Bahrein

We woke at 5.40 am still weary from lack of sleep, returned to the airport, cleared formalities and immigration, and left King Khalid airport as fast as we could. I had one last go at smiling warmly at everyone there, but there was no point in trying to change things single-handed. “Thanks for having us, and see you next time,” I tried with a smile. Not a flicker.

Bahrein lay 250 plus miles ahead of us, in the same kind of heat that we had been experiencing in recent days. So again we flew high. Midway we made VHF radio contact with Dhahran International, close to the Gulf Coast. At 4000 feet the cockpit temperature was 26 degrees, with the ground for a time under a light haze, but every now and again you could see huge cultivated circles lying green in the desert, and no doubt depending on a deep well and mechanical irrigation. Nearly at the end of the trip we flew close by Dhahran International, leaving King Fahd International 30 miles to the North East, and followed the 15 mile road causeway across the sea separating Saudi from the independent emirate of Bahrein. The airport for Bahrein itself has been built on the island of Muharraq, at the north eastern corner of the territory.

We locked onto the Muharraq air traffic control, and they landed us as usual in the general aviation section of the apron, with instructions to wait for the Follow Me Truck. We waited in the sun, sweating profusely, for 15 minutes for the truck to travel the half mile or so from the terminal building. When this arrived it took us 50 yards to the left of where we were, and then we were required to turn round, for reasons of neatly arranging ourselves with the handful of other aircraft already there. This meant taking the full blast of the sun into the cockpit, which was already at 44 degrees.

Parking neatly was not our priority. I turned it back around, leaving the sun above and behind us. It only a little difference to the temperature.

We were here for maintenance, and we needed to contact Simon from HeliAir. I called air traffic again on the radio.

“Uniform Kilo, Muharraq, can we taxi to a hangar for maintenance, please?” I tried one last time. “Bus is coming for passengers” came the reply. “Uniform Kilo, request taxi to Maintenance.” “Bus arrive 5 minutes.” This exchange was going nowhere, and certainly not to maintenance. “Uniform Kilo, request taxi to hangar one,” I guessed desperately. “Negative, passengers must disembark.” “Uniform Kilo, negative passengers.” “Bus gone already? Why you not go too?” “Uniform Kilo, no passengers, no bus, request immediate bus for aircrew.”

As I spoke, the bus arrived, parking so close it nearly shortened our main rotor. I switched off the radio, grabbed my bag, locked the helicopter and followed Martin up the steps into the cool of the bus. I tried Simon from Heli Air on his mobile. After a bit of a wait he responded; he was at Gate 16, where as I spoke the bus was slowing to a stop.

We found him very concerned about the lack of facilities. Doing maintenance work in the full sun outside would not be possible. The tools and equipment would quickly become too hot to touch, and it would be inviting almost immediate lethal sunstroke and dehydration, even with a sunhat and loads of water. We needed premises for him to work in, preferably air-conditioned.

Driving around the massive airport in the handling agent’s old Toyota, we found that the only available possibility was a large hangar housing the US Navy Search and Rescue presence on the airfield. It did not seem like a good bet, but there was no choice and we made for it. Huge tri-rotor helicopters stood parked around it. Would there be our kind of people inside?

Certainly would. Bahrein: Martin re-cycling one of his tall stories with the Americans pilots.

We walked in and introduced ourselves. Astonished, they gave us a warm and interested welcome. They chatted to us about what we were doing, thought about our needs, and then gave us hangar space, and the run of their facilities. They gave us access to their iced-water supply, their shower room, their washing machines, their internet connection and their air-conditioned burger restaurant. Just what we needed.

All 80 of them, looking after their eight huge OH 53 McDonnell Douglas 3-engine machines, would stop by individually to chat, and to rib us about our tiny machine. Their OH 53 is the biggest helicopter in the world. It will take 50 people. It can take an R44 inside its cargo bay. Its engines develop 15,000 bhp. The range is five hours. It can be refuelled in the air. But our R44 is American, too, and one of the US engineers had owned and flown one; so there was a limit to the amusement and the scepticism, and comparing our 250 bhp engine to a rubber band was as far as it went. We could sense, though, that they were also concerned about us; that with their own vast technological back up they thought us totally crazy to be making a journey of this length in what they saw as a fragile machine and with such minimal specialist support along the way.

