We were planning to fly south to Al Wehj down the Saudi west coast, which is about 250 miles from Aqaba in a straight line, but 350 miles if you are routed to stay along the coast. Saudi air traffic control insisted that we stayed over the coastline, which meant that we would need more fuel before we reached Al Wehj. But even if we could find some along the coast it would mean landing in Saudi Arabia at an airport which was not a port of entry, and that was not going to be allowed. So we crossed the southern end of the Gulf of Suez towards Hurghada in Egypt.
“Giv me 30 min 2 find out whthr ne avgas at Hurg”, James had texted me.
The message came back to us within ten minutes that there wasn’t any, so we flew on to Luxor, a journey which is about fifty miles shorter than going to Al Wehj, and, better still, is across land.
When you aren’t worried about fuel, the Valley of Kings around Luxor is an enthralling sight, along with the Nile itself. On the way back, once we had collected fuel at Luxor airport and taken off again, we relaxed and I enjoyed a few minutes contemplating all those Pharohs lying buried for thousands of years in the magnificently monumental temples in the Valley; before we turned east and headed for the coast. The hop to Al Wehj is first of all 100 miles back across Egypt to the Red Sea, followed by a 125 mile sea crossing, which carried with it the risk of drowning if the engine failed, as there was unlikely to be much Search and Rescue. Also, we didn’t know how clean the fuel was in this part of the world. But it was a nice day, the sea was calm, and there was a following wind. So we put the risk of engine failure out of our minds and counted the occasional ships going up and down the Red Sea.
As we crossed the Saudi coastline, surrounded by nothing but sea, ships, sand, sun and sky, something occurred to Martin, and he broke the silence.
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S,” he announced firmly. There was nothing else visible whatsoever that began with any other letter.
We arrived at Al Wehj at around 2.30pm. Allowing for eating and refuelling, we would not have time to complete the 300 plus miles to Ha'il, the next stop, before nightfall, so we decided to make Al Wehj our stop for the night.
We were looked after by Abdullah, the airport Manager, who went with us to get fuel from the local garage, and local currency to pay for it from an ATM cashpoint, which gave instructions in Arabic.
He then fixed us up for the night in some sort of airport barracks, a somewhat spartan place in crumbling concrete. There were five rooms, all empty, and a shower block at the end of the hall. It was clean, in a military way, and the whole structure was hot to the touch from fifty years of unremitting sunshine. I tried the aircon unit, a large brown device which looked like the inside of a 1950’s Cadillac, and which replaced one of the panes of glass in the window. It had three settings, tediously noisy, hideously noisy, and unbearably noisy, and each setting made no difference to the temperature of the air coming out of it. The shower though was fantastic; a huge gush of cold water.
Abdullah later took us out for a meal of fish and rice at, bizarrely, a roadside Vietnamese diner, and then on to a coffee shop which he himself had started, to serve as a youth club for teenage boys.
We watched while these young boys, indistinguishable in attitude and behaviour from our own children, played noisily on the table football and pool tables he’d provided for them. A little bar in one corner served us Saudi coffee in tiny cups arranged on a tiny tray. He told us with quiet passion how he could see that, for these boys to be the future of Saudi Arabia, they had to be given an outlet for their enthusiasms.
Most of these boys’ enthusiasms appeared to be made in the West, even so - table football, pingpong, Walkmans, GameBoys, and Nike trainers. Looking out of the window at the dusty concrete structures of the quiet desert town of Al Wehj in the evening sunshine, three hundred miles of desert from anywhere, it was easy to imagine that teenage disaffection could be a problem. There was beauty, serenity, and cultural identity, but nothing other than Abdullah’s café appeared to be devoted to teenage fun.
Even that had its limits. There was a sudden mass thudding of fifty pairs of designer trainers running for the front door. I looked around for the trigger for this stampede, expecting to see at least a poisonous snake on the pool table, and could find none. Abdullah picked up the tiny tray, holding with his thumb the neatly embroidered cloth doily, and, picking up the sugar bowl, commanded me and Martin: “Come!”.
