by Matt Potter
Then Mickey and I split—partly because they were flying somewhere I’d actually need a visa for rather than the standard fifty-dollar bill at immigration, but mostly because I’d had a bellyful. I spent a couple of days sobering up and chasing leads across the country. Then one afternoon I went to a place called Kampala Casino to meet with some off-duty Moldovans who never showed, and instead got talking to the manager, Peter. Once he was absolutely sure I wasn’t a crooked revenue man trying to shake him down, he summoned a slender-legged waitress to pour me a cold Club on the house and slipped me the number of someone who—if I didn’t know her already, which he clearly couldn’t believe—I should speak to.
This contact would, he said, give me a deeper understanding of the curious communities of displaced ex-Soviet aviators in Africa. Having seen only Mickey’s rootless drifting, I could use it. The woman was, he said, pretty much the social organizer of that community in East Africa, known for sorting out any aviators who got into trouble out here. I said she sounded like a Slavic Lara Croft with a pilot’s license and laughed. Peter didn’t laugh; he just nodded. “Call her. She knows everyone,” he smiled, and left to tend the tables.
And that’s how I met Katya, Aviation Queen of the Jungle.
Katya Stepanova can fly a plane herself, and after talking to her for just a few minutes, you realize she knows her way around not only an Il-76 but more aircraft than the designers know they’ve made. These days she runs her own highly successful Kampala-based travel firm, taking tourists, dignitaries, and businesspeople over the country’s hills, cities, and jungles by light aircraft for safaris, nature trails, hiking, sightseeing, meetings, and kicks.
But that’s only half her story. For a whole generation of honest, hardworking aircrews from the former Soviet lands who’ve washed up in Africa and, unlike Mickey, have decided to linger, to try and put down roots and carve out a life for their families, she’s something between a social hub and an oracle, and her insider status gives her a unique perspective on the pressures, dangers, and temptations many of these crews of Afghantsy Lost Boys face.
With her long red hair, ready laugh, action-girl past, and one-of-the-boys wit, it’s not hard to see how she’s become the center of a whole social group and support network for marooned ex-Soviet flyboys zooming back and forth across the dark, radarless expanses of sub-Saharan Africa. Now in her early thirties, Katya is the aviator daughter of a Russian Il-76 pilot who’d moved from his base near Moscow to the Congo when the opportunities for honest, skilled, and hardworking ex–air force men like him dried up back home. She grew up in and around her father’s Candid, flying with him on missions across Africa and further afield.
“Nowadays they’re not so young anymore,” she says, “but when we arrived out here the youngest pilot was thirty-four, thirty-five.” She remembers that 1990s generation of newly arrived jungle pilots, bound together by common experience and mutual respect.
This was, she says, back before “the UN began controlling it all,” when a pilot and his Il-76 was the closest thing many shelled, roadless areas had to a local bus, and military, ministers, civilians, and crates would jostle and bid for space on board. “At the beginning, all the crews here were nice, and everyone helped each other.” She confesses she yearns for those times now. Times when the business of flying your Il-76 or your Antonov around Africa was, she says, “just a lot simpler.” Still, even then they found themselves being scapegoated, hustled, and worse. “But it’s always been risky. Crews kept getting arrested in the Congo in those days—they arrested crewmen, not the airline bosses. I remember one crew I knew, they got arrested and had to disappear pretty quickly. I had the Russian Embassy asking me if I knew what had happened with them, but I didn’t.”
It only takes the mention of my connection to Mickey and the others for Katya’s memories of life among the first tidal wave of ex-Soviet aircrews in Africa to pour out. There were the times she and the crew had to deal with amphetamine-fueled child soldiers whenever they landed in jungle airstrips controlled by some of the wilder Congolese rebel warlords. “You hope nothing will happen,” she says, “because it’s just a ten-year-old. But then, you know, a ten-year-old with a gun, anything could happen. Those child soldiers are totally fucked-up, they don’t really know any better. They’re scared little kids, really, trying to be tough.”