With all this hospitality, Simon got on with the 50-hour service. It is a big job and involves meticulous examination of every component and every bearing. The plugs get changed. The magnetos are overhauled. The electrics are examined and tested. The fuel filters, lines and pumps are checked. The oil, of course, is changed as well. Simon looked at the minor oil leak from one of the seals, but it did not seem to us to be getting worse, and the engineering involved in fixing it would have been quite disproportionate this far from home.

The availability of the right oil was becoming a problem. Here we were, on top of the largest oil deposits in the world, and we were short of oil. But this is not just ordinary motor oil. The R44 burns a litre of it every three or four hours, and you therefore need to carry some with you for topping up. Because of the airline restrictions on flammable items, and limits on personal baggage, Simon had been able to bring with him only enough of the specialist oil required for the oil change, but for the top up we had to re-bottle some of the used oil. Not great, but the best we could do.

We did yet another careful sort through all the stuff we were still carrying in the helicopter. With the increasing heat as we went south making take off more difficult, our weight was an increasing problem.

“We need to get this thing light enough to take off even in places like Ha’il,” said Martin, wistfully packing up the unused water purifier into the box bound for home. It went with all our spare clothes and shoes, our towels, our swimming trunks, my pencil case, and half of everything else, including half of my face towel, the other half torn off and repacked.

We managed to get rid of nearly 50lbs, which we again sent back home by courier. Bit by bit we were reducing our equipment to the minimum required for survival. Every luxury, everything which might just come in handy, everything not yet actually used, other than survival gear, was being stripped away and rejected.

In a way this was what was happening to us as human beings. Our entire focus was being narrowed to the issues directly associated with getting to our destination, and in one piece. Helicopter, fuel, oil, water, food, sleep, maps, flightplans, minimum personal hygiene gear; these were our world for the time being. Everything else, all the preoccupations of the modern world, we were disregarding altogether.

Simon, suddenly jetting into all this from Home Counties normality, and seeing a two day snapshot of our survival mindset, obviously thought we were completely off our heads. From his point of view he was right, but our personal adaptation was inevitable.

The Hotel Ramada in Bahrein is a very serene place. I enjoyed staying there, and especially the clean sheets and the marble bathroom in my room.

The evening social life in Bahrein is not much to write home about. It is entirely masculine, because it follows the Arabic pattern. The general quality of the places to go to is not high. A Chinese restaurant was nothing special. An Irish pub, called inevitably Murphy’s, was full, with 90% of the drinkers being Saudis escaping their home country’s ban on alcohol, and the rest of them expats. A Vietnamese place did not impress either, though it was just about alright. On the other hand we met some quite interesting expats. One, an Irishman, was a Porsche dealer, and had some good jokes. Another, a Norwegian, recognized the SOS badges on our flying suits because he had been an SOS fundraiser in Norway. In the Gulf he said he was selling fish hooks, which didn’t sound very plausible. And there was the Englishman, formerly a schoolmaster, now having a hard time selling books.

All these, and others we met, welcomed us because they were glad to meet fresh people to talk to, whose jokes they hadn’t heard, and whose contact with the West felt closer and more recent than their own.

Once Simon had come to the end of his work on the helicopter, two tests had to be carried out. The first was to check that the engine worked ok. This test was done on the ground. We got it out of the shade of their huge hangar with the help of some American friends, and fifty yards away Martin started the engine, and checked it made all the right noises, and showed all the right signs on the gauges. It worked fine, without vibrations or unusual leaks of oil or fuel. The second was a flight test. This test, given the shoreline location of the airport, was entirely over the clear blue sea, so shallow that if the engine had packed up they probably could have waded back to the airport perimeter. Fortunately that wasn’t necessary. Simon listened for vibrations, checked instruments, and watched how the aircraft responded to the controls. The flight was over in a few minutes and Martin and Simon both declared Uniform Kilo serviceable. Simon checked everything for leaks or other signs of danger one final time.

We gratefully put him on his scheduled flight home, back to the kind of normality that we wouldn’t see again for a few more weeks at least.