Steeped in Blood (25 page)

Over and above calling the flight engineers to his house on a Sunday, Margo had discussed the matter with other engineers in his chambers, without other interested parties and legal representation present. This was grossly improper. Yvonne Bellagarda, wife of the late Joe Bellagarda, the flight engineer who had been on board the
Helderberg
, gave me an affidavit on 27 May 1998, in which she stated that Jimmy Mitton, a close friend of hers, was called in to see Margo during the inquiry.

During the inquest Jimmy Mitton and I would go to court together to hear the proceedings. I was with Jimmy Mitton on the day that Judge Margo summoned him to his chambers. I was not present in the chambers, but when Jimmy Mitton came back to me, he was visibly upset. He told me that at the time Margo had insisted that he drop his line of inquiry. Furthermore, that Margo said to him that the country could not afford to have him pursue this line of inquiry. It would cost too much and his job and career and safety were on the line.

This, combined with the fact that Margo spent considerable time sending the inquiry in different directions and reached a nonsensical conclusion, points to a cover-up.

So why did Uys fail to land the aircraft after the first fire? The answer is straightforward and obvious: if Uys had landed the
Helderberg
, he would have had to land in an anti-apartheid country.
South Africa was a very different country in 1987 from what it is today. We were deep into the reign of P.W. Botha and the dishonest, paranoid gang called the nationalist government. Our international friends were also numbered among the polecats of the world, and we certainly did not have many political allies in the Indian Ocean area over which the
Helderberg
was flying. Landing the aeroplane would have invited inspection of the hold, and the dangerous cargo would have been discovered. The revelation that the apartheid government was carrying dangerous, even deadly, cargo aboard one of its passenger aircraft would have been the kiss of death for SAA. This, and
this alone
, was a powerful stimulus for Uys to keep flying.

But there is also a more sinister reason: a fire that involves the burning of plastic material produces copious quantities of very toxic substances, such as cyanides and carbon monoxide, which come from the phosphate-containing fire retardants in the plastic. Even more toxic substances than these are also produced – the toxicology of some of these gases is still poorly understood. If there had been a first fire shortly after reaching the cruising altitude, there would certainly have been severe casualties, and even deaths, on board the
Helderberg
.

On 22 August 1985, a fire on board an aircraft on the Manchester airport runway caused numerous severe casualties and some deaths. This aircraft was on the ground, and evacuated within three minutes. The so-called oxygen masks that drop from compartments above the passengers in such emergencies do not actually provide pure oxygen: they emit a source of cabin gas to which oxygen has been added to make the air breathable. If there are any toxic substances in the cabin gas, these will be supplied to passengers together with the oxygen. Death will result not from lack of oxygen, necessarily, but from the toxicity of the smoke and combustion products in the cabin gas.

The injury and probable deaths of an unknown number of
passengers on the
Helderberg
would have caused an international outcry. At the very least, Captain Uys would have been arrested wherever he landed and tried for either murder or culpable homicide. The government and the airline could never have withstood such a happening, and Uys would probably have been disowned by SAA.

After the first fire, which Uys thought he had successfully extinguished, he would have done what all pilots would do in that situation – use his radio to contact home base. The radio system was quite different in those days. Because of our appalling international relations at the time, particularly over Africa, the aircraft of SAA were obliged to fly some unconventional routes. For instance, we did not fly over Africa to Europe, the most direct route; we flew around the bulge instead and landed at out-of-the-way Portuguese islands, such as Isle de Sol, to refuel. Normal flying routes had radio beacons, which an aircraft could tap into to navigate, but we did not have access to these. So to keep in contact with its far-flung fleet, the management of SAA created and maintained a high-frequency shortwave radio station in Johannesburg, at what was then Jan Smuts Airport. This radio station was known as ZUR, and was manned twenty-four hours a day by different shifts of operators. It was, in essence, radio telephony.

There were set schedules for the aircraft to call in. If an aircraft was, for whatever reason, late in calling, there was a method of alerting the crew to the need to report home. This method was called Selcall – selective calling – incidentally, also the name of the pilots’ in-house magazine.

The calls were monitored on a continuous basis, and each transmission was recorded on a large reel-to-reel recorder, which had capacity for just over twenty-four hours of conversation. Depending on the air traffic, the reel would be replaced every twenty-four hours or so. As a recorded reel came to its end, it would be lifted out and replaced with a fresh reel, and the recording would be
placed at the back of a row of about thirty-five reels in a closed cabinet. It would then slowly work its way along the row until about thirty-five days later, when it would appear at the front of the row again, ready to be reused.

When the
Helderberg
crashed into the sea off Mauritius, this tape would have been a vital piece of information in either eliminating or confirming certain possibilities. Naturally, the men from the DCA would want to hear this tape.

One would have thought that time would be of the essence, but the tapes, strangely, were only collected by the DCA an extended period after the crash. And when they were collected, there were just two tapes available: the recording of the take-off, and the recording of the events of the following day – the search-and-rescue operation. The tape recording of the crucial in-between time, when Uys would have been battling the fire and calling home for help, was missing. Inexplicably, no one knew the whereabouts of that tape.

How does Margo deal with the tape in his report? He says, ‘There was no further contact between ZUR and the aircraft’ (page 12). Later, he states, ‘The ZUR tape recording ran until about 16.34. As the follow-on tape was apparently later mislaid or inadvertently reused
there was no further communication between SA 295 and ZUR on record
’ (page 30, emphasis added).

This is very strange. How did the tape get lost? And why was no one questioned or reprimanded for the missing tape? If it was over-taped in error, why was
that
tape not given to Margo? I believe that Margo knew all along where the tape had gone and that it was damning.

