Teenagers fly from Cape Town to Cairo in self-built plane
When they landed again, they were faced with a barrage of police and army personnel.
*Special Editor’s Note:
The News learnt that Megan’s father and his co-pilot had died in an aviation accident in Tanzania after this article was written. The News team would like to convey our deepest condolences to the Werner family in this difficult time.
A team of teens took to the skies to prove that age is just a number next to their names.
These 20 high school learners from all over rolled up their sleeves, applied the proper amount of elbow grease and literally built their own airplane from the ground up.
By 12 June, they were done with the building project and found themselves in Cape Town for the big day. They were gearing up to make a more than 7 000 kilometre trip to Cairo, Egypt.
Hoërskool Noordheuwel learners, Keamogetswe Seemela and pilot, Megan Werner, felt nothing more than a few butterflies in their stomachs as they climbed into the cockpits of the main and the support planes. This was, naturally, what they’d trained for, for months beforehand.
For the most part, the flight across the African continent went smoothly. When they reached Ethiopia, and after the team was well rested, they prepared for the rest of the trip. They filed their flight plan, but knew they were going to have a problem.
“The plane carried enough fuel for a six-hour flight, but we had to fly 10 hours,” noted Megan. “So we removed the back seat and installed extra fuel tanks.” Then, the bad news turned to worse as they realised that the support plane, which had accompanied them all the way and carried most of the team, had sprung quite a large leak.
“We had to make a difficult decision. Driaan and I had to fly on alone. We just couldn’t wait for the support plane,” Megan said.
Driaan van den Heever, an experienced pilot himself, felt sure they could make it, and with his support, Megan was ready to take the big leap. When they landed again, they were faced with a barrage of police and army personnel. They were in Sudan, in the middle of a terrible civil war, and traffic in and out of the area was strictly controlled and monitored. Megan and Driaan then found themselves in a very serious situation, amid paranoid men with guns, demanding all kinds of things from them.
“We were almost locked up,” Megan explained, “even though we had permission to land there. After four hours, they let us go and we had to fly on during the night to the next airport.”
The three teenagers explained that they had a new outlook on life after the entire event. “All the effort you put in is precisely what you get out,” Driaan said, with Megan adding that, “Life is working for you, not against you. If the support plane had flown with us with that leak, our friends would not have made it to the next airport.”
