My scary plane experience as Tanzania mourns its two young pilots
I vividly recall that cloudy and rainy morning of December 8, 1980. A group of eminent Dar es Salaam residents, most of them diplomats and Government officials, had weathered the morning drizzle and gathered at the Karimjee Hall to attend a solemn ceremony to pay last respects to one of their own.
Two days earlier the then UN Resident Representative to Tanzania, Kwafo Apeadu, from Ghana, and nine others most of whom were UN senior staff members, including the pilot had died in a plane crash in the Kisarawe forests in Coast Region as they flew back in a stormy weather from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam.
As a Daily News journalist, who had covered several UN related events I was assigned to cover this tragic ceremony.
To say I was shaken is an understatement of the year. I was literally shaken to the bones.
As the military Brass Band belted the solemn Last Post song my mind wondered to the events which took place barely a month earlier. The events took place in the same aircraft and with the same, now deceased, pilot.
I, as a scribe, and a delegation of nine other senior government and UN officials, led by then Minister of Home Affairs, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, had flown to Tabora on our way to Ulyankuru Refugees Camp, an hour or so drive from Tabora town, to bestow citizenship to about 100,000 refugees from Rwanda. We had used the same tragic light plane and flown with the same pilot.
On our flight back our plane was terribly rocked by thunderstorms as we flew over the Uluguru mountains all the way to Dar es Salaam. It was a scary experience.
Actually on landing at the Dar es Salaam airport we did not even wait for the mini-bus to ferry us to the terminal building. We all ran, notwithstanding the heavy rain, to the airport building and stormed the washrooms - well you know why - in our now totally wet attire.
So here I was at the Karimjee Hall shaken and thinking it could as well have been me and my delegation inside those coffins.
No wonder I am still shaken by the death, earlier this week, of the young pilot Mabeyo Jnr and his colleague and namesake Nelson in a plane crash in Seronera in the great Serengeti.
It is more painful that here were two young men, healthy and with promising future whose lives had suddenly and tragically been cut short.
My condolences to the Mabeyo family, to the Olotu family, colleagues and friends.
The author is a veteran journalist and communication expert based in Arusha.
