Gold, guns and defying gravity

Having cleared the tops with barely feet to spare, the aircraft suddenly banked so steeply that the horizon became virtually vertical and I felt my stomach lurch as gravity tugged at my insides. Just as I was reassuring myself that the worst was almost over, the fuselage door at the back of the plane suddenly flew open, sending a deafening blast of air into the cabin. So powerful was it, that the heavy industrial harnesses used to hold the cargo of highly inflammable fuel drums we were carrying on board, fluttered like celebratory bunting.

Next to me, our only "official" passenger - a Congolese goldmining engineer, was anything but celebratory. Having clamped his hands instinctively to the armrests of his seat, his eyes were full of fear and looked ready to pop out of his head.

Glancing anxiously towards the cockpit, it slowly dawned on me that the plane's co-pilot, was actually gesturing at us to try and shut the hatch through which the Congolese jungle could be seen sweeping past a few hundred feet below.

He had to be kidding. Already this was all getting a bit too Indiana Jones for my liking. Shamefully, I decide to remain seated and watched as my indomitable cameraman colleague buffeted by the wind, edged his way back up the aircraft, before getting his shoulder behind the door and heaving it shut. Not surprisingly, the experience was enough to leave lesser mortals like my fellow passengers and I on the edge of mental meltdown. Not so the plane's pilots however.

For Chris Peppersteak' Laidler, and Paddy Hyndman, who sat grinning in the cockpit, it was all just another day at the office, albeit one in the skies over Africa's "heart of darkness" - the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For the best part of the last seven years Laidler and Hyndman have worked as bush pilots flying in and out of one of the continent's most politically volatile areas - the Great Lakes region that straddles Uganda, Rwanda and the vastness of north-eastern Congo.

In that time Laidler, had picked up - along with a few furrows on his brow - the Peppersteak nickname, because as Hyndman pointed out, it doesn't matter what kind of restaurant he goes to; Thai, Italian or Indian, it's always the same order - pepper steak. Not that restaurants like these are thick on the ground at most of the pilots destinations. For even in today's shrinking 21st-century world, the remoteness and isolation of the places into which they fly inside Congo still beggars belief.

On bush airstrips in these far-flung places, Congolese children who perhaps hadn't seen a white person for the first 10 years of their lives, have been known to feed grass to the engines of stationary aircraft after thinking they were living creatures.

Breathtaking in its beauty, the region is full of rivers, volcanoes, giant lakes the size of seas, and lush impenetrable rainforest where pygmies live as they have done for centuries. But here also roam rival tribal militias armed with the "panga" machetes of old, as well as modern Africa's ubiquitous new weapon - the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Many of these militias are little more than violent bit players and pawns in the bitter struggle for Congo's vast natural mineral resources. As the brutal Belgian colonial rulers of the past were quick to realise, the fertile Congolese earth and its dense forested hills are bursting to the seams with diamonds, tin and copper.

Here too lies vast quantities of coltan from which the crucial microchip ingredient Tantalum is extracted, and without which our computerised world of mobile phones and PlayStations would cease to function. Above all though, it is gold that has brought the biggest fortune hunters to Congo in recent times. Massive multinational companies keen to extract and profit from some of the purest gold to be found anywhere on the planet.

For the men who work the mines in Ituri Province in Eastern Congo, their link with the world outside is through the air bridge that bush pilots, like Laidler and Hyndman, risk life and limb to keep open.

I myself had come to Congo for a few weeks with a cameraman friend, to make a film about the two flyers. Within days though, I was to realise just how much the work routine of these pilots quickly made many of our own nine-to-five lives seem gut-wrenchingly mundane.

Young modern men, these aviators might be. But despite their occasional penchant while airborne for listening on their iPods to the The Killers, there still seemed something of a pioneering streak in their nature more in tune with the values of a bygone age. A time in history when enormous risk-taking was par for the course in exploring places like Africa, and shrugged off with an insouciance and black humour only those confident enough in their own resourcefulness were able to muster. Indeed, many of the pilots I met in Congo might have come from the pages of books like Wind, Sand and Stars by the French writer and aviator-adventurer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The miners and engineers meanwhile often seemed like contemporary clones of characters out of old Humphrey Bogart films such as the The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. North-eastern Congo has always looked and felt like the setting for a Boy's Own tale of derring-do. At some of the bigger airstrip towns like Bukavu and Goma, on the banks of Lake Kivu, the runways are flanked by ancient Dakotas and Antonov bi-planes of the type any locations researcher for Raiders Of The Lost Ark would have died for.

All in, Congo has never been a country for the faint of heart. At its murkiest it has seen its fair share of despots, mercenaries and arms dealers. Today's bush goldmines are still the workplaces of roughneck drillers, ex-French Foreign Legionnaires and Gurkha soldiers whose job it is to guard the mining compounds from potentially marauding militias who think nothing of chopping up and eating their enemies.

Then there are the bush pilots who ferry in the rigs, spare parts and supplies, the fuel and the workers. What, I wondered, had brought men like Chris Laidler and Paddy Hyndman from places as far apart as Surrey and Nova Scotia to this life of gold, guns and defying gravity in the skies over Congo? "I don't know really to be honest. I suppose I thought it would be quite good fun. I got a job in Botswana and kind of enjoyed it so decided to stay here in Africa," says Laidler, in an elusive hybrid accent part Australian, part South African in keeping with his nomadic lifestyle.

Flying, or at least an interest in aviation, had run in both men's families. In Laidler's case his father had been a pilot with British Airways, in Hyndman's it was born from his father's keen amateur enthusiasm and a sister who flew DC3s in the Canadian bush.

