My narrow escape from a burning aircraft

Addis Ababa airport

This morning I caught a connecting flight via Addis Ababa’s Bole airport. For me this place has always been like a magical wardrobe, leading me towards different adventures across Africa. Today Ethiopia is the world’s fastest-growing economy and Bole is a continental crossroads, teeming with religious pilgrims, wandering tourists, African traders and sunburned Chinese workers. When I pass through the airport I always look for the wreckage of a Boeing 707 jet I know so well. It still sits there, shoved off to the side of the tarmac apron, scarred by time and caked with dust.

On 11 July 1989 I was on that aircraft with a few other correspondents. We had been on a gruelling assignment to cover a military coup d’état in Khartoum. As we waited for the flight home to Nairobi, a blasting haboob sandstorm swept in and turned the Sudanese skies a Martian red. No aircraft could land while the harmattan raged and bad-tempered soldiers refused to allow us out of the airport because the new junta had imposed a general curfew. Khartoum’s haboobs were famously treacherous, confusing one pilot so thoroughly he landed his jetliner on the River Nile, three miles short of the runway. Stranded in the sweltering terminal, we slumped about for 18 hours with nothing to keep us going except tepid mango juice swimming with fat black flies.

At last the heavens began to clear. Our plane arrived and we took off en route to Nairobi via Ethiopia. In Addis the flight was delayed on the runway for a further six hours and the communists in power at the time would not let us disembark.