Watching for warbirds
T6 HARVARD: US FIGHTER PLANES ARE NOW NATIONAL TREASURES
Each week Marie-Lais scouts another urban reach, tasting, testing alternative aspects to pique our curiosity about places and people we might have had no idea about. This week her eyes are glued to the sky.
Sitting at the Harvard Café is certainly no guarantee of sighting Harvards. But there are plenty of Cessnas and Pipers taxiing and taking off, the airport fire truck running its beat and helicopters are landing. The tarmac and the air are busy in the late afternoon. The café’s sign indicates that this is Where Time Flies.
Harvards began landing in South Africa from the US from 1942 onwards, training many, many fighter pilots, their two seats in single file. They were retired from local service in 1995 and are now registered as National Treasures.
They’re still used in air shows and for short flights, particularly from the Harvard Club at Zwartkops, near Pretoria.
I stare fixedly into the blue, having noticed a man in a scarlet tracksuit playing live music half-inside the café, facing outside. “It never rains in southern California,” he belts out. Families with children are fussing around outdoor tables.
I’m remembering an encounter with G-force that I experienced sitting, sealed into the separate second-seat section of a racy de Havilland Chipmunk.
I was linked by radio mic and headphones to my friend the pilot but I couldn’t get my brain to allow me to utter a word, merely emitting a useless groan as my life was dragged down, out of the sky, away from my flying, slumped body.
The tiniest birds are flitting around me here, adjacent to the fence and the runway, darting for real or imagined crumbs.
Rand Airport, art deco in places, was built nearly a 100 years ago as Johannesburg’s main airport.
After the Second World War, the city had outgrown it and it lost its status to a newer airport at Palmietfontein, further south, where Katlehong is now. All this happened before the much bigger airport called Jan Smuts and then OR Tambo was constructed nearby.
“Oh, I’ll be your baby tonight,” goes the singer.
A nicely rounded fiscal shrike on the fence looks at us coquettishly from its naughty mask. Then it glances up.
This is not just any bird or plane ripping the sky. It’s the super-duper warbird aircraft, a T6 Harvard, number 7544, with its chrome yellow snubnose and wings. Everything else seems to have gone quiet as the plane fills my view of the sky. I have goosebumps. Heather cries “and I switched lenses to take pictures of my tramezzini!”