We grabbed our stuff and followed him out of the door, across the pavement, to his car. The café was suddenly empty and locked up, with the curtains drawn and the lights off.
We got into Abdullah’s huge luxury 4x4. Inside, there were some pretty fabulous looking miniature rugs spread out, giving it the atmosphere of a Bedouin tent. Abdullah laid the tray down, still complete with coffees, on top of a lovely rich red rug spread out on the central armrest. He gestured for us to continue to enjoy, and took another sip of his.
“Er, is everything ok?” I asked as I reached for my coffee.
“Didn’t you hear the siren?” he asked? “It calls us all to prayer, and even if you don’t want to pray, you must close all shops and cafes and stuff, or the religious police close you down.”
He completed his kindness by phoning through to Ha'il, to let former colleagues know that we were coming.
We had a good night in the little barracks, with Martin continuing to get better.
We wanted to get from Al Wehj on the east coast to Riyadh in the course of today, which is about 650 miles, and something like seven hours’ flying.
We took off at 6.30am. Even at 1000 feet above the coast it was 36 degrees, and we were forced up to a height of 8000 feet as much by the heat as by the mountains below us. The raw beauty of the desert landscape, red and yellow rocks and sand mingled with scrub, kept us from worrying too much about the fuel – for what we were using was motor spirit, not Avgas, and you never feel quite so confident about its octane rating or that it has been properly filtered.
Ha’il, our staging stop, is at an altitude of 3000 feet, a city white against the desert colours and emerging from the brilliant sunny haze. Ha’il airport is the size of London’s Stansted, but has no specific arrangements for getting Avgas into the tanks of small aircraft. There are pumps, but we had to put the fuel first into our green canisters, and from these pour it into the helicopter using our plastic funnel. At 36 degrees, the effort is almost unbearable.
Martin stood on one of our plastic fuel containers, to get him up high enough to pour the fuel into the filler high on the roof of Uniform Kilo. I stood on the ground holding the funnel, to stop it tipping over when Martin filled it. I kept my face averted, as there was a lot of petrol splashing everywhere.
While we were doing this, I noticed a tick…tick…tick noise, just like the noise a gas cooker makes when you light it. I thought this must be the plastic funnel expanding in the heat. But then I suddenly realised that the ticking was coming from a line of sparks leaping from the sharp point of my elbow to the nearest metal of the helicopter!
“Hang on a minute, Mart, I think we’re just about to die,” I said as calmly as I could. Martin, struggling with the weight of 10 gallons of fuel, some of which was slopping onto his flightsuit, needed it to be a pretty good reason why he should stop.
“What’s up?”
“More static electricity than I’ve ever seen before, probably from the hot fuel passing through the plastic funnel”, was what I wanted to say. What I actually said was “MASSIVE STATIC! Get down NOW!”
We tiptoed carefully away to let everything evaporate so that we weren’t so immediately combustible, and found a bit of shade under a nearby aircraft’s wing to recover in. That was the closest we’d been to death so far, I thought. We stood for several minutes assessing the situation, still in a haze of petrol vapour.
We needed to get the static electricity to earth somehow. If we could do that it wouldn’t jump across gaps, forming sparks; and the danger of sparks setting off an explosion in the petrol vapour would be avoided. We hadn’t got any wire, which would have been ideal, so the only thing was us. The human body conducts electricity, as everyone knows who’s ever had an electric shock, and it conducts better if it’s wet.
I suggested that we could pour water onto my hands and feet, and then for Martin could pour in the rest of the fuel with me holding the funnel with my wet left hand, clutching Martin’s ankle with my wet right hand as he stood on the other container, and curling my wet bare toes round a convenient metal fitting embedded into the concrete apron as an earthing point. We set it all up and it seemed to work, even if it all looked a bit weird. We poured the rest in, and cleared up. We still stank of fuel.