Once, a girlfriend of hers, an Eastern European crewman’s daughter, pestered a crew to take her on a mission over rebel-controlled DRC territory. She got her wish, and the girl spent half the trip flattened, terrified, against the fuselage as rebels in the Congolese uplands loosed a hail of machine-gun fire without any warning, bullets smashing through the glass and ripping into the cockpit, missing her by inches and smashing the plane up inside and out. She got back okay, says Katya, and shrugs. Technically, “they probably shouldn’t have done it. With me it was different: The crews never took me on military flights, just commercial runs. They looked after me, they made sure I was safe, and I wasn’t really scared; [as a teenager] it was a case of, Nothing to do today, so I’ll go up. It was interesting. The guys would never have let anything happen to me. Seriously, they all looked after me. I went with them on missions back then; they’re my family.”
Such are the bonds of expat language, culture, and common interest that the ex-USSR aviator “family” extends to pretty much everyone in the beat-up Soviet cargo-plane business over Africa. “They all come through Uganda at the moment,” she says. “I’ve met most of them, I think.” Russian aviation magnate Evgeny Zakharov is an acquaintance too. He is, she says, not just one of the few genuinely well-known post-Soviet movers and shakers in these parts, but one who’s “not full of shit” either—the highest compliment.
I grab my chance—I’m interested to hear the view of the wider expat “family” on the shadier side of the cargo industry, people like Mickey and that thorn in the side of investigators Viktor B. So I ask her about Viktor Bout, just because he’s been on the news today. She weighs up my question before exhaling a jet-powered plume of cigarette smoke into the night air. “He wasn’t doing anything that everybody didn’t know about at the time. It’s all politics.”
Also counted as extended family are the casualties. “A few months ago, an Il-76 went down in the lake here,” Katya says. “All crew were killed. And I knew them.” The community was already in mourning at the time of the lake crash for men it had lost the month before. In February 2009, a Ukrainian Antonov-12 en route from Kisangani, DRC, to Ukraine, with Entebbe and Luxor as refueling stops, crashed on takeoff from Luxor, coming down half a kilometer from the runway, catching fire, and killing all five occupants: two Ukrainian citizens, two Byelorussians, and a Russian.
“The pilot was a friend of ours from back in South Africa in 2002,” she says. “He was called Yuri Matveenko: a good guy, and a fucking great pilot. I dunno what he was thinking—the plane was junk. Shit condition. And the pilot was one of the best, most well-known pilots. When he stopped in Entebbe he stayed with my dad. He knew the condition, why the hell did he fly it? Probably he thought he could just make it for that last leg of the journey home, even though his plane was junk.” She shrugs. “Well, he made it halfway home.”
The reason for the An-12’s dive could be incorrect loading of the aircraft or pilot error, according to an interview on local TV given by Egyptian civil aviation minister Ahmed Shafiq almost immediately after the accident. Yet according to subsequent crash reports, the plane was indeed less than airworthy. Even Luxor airport’s technical ground staff had warned the crew not to take off because the plane had a fuel leak. But this was no mysterious lapse of judgment, no hallucinating narcosis: The killer, she says, echoing almost everybody connected with the business out here, is money—as usual. It’s what encourages risks like that, encourages overloading, encourages crews to take invisible cash cargoes unknown to their paymasters. “The pay is not bad, but if you are making money, you wanna make more money; you’re thinking, ‘Okay, well, if I can ma
ke more money, why not?’ You know the problem is: You don’t know how long your contract is going to last. That’s the problem. So you are trying to make as much money as you can, because you don’t really know how long you are going to be making any money for.”
In the days that followed, Russian aviation forums were no less affecting. Messages from fellow avialegionery and former comrades paying tribute and offering help, witnesses describing the event, aviators appalled at the waste of life and looking for answers, and loved ones across the world in their hour of grief all served as a reminder that these are not just pilots and loadmasters but men: “Half my heart burned together with Dad on that plane,” read one. “And what to live with survives, I would not wish on my worst enemy.”
Another spoke of the psychotherapy she’d had to undergo to get over the loss of her father years before; the wives, brothers, and children of other fallen avialegionery joined the condolences. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church in Johannesburg held a memorial service to mark the forty days of mourning. Everywhere, messages ended with the words, “Come in to land now, crew.”