"My old man is a physician and his hobby for a time was aviation, before he switched to golf," explained Hyndman. "We always had aviation magazines lying around, so I guess I was stimulated by that as a kid early on."

After flight school and stints flying elsewhere in remote areas of the world, including parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea, both ended up in Africa working for Kilwa Air. Like many of the aviation outfits that serve the gold mining industry in Congo, Kilwa is South African-based, though the company operates mainly out of Mwanza in Tanzania. The demands of the company are high, with a seven-day working week starting at 6am and often lasting 12 hours or more, up to seven of them in the air. And then of course there are the dangers, something both pilots insist they rarely think about despite having had their fair share of touch-and-go moments.

"I think the worst was coming into Mongbwalu," recalls Laidler, referring to the same strip from which we had taken off a few days earlier when the door had flown open shortly after leaving the ground. On the occasion of Laidler and Hyndman's own heart-stopper, the weather was bad with low cloud engulfing the surrounding hills and ridges.

"The engine failed when we landed and tried to put it in reverse. We were fully loaded with a couple of tons of freight and were half way down the strip with only about three hundred yards left." Laidler continued. "We decided to do a go-around and just squeezed off the end and came round for another try. That was hairy canary."

The ability to get in and out of such tight strips the pilots put down to the special flying qualities of their Spanish-built CASA 212 despite the plane being 21 years old.

"It's hideous and looks like Miss Piggy but I love it and it's perfect for what we use it for. We beat it half to death, but it's still very forgiving," insists Hyndman, clearly affectionate about "the crate" on which their lives depend. If Hyndman worries about anything, it's the fact that the terrain has not been properly mapped, the weather and rainforest are unpredictable, and then there's Lake Victoria, which "has more convective thunderstorm activity than just about anywhere in the world".

There is also the issue of the "big M" - maintenance. While Kilwa Air has a good track record, not all operators in Africa are as rigorous in the upkeep of their aircraft.

"There was one operator in Stonetown in Zanzibar which had been sending their planes over the Zanzibar Strait to Dar es Salaam, which one of my friends was flying," Hyndman remembers. "The plane was half way across when he lost his single engine, and he was headed into the drink. He survived, though the plane is now at the bottom," he tells me, before providing the all too common postscript to his story. "Later they found out the company had been replacing parts in the plane with bits they had ripped off a Volkswagen bug in the parking lot."

Others pilots elsewhere in Congo however have not been so lucky as Hyndman's friend. Laidler doesn't like to talk too much about one new crew a few years ago, who, being unaware of the correct procedure for going into a particular strip in bad weather, turned the wrong way before slamming into a ridge killing all 16 crew and passengers on board.

When rescuers found the wreckage and bodies some time later, what had survived had been looted, and the dead stripped of clothes and belongings before being mutilated.

"These things don't always happen, but if you go down in the wrong place then it probably will. I mean if I went down in the Congo, the chances of me coming out are pretty slim, because I'll either be put in prison or be held by some local militia," Laidler assured me with a shrug.

During the years 2002 to 2004, many local militias from tribes such as the Lendu and the Hema acted as the proxy forces of neighbouring countries like Uganda and Rwanda in the struggle for gold inside Congo. Most gained a grisly reputation for brutality whenever intermittent violence gripped the region around mining towns like Mongbwalu.

Forces under local and foreign commanders some with ominous nom de guerres like Commander Kung Fu fought each other ruthlessly, often targeting civilians in the battles for control of the gold supply. Widespread ethnic slaughter, torture, rape, and other violations of human rights and international law were widespread around Mongbwalu and in other northeastern areas.

"When our company first arrived with their drill rigs they rolled through Mongbwalu and it was empty because all the locals thought the trucks and rigs were tanks, so they cleared out of town and have always been on edge since," said Hyndman. "About two years ago it got so bad again, we had to haul all the miners out". With so many weapons around it's not only gunfire from militiamen on the ground that present dangers. Sometimes the cargo and even the passengers themselves can pose a threat.

"All pilots worry about hazardous materials, acetylene, bottles of oxygen and those kinds of things, and then sometimes we have security guards on board and have to take their ammunition clips away".

One story goes that a Russian company was ferrying scores of Congolese soldiers when a fight broke out on board over one of the men's girlfriends and the troops started shooting at each other.

Faced with losing his own life and that of his crew, the Russian pilot is said to have opened the ramp on the Antanov transport aircraft, and put the plane into an extremely steep climb leaving some 80 heavily armed men tumbling like toy soldiers from a tin box to their deaths in the bush below. Given the obvious stresses bush pilots face, how long I wondered did Laidler and Hyndman think they would continue working in Congo? Was it not also the case that most pilots seem so hooked on flying that hanging up their wings was easier said than done?

"I think what people say about it taking its toll on you is true, it takes years off your life. Christ, I feel like an old man already. I'm only 32 yet I look 40," Laidler complains, before then telling me that if he didn't like it he wouldn't do it, and how much better it was than flying at "a boring 10,000 metres".

While both men talk of settling down and getting married, somehow it doesn't quite square with two characters clearly steeped in Africa and an adrenaline-fuelled lifestyle that Hyndman admits, is "a powerful narcotic". So what would they do if they weren't flying, I asked him one afternoon as the CASA cruised over Lake Victoria en-route back into Congo from Entebbe in Uganda.

"I need to quit while I'm ahead," Hyndman replied, putting down the copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa that he'd been reading when the flying wasn't too demanding. "If I wasn't flying I don't know what I'd do," he confesses with a grin while chewing on a piece of his favourite South African beef jerky.

"I'm too old now to be stripper."

From March 25 you can view footage from Congo filmed by David Pratt on www.sundayherald.com