Aviators flying vintage planes the length of Africa were showing them off in the skies over a Kenyan game park yesterday, a day after one of the aircraft was wrecked in a forced landing.
The Vintage Air Rally, including biplanes built in the 1920s and 1930s, has flown from Europe past Egypt’s pyramids and through Sudan and Ethiopia, where participants were briefly detained because of a dispute over whether they had proper authorisation.
“They are tough conditions for the aeroplanes. It’s hot, it’s high and in the afternoons we get the thunderstorms,” rally organiser Sam Rutherford told reporters as the planes flew over a game park on the outskirts of Nairobi.
“We did lose an aircraft,” he said of Saturday’s incident, when a vintage Boeing Stearman suffered an engine failure and made a forced landing northwest of Nairobi.
The plane was “written off” but the crew were fine, Rutherford said.
The vintage Boeing Stearman were flown by an Irish father and daughter team.
“Team Eagle in a Boeing Stearman have suffered total engine failure and made a forced landing. We are happy to say and terribly relieved that both crew are uninjured, but the aircraft is irreparably damaged,” the Vintage Air Rally said on its Facebook page.
The rally also briefly lost track of veteran pilot Maurice Kirk, 72, and his plane after the stop in Ethiopia last week.
After being released from Ethiopia he landed up in conflict-torn South Sudan instead of Kenya.
“Locals found him and called a Brit in Juba they recently worked for. He contacted the British embassy in Juba,” organisers said on their Facebook page on Saturday.
Kirk and his plane are no longer part of the rally.
About a dozen planes from the 1920s and 1930s are taking part in the 13,000km (8,000-mile) journey from the Greek island of Crete to Cape Town – an extraordinary bid in aircraft with no autopilot, automation or protection from the elements.
The teams became the first group of aircraft to land at Egypt’s Giza pyramids in 80 years.
After the problem in Ethiopia, the teams made it to Kenya where they flew their vintage planes yesterday above Nairobi’s famed National Park, where lions, zebra and giraffe roam in the shadow of the city.