonne former Russian paratroop aeroplane first built in 1976.
He said: “The condition of the aeroplane is all right, but aeroplanes breakdown all the time and if that happens I will have to phone someone in Russia to find out how to fix it. It’s a huge risk and when I bought the plane it was painted in camouflage, so if we had flown like that over Africa it would have been shot down.”
The route re-creates the 1931 Imperial Airways “Africa Route” from the Nile to the highlands of Ethiopia, past the Serengeti over the Victoria Falls to Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Among aircraft taking part will be the G-AAMY plane flown in the 1985 Oscarwinning film Out Of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.