A Nail in the Sky

Last Monday I flew the longest nonstop flight I have done since arriving in the Congo. I took 2 passengers to Buta, a town 340 miles west of Bunia. The flight itself was very uneventful...unlike the rest of the day.

I landed in Buta and immediately felt some vibrations from the nose area of the plane. I had never landed at this airstrip before and my first thought was, "Wow! This has got to be the roughest airstrip I have ever landed on." It quickly became obvious that the problem was not the airstrip. I stopped short of the parking area, but was able to taxi off the runway. When I exited the airplane, I found a completely flat nose wheel.

So, what do you do when you have a flat airplane tire in the middle of nowhere? Enlist help. Thankfully, there were several people around who were eager to assist me. In a matter of minutes the group of 10-15 and I raised the plane off its flat nose wheel (by sitting two men on the tail) and pushed the plane to the parking area.

Next came the repair attempts. I found a can of emergency tire repair goo in the airplane's toolkit. While I applied that, I sent someone into town to look for an air pump. Half an hour later they returned with a bicycle tire pump. The pump worked, but the repair goo did not.

Plan B: Since this obviously could not be the first flat tire in the middle of nowhere in the history of MAF, I called another pilot on the radio for advice. (This, of course, involved yelling and repeating myself several times as the distance made the connection very poor.) The best option was to take the tire off, see if the tube could be patched, and then probably spend the night in Buta if I couldn't finish the repair in time to make it to my next destination.

Thankfully, the Congolese men who were helping me were very resourceful. One had a strip of rubber from an old tire tube that we could use as a patch. Another had a hacksaw blade that we could use to prepare the patch and roughen the areas to be glued together. A third person hopped on a motorcycle and went into town to buy tire patch glue.

It took a few hours, but eventually I was able to get the tire repaired, inflated, and reinstalled. Although hot and tired, I quickly loaded my passengers, took off, and arrived at my final destination just before sunset.

What a day!