“We need a metal funnel,” Martin suggested, when all the fuel was in. “That plastic thing is lethal, literally, and it slops everywhere.”
We spent the rest of the day smelling of fuel. But at least we were alive to smell it.
Abdul Samir, the station Manager, showed us great courtesy and chased everyone else up to look after us. He spoke brilliant English, having spent a lot of his youth in the Knightsbridge area of London. He had started as a flight attendant and of course had flown widely round the world. He now took evident pride in the height of his present position, and after our long spell in the baking sun fuelling the helicopter, he invited us into his office for cinnamon tea. This tea, or whatever it was, had the effect, perhaps assisted by the extreme heat and brilliance of the desert sunshine, and the sudden darkness on entering the room, of making me hallucinate. I floated round the room at ceiling height, still drinking my cinnamon tea and watching to Martin conversing with our host below me.
I heard Martin say: “I see your women cover themselves here!”, never slow to explore other people’s cultural differences.
Abdul: “Yes! And I tell you why!”
Martin, earnestly: “Yes….?”
Abdul: “Because if they leave themselves uncovered, such is their beauty, they drive you CRAZY with desire.” His dark eyes blazed with conviction.
The effects of the tea, the sunshine, the heat, the darkness and the petrol fumes ebbed gently away, and I found myself back on the sofa, my trip unnoticed either by Abdul or by Martin.
Abdul gave us a richly woven Saudi flag as a parting gift.
Fuelled, started and ready to go, Uniform Kilo didn’t want to play.
I lifted it into the hover and tried to move away. It lurched, and landed back on the concrete again, the warning horn blaring out a declaration that the rotors were stalling in the thin hot air. The air was too hot, the atmospheric pressure at 3000 feet was too low for the rotors to get hold of, and the aircraft was too heavy from all that fuel. I put it back down again, checked all the instruments in case I’d missed something basic. No, we were just asking nature to do something she wasn’t programmed to do. I tried again, more gently this time, and got the same result. I could lift it only as far as the point where the rotors and the undercarriage were sharing the weight of the helicopter and its contents.
A breeze helps on take-off, as it creates lift as it passes over the spinning rotors, but the only breath of air came from the direction of the control tower immediately in front of us. I coaxed the helicopter along the taxyway at full power, huge sparks flying as the landing gear scraped on the concrete The helicopter was rising at most a couple of inches off the ground momentarily, before crashing back down. It sounded and felt awful, and was terrible for the undercarriage.
I did this three times. This was a real abuse of the machine.
On the fourth attempt, scraping and shuddering past the point of absurdity, it began to rise, to fifteen feet, and, shuddering, stayed airborne. But it had taken a hammering, and I took it round the perimeter track for a quarter of an hour or so because it felt so unstable, and I wanted to stay near the airport’s fire trucks in case it fell out of the sky. Having burned a little fuel off while circling over the airfield, I set course for Riyadh to the east. All the same, at that weight, and with that temperature and pressure, I could only get Uniform Kilo up to a cruise speed of 65 knots compared with the usual 100 or so.
The first hour was a little tense, but as the machine continued to behave itself and gradually gain in speed we relaxed and resumed our usual mood of optimistic anticipation, looking forward to arriving at Riyadh.
Flying above desert in that heat is physically demanding. One problem is turbulence: the air behaves as if it is a thick boiling liquid in a vast saucepan, with the heat of the desert generating violent convection currents which rise up into the atmosphere. We were thrown as much as 500 feet up, or down, without warning: and whereas normally a light touch on the controls is sufficient, in conditions such as these nothing will suffice but a strong and unremitting two handed grip, like steering a sailing ship in a storm. And if you don’t hang on tightly, the controls can at any moment be whipped out of your hands, with the helicopter upside down and in pieces within seconds.