Margo concluded that ‘The circumstances were investigated in full by the board, which is satisfied that there was no connection between the failure to comply with the instructions and the accident to the
Helderberg
’ (page 137). Margo goes on to elaborate on the point that there was no connection between the ZUR tapes and the demise of the
Helderberg
. I totally disagree with Margo on
this issue. Margo was being less than honest when he put these remarks in his report, and I will explain why.

Firstly, whatever was on the tape would have been of benefit to the commission. If it had simply been a conversation about taking the cat to the vet, it would have assisted the commission in knowing that there was no foul play during that period. It would have instantly silenced a host of critics – myself included – who maintain that there was dirty dealing at the crossroads.

Secondly, Margo’s suggestion that he and the board had investigated the disappearance of the tape does not survive even the most elementary scrutiny. If the tape had been lost, someone would have come to Margo or the investigators and said, ‘We have lost the tape.’ We know that that didn’t happen. The next alternative is that the tape was inadvertently over-taped. This also did not happen: these are huge tapes, each with their own index card and identifying marking. Had the relevant tape been over-taped, someone would have led evidence to that effect and said to Margo or anyone else, ‘Look, here is the tape. I messed up and accidentally taped over it.’ This never happened. Margo’s claim that he and the board had examined the disappearance of the tape thoroughly also does not bear scrutiny on his own records, on the transcript of the court proceedings. So what really happened to that tape?

I was determined to get answers. After asking around, someone suggested that I contact a certain Captain Jimmy Deal, whom I called late one evening in Durban. He had a bad cold and was feeling poorly, but I said to him directly, ‘I was told that you took the missing ZUR tape out that evening. What did you do with it?’ He admitted that he had given it to Mickey Mitchell, who was the chief pilot for SAA at the time. Then Deal realised what he had said, and tried to backtrack. When I cross-examined him later, he was unsure about whom he had given the tape to, and ended off by saying that the tape never went missing. It was clear that this was a tape recording that SAA wanted hushed up.

I needed to know a little more about what I thought was the first fire. One of the people to whom I spoke was Athol Hardy, who worked for a company that sold fire equipment. The Monday morning after the
Helderberg
accident, which took place early on Saturday morning, he was at Jan Smuts Airport and overheard a conversation, which he repeated to me in a signed statement on 24 February 2001:

I am at present station officer at Benoni Fire and Emergency Services. I have been a fire officer for about the past 12 years. In 1987 I was working for a company called Harwil engineering (a company belonging to my father) which manufactured aircraft tenders among other fire-fighting equipment. On the Monday after the accident I was at the airport fire station. I had some servicing work to perform. This was at approximately 8.00 a.m. in the morning.

Normally when I get there I would speak to the other officers and chat about this and that. That Monday the only topic of conversation was the
Helderberg
. The conversation between the officers was to the effect that the plane had had a fire plus minus three hours after take-off and that the plane wanted to divert to Singapore. They had used up all the fire extinguishers on board. The captain thought that the fire was out and hence the reason for the diversion.

There had been some talk that if there had been a fire on board that the passengers would have been dead and that essentially they were flying a coffin and the only survivors were the senior steward and the cockpit crew. I got the impression that the senior steward had done the bulk of the fire-fighting.

There were two consequences: 1. the officer said he would put it [the plane] in the drink; 2. there was a second fire and they could not control it.

The people in the office at the room were myself, Tony Cavallier, Vossie Vorster, Blackie Swart (Training Officer) and a man with a large black beard.

They had obtained the evidence from the SAA staff. It appeared that two senior officers were in on a meeting with SAA personnel where the whole issue had been discussed.

Clearly there was radio communication between SAA and the plane (not the tower) earlier in the evening. The officers had been notified earlier in the evening.

According to the officer’s discussion the pilot had been refused permission to land the aircraft.

A similar version of events was relayed to me by Lucas Meyer. One of the radio operators, Gavin Dick, had been on duty in the ZUR room the evening of the accident. The next morning he went to visit his father, who worked in the avionics department. In the presence of at least one other person, Dick said that he had been in contact with the aircraft that evening, and that they had asked to land because of a fire but had been refused permission. When I questioned Dick on the issue, he denied having had the conversation – but he had been overheard by Meyer (see
Appendix F
).

I have a signed, sworn statement dated 16 March 2007 by a third independent person, Christiaan Pieter Hattingh, who had heard about the fire early on the Monday morning.

At the time of the
Helderberg
accident I was Flight Simulator Instructor on the B747 for South African Airways. We were scheduled for a training session that Saturday morning. I cannot remember the exact time of our programme but on a Saturday it was most likely to have started at 0800 in the briefing room and 0900 to 1300 in the simulator. It was only after my arrival that I heard that SA295 had crashed near Mauritius. The information was basically little, and one of
the crew members decided to go to ZUR to find out more. He came back with the story that SA295 had reported a fire earlier on but had decided to continue.

That Saturday morning the only information that could have been available was from ZUR and they must have been in contact with the aircraft earlier. Yet, during the investigation and hearing it turned out that they were not in contact with SA295. That cannot be the truth.

I believe I am just one of the few people that knew of the fire earlier in the flight. Like the flight engineers who tried to submit their report.

Jimmy Mitton was a Flight Engineer Instructor on the flight simulator and we often worked together and talked about the
Helderberg
accident.

Three entirely independent sources confirm the theory that there had been a fire on board the doomed aircraft shortly after take-off.

Various people have criticised my view that Uys chose not to land, saying that he was in ultimate control of the flight. There is one fact we cannot ignore: Uys surely knew that he had loaded dangerous cargo. After the first fire, he probably had bodies on board, as some of the passengers would have died from the toxic gases. He realised that if he landed with a cargo of dead bodies and traces of a dangerous substance, he would be dead in the water, as he had risked the lives of innocent people.