It’s a reminder that in some ways, Katya is not unique—there are hundreds of crewmen’s daughters propping up communities like this one from Afghanistan to Angola, as well as back home in Russia; family members who travel in their dads’ planes across continents, living action-packed teenage years and young adulthoods their counterparts back home can only dream of—or else wait, anxious for news from cities they’ll never see.
Yet the remarkable combination of Katya’s junior Il-76 aviatrix experience and her connections among crews, air industry, and locals here in East Africa have made her something of a go-to among old hands and new arrivals in Africa from back home. Only recently, her mobile phone rang with a number she didn’t recognize: It was one of two Russian pilots on a mission in the eastern DRC who’d apparently been passed her details as a contact who could help them out of any tight spots, and he was in one. He told her he and his comrade had fallen very ill. They’d noticed their skin was turning yellow, and as they’d heard she knew people, and his English was almost nonexistent, could she help?
“Hepatitis,” says Katya. “We got them out of the bush and over to Kampala, and got them seen by an English doctor. Don’t ask me how they got my number.”
She got to know people really fast when she arrived, she says. The daughters, wives, and girlfriends who wanted to come out and tag along while their men disappeared for weeks on end “all had time on their hands and didn’t know anyone either, and the guys were never there, so they formed quite a big community in the end, everyone helping each other out.” Nowadays she plays unofficial human SatNav for new arrivals, too. “I get a lot of new arrivals, you know, pilots asking me about runways, and fortunately I can usually tell them, ‘This one you’ve got to watch for the holes on the left-hand side,’ or, ‘They bombed the hell out of the end of that, so stop short.’ ”
Just for the hell of it, I test her. I tell her I’d expected Rumbek airfield in Southern Sudan to be better, what with it being the biggest city in the southern half of Africa’s biggest country. “Ooh! That’s bad,” she says. “There’s hardly anything, it’s still all dirt and bushes.” Which is spot-on.
She reminisces about her days as a twenty-year-old at the end of the 1990s, when the skies were so full of Soviet-made metal you could grab a ride in an Ilyushin or Antonov like getting on a bus; then she recalls lying on her front watching the warlord-held jungle of the Congolese frontier whooshing past below in an endless, cinematic kaleidoscope of greens and browns, and says she appreciates how lucky she was. Only now, like everything, thrills like that are sort of drying up. It’s getting more ordered. The rules are getting tighter. The UN is in town now, calling the shots for all the cargo ops. It all goes through the UN, over at the military base.
There’s a sense of things closing in on the old networks of former Soviet air force guys, for sure. You can feel it everywhere. Every week, news feeds come through to Entebbe, reporting on yet another aviation authority somewhere that’s banned yet another kind of Antonov plane, or another company, or another whole country of registration. Currently there’s not a single airline registered in the DRC that you can even think about flying anywhere over Europe without scrambling God knows what forces intent on keeping you and your noisy, teetering agglomeration of metal away from their lovely expensive buildings, roads, and people.
For the first time, there’s competition out here now, too. South Africans are moving in. “They’re the only pilots who can do anything like the things that your ex–Soviet-Afghan war guys can do with these planes,” she laughs. “Those pilots are just as crazy.” She likens the sudden competition to the frontier-style atmosphere among aircrews and their old comrades on the ground way back in the 1990s, when her dad came over.
The world she describes is in many ways similar to the one Mickey encountered when he washed up first in the Balkans and Central Asia, then the Emirates, all dirty-nailed and dusty-mouthed, and ordered his first freelance beer in an air-conditioned hotel next to the hangars. Only like everything in Africa, it’s both instantly familiar yet essentially different, too.
Before Uganda, her family had moved around with the flying work her cargo-pilot father could pick up, she says. She’d lived in Cyprus, among other places. But in the mid-to-late 1990s, Russia was still seen as a dead end for many émigrés. And over in Africa, business was really picking up. There was plenty of flying to go round, plenty of cargo to shift, and a fair bit of money to be made. And while pilots like Katya’s father were relentlessly law-abiding and aboveboard, like any wild frontier, East Africa had its attractions for those who were prepared, like Mickey and the boys, to take things just a little further.
