night, when you get back there, feelings of warmth and welcome radiate out and grab you, remarkably like home, without a little Dragon, of course. Funny isn’t it? Some of my more unusual ‘homes’ were in Yemen, which is arguably the very cradle of western civilization. Many of the Old Testament stories and the Adithi of Islam took place there. Yemeni culture spread, through trading in spices, gold, ivory and slaves, from the Far East to the coasts of East Africa, from Sheffield in England to the palaces of Saudi Arabia. Sindibad, the sailor who, more than seven hundred years ago, traded all the way to China in a tiny Arab Dhow made of Murihi wood bound together with coconut coir and anti-fowled with Shahamu shark oil mixed with lime, hailed from these barren shores. So peaceful were its people that their cities were not even fortified. It has had its fair share of problems since then, however. Aden, the old capital of South Yemen was known as the whore of Arabia. She was taken by Queen Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, who built her historic water system in the old crater which encircles the ancient Arab Quarter. The Ottoman Empire had a short brutal affair with her. The British had a very soft spot for her, for over a hundred years and the Russians raped her. I just lived there.
the concession where we were operating. However, by the time we got there, the Russian military mantle was quietly being withdrawn, as the Soviet empire began to crumble. The Saudis had promised citizenship to any of the Bedoui who would support their claim to the plateau. The citizenship was reportedly backed up by substantial financial benefits to anyone who was interested. By all accounts, quite a lot of the Bedoui, who didn’t see the point of borders anyway, were keen to avail themselves of the financial side of the deal, even if it meant planting a few little ‘markers’ around to discourage the communists from ‘invading Bedoui Territory’. As it turned out, the ‘markers’ were of the explosive variety, as we were later to find out. We kept the aircraft almost inside the laager formed by the camp trailers at Minwach, because the Saudi border patrols used to race past our camp, every night, forty kilometres inside what we thought was our border, and let off a hail of 50 cal. over our heads as they went. Every eighth round was dipped in phosphorus to make it sparkle as it left the barrel of the jeepmounted machine guns. These tracer rounds made a very impressive pyrotechnic display for us to watch, as we sipped our Becks beers of an evening. They looked quite dodgeable too, until one remembered that there were seven rounds hidden between each of the sparklers.
Every eighth round was dipped in phosphorus
One of my ‘homes’ in Yemen was a little three compartment trailer, about one third the size of a European railway carriage. I was flying my old friend, the Pilatus Porter, for an excellent Swiss Utility Aviation Company, in support of a French seismic survey outfit called La Compagnie Général de Geophysique, or CGG to its friends. We were situated in the north of South Yemen, where the Saudi border slopes up from south west to north east. Our camp was at the bottom of a barren escarpment near an old well known as Bir Minwach. The desert plateau, nearly a thousand feet above us, stretched away to the east, excoriated by dozens of wriggling dry canyons and inhabited by wandering Bedoui nomads. That border had never been properly defined, particularly in the area where we were prospecting. The Saudis claimed large tracts of South Yemen, right down as far south as the fabled Wadi Hadramaut. Only the presence of substantial Russian support for the South Yemeni Army discouraged Saudi incursion into 8
FlightCom: November 2021
After some days of this intimidation, it was decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and we withdrew south west, down the edge of the escarpment to another old water well at Bir Zamak. We would stay back at Minwach, with the aircraft, and cover the retreat, just in case there were any mishaps. It was then that the weather joined in the fun. Just after myself and Werner, our engineer, got airborne in the PC-6 from Minwach, a great wall of white dust came rolling in, out of the north west and engulfed the whole area. It was moving so fast that we were enveloped before I realised what a challenge it represented. The turbulence, exacerbated by the ferocious winds and the proximity of the escarpment was frankly intimidating. I shouted to Werner to keep an eye out for anything solid-looking which appeared to be coming dangerously in our direction from his side, while I strained every optic nerve-ending to decode the visual messages swirling at us through the