We did 15 minutes each, and climbed higher and higher to try to reach cooler and more stable air.
I was just getting used to it all, and hating the dizzy height, when I noticed what seemed to be a curtain of sand-coloured pillars in front of us. It was a huge storm of dust devils. These are vortices, twisting columns of air, their tips in the desert sand and over seven thousand feet tall, racing erratically about, faster than the 100 mph or so that the R44 can do in those conditions. One of these columns must carry hundreds of tons of sand, and would break us into pieces on impact if it hit us.
The moment we saw these things in the distance and heading our way, Martin said “Max possible climb right now would be good.”
The natural horizon was out of sight in the blinding haze, but I still knew roughly which way was up, and how to make the helicopter get there. I pulled the stick back, and concentrated on keeping the helicopter stable using the artificial horizon. Martin kept a lookout all round, suggesting “left” or “right” or “climb higher” at the approach of a sand-filled vortex, so I could respond with an immediate banked turn away from the danger.
We climbed to 8000 feet, over a mile above the high shimmering desert, blinded by the glare. At this height we seemed to be at a standstill, with no outside visual references to tell our brains that we were still moving, but at least we were just above the tops of the battling dust devils.
The paths of these sandy vortices across the sky were random. We had dealt with about twenty of them altogether, before we had gained enough altitude to escape them. It was a terrifying experience, and the return to the routine of flying on instruments in mere convection currents felt something like peace by comparison.
The sand storm below us lasted more than an hour, and we stayed high until we were sure it was behind us.
“One of those once things once picked up my hangglider from the top of a Spanish mountain and dumped it in the valley below,” Martin recalled as we began the long gentle descent to Riyadh. “Fortunately I’d left it there while I had some lunch, so I wasn’t attached to it at the time”.
“Nice,” I said, still trying to relax.
“The Spanish one didn’t have any sand in it, though, so you couldn’t even see it coming.”
We were pretty tired when we landed at Riyadh. King Khalid Airport is huge; some say the largest in the world, and very modern, Arabic style with American influence. They would not let us land at the neighbouring military airport, where there is Avgas, and it had to be sent for. They were curiously rude in all their dealings with us.
“I suppose we’re unusual, neither a commercial liner nor a private jet with en-suite bathrooms, and so for some reason they despise us,” I reflected.
We were charged navigation and landing fees totalling US$1000 for our arrival. I queried the bill with the cashier.
“It says here it includes US$950 for navigation services, but we didn’t get any” I said with a smile.
Stony faced, the man replied “We cleared you to land didn’t we?”
“Yes but if I’d landed without clearance, I’d have been arrested”.
“So better to shut up and pay $950, I think you agree”. His gaze was level and unblinking. I gave up, and paid up in cash, convinced that the guy I was paying was going to eat well for the rest of the year.
Saudi Arabia. We needed translation help at the cashpoint as it was all in Arabic.
The Immigration officials showed the same cast of mind. Because we couldn’t persuade them that we had a proper visa, we were allowed only a 12 hour pass despite our protests that this meant we could only get a few hours sleep after an exhausting day. Our request for 3 hours longer was turned down flat, without either courtesy, or consideration, or reasons given.
There was an institutionalised arrogance that we found personally very threatening.
It was all very odd, because in the rest of Saudi we had been treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy, entirely in line with the traditions of Arab hospitality.
A taxi shuttled us about between the airport and the Sahara Hotel; to the cash machines and the airport again because the Avgas had arrived: to the cash machines again and back to the Hotel, swerving often to avoid piles of the dispossessed just lying without apparent hope in the road.
We ate in an icy airconditioned atmosphere of segregated families and crowds of obnoxious teenage boys shouting with their mouths full into mobile phones. It was like one of those hideous future-fantasy films, where positive human values have been crushed by desperation and corrupted by the corrosive influence of unimaginable, unearned and unexpected wealth.
