Arthur Walker: Brave pilot with nerves of steel
1953-2016
ARTHUR Walker, who has died in Pretoria at the age of 63, was the most highly decorated member of the South African Defence Force.
A helicopter pilot during South Africa’s conflict within Angola in the ’80s, Major Walker was the only person to receive the highest medal the SADF awarded for bravery, the Honoris Crux Gold, twice. Only four others received the medal.
He earned his first on the evening of January 15 1981 when two Alouette helicopters under his command came under heavy fire while providing air support for South African parabats in southern Angola.
The situation was so dangerous that the choppers were ordered to withdraw. They had just returned to base when he led them back to cover a casualty evacuation.
On their way out in gathering darkness, the second Alouette came under heavy fire and radioed for help. Walker turned back into the danger zone, this time switching on all his lights to divert the fire onto him. This enabled the second chopper to get away, leaving Walker to duck and dive and make it out by the skin of his teeth.
He won a bar to his Honoris Crux Gold on December 29 1981 after he landed next to a chopper that had been hit and crashed while taking off from a casualty evacuation in the middle of another battle.
While his flight engineer tried to free the soldier’s body from under the burning wreckage, Walker grabbed an AK47 that he always carried and set off to find the aircrew.
He came under heavy fire, which he returned from behind an ant hill. He and his flight engineer sprinted for their chopper and took off. Then Walker spotted the aircrew below, turned around, landed and lifted them out, all of this under withering fire.
Walker, whose English grandfather stowed away on a ship to South Africa at the age of 14 to fight in the Anglo-Boer War, was born in Johannesburg on February 10 1953.
He matriculated at King Edward VII School in Houghton (its museum has an “Arthur Walker” section). He got his pilot wings in the South African Air Force in 1977 and flew helicopters in combat in the Rhodesian Air Force before rejoining the SAAF in 1980.
He left in 1993, joined the flying ambulance service, fought mountain fires in Cape Town, did sea rescue missions and precision live-line flying (during maintenance work on live power lines) in South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola, and taught law enforcement officers to fly stealth helicopters to combat drug trafficking in the Middle East .
Walker, who was diagnosed with small-cell cancer in November last year, is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Bianca. — Chris Barron