Just as it had in the 1990s, what the locals called the “Russian rain” kept falling over the resource-rich, rebel-patrolled Congo, with another Antonov listed as carrying aid equipment simply falling from the sky, presumed shot down, over occupied, diamond-rich, rebel-encircled Kisangani.
Then in May 2003, some 120 people were sucked to their deaths in an unexplained incident when the giant loading-bay door of an Il-76 owned by Hermes, a small Russian-operated outfit contracted to the Congolese military, mysteriously opened forty-five minutes into its flight at ten thousand feet over Kinshasa, loaded with soldiers and their families. After the pilot’s successful landing of the stricken, depressurized, and unbalanced plane, he and the other surviving crew members were immediately visited by the equivalent of the Men in Black, sequestered by Russian authorities in a room at the Grand Hotel, Kinshasa, and ordered not to discuss the incident.
Something was clearly very secret, in any case: Later that year in October, a tense face-off ensued when a crashed An-28, just eight hundred meters from the runway at Kamina airstrip, was immediately surrounded by Congolese military, who refused to allow UN military observers access to the wreck or the cleanup.
January 2005 saw a cargo flight for a French NGO crash outside Kongolo, injuring all ten occupants, seven of them unlisted: The flight was not authorized to carry people. It later emerged that the plane had been grounded twice before for infractions, but cleared immediately on both occasions to continue flying humanitarian missions.
In October 2005, two passengers—Congolese army soldiers en route from Kisangani to Bunia—were turned into soup by an An-12’s still-spinning turboprops when a crash landing on a dirt strip caused the wheels to smash their way into the cabin and, in the panic, all one hundred passengers burst through the doors and ran blindly in all directions—including right through the props. (Seeing the first two becoming human smoothies and the limbs of the next three flying off in many different directions apparently slowed the rest down somewhat; the evacuation proceeded in a more orderly fashion after that. An interesting idea for passenger airline safety drills, perhaps.)
Weeks later, an An-12 broke up in the air for no reason. Then in January 2006, yet another “just fell apart” on
the ground, got struck off the aviation register, and was towed away for scrap. It was spotted again a few months later, back from the dead and in the air, blithely sporting a new paint job and a recent Kyrgyz registration.
One Russian crew landed their cargo plane only to have the wings literally fall off as they touched down. One simply flew into a hill outside Goma in July 2006; days later, another hit the side of a mountain in Bukavu in thick fog. Someone else’s Antonov smashed into a parked 727 on the runway when his brakes failed. One Ukrainian Il-76 crew’s plane “just exploded” at Pointe Noire, Congo, in May 2007. Then, at the same spot on the same runway in September, so did an An-12. On August 26, 2007, an An-32B carrying nine tons of freshly mined cassiterite, or tin oxide, experienced engine problems, hit tall jungle trees, and crashed. On September 7, 2007, two Georgians, two Ukrainians, and a Congolese crewman died when their junk-status An-12 carrying palm oil crash-landed in a Goma volcano field and caught fire. Another was shot down over jungle on the Rwandan border.
Then there was the showstopper, the one everyone talked about—that is, October 4, when a 1979-vintage, Ukrainian-operated An-26 crashed shortly after takeoff from N’djili Airport, Kinshasha, fireballing at high speed into a packed market square just after half past ten in the morning, spinning turboprop blades simply atomizing everything in their path. In addition to between nineteen and twenty-two fatalities among passengers and crew, a further twenty-eight to thirty-seven bystanders on the ground were literally mown down. Reports circulated soon after that one Congolese occupant had survived the initial impact, but that enraged locals had dragged him from the wreckage and beaten him to death—without, of course, waiting for the crash report to find for or against human error as one of the causes. Not that there would have been any point in waiting for the crash report: Some claimed the “black box” flight recorder was either one of the items looted from the wreckage, or had already been removed before the flight.
