There is something like 50 km of paved roads in South Sudan, so getting round is a headache. The solution is the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service. Here it has a fleet of 10 or so aircraft, administered by the World Food Programme, that ferry aid workers from tiny place to tiny place and back to Juba.
Tickets are considered far too simple a method of deciding who gets on the plane. Far better is to publish a manifest the day before the flight, twenty minutes before the flight, or not at all, listing who the chosen ones are. If your name's not down you're not coming in, although methods have been designed to get around this. They include crying, shouting, arguing, pleading, threatening or being extremely attractive.
You get from Juba to regional hubs Rumbek, Malakal and Wau on a 40 seater De Havilland Dash, and from a hub to the pointless village of your choice on a 10 seater Cessna Caravan. A trip on a Caravan is a lot of fun; you get a great view of take-off and landing through the windscreen, and pockets of hot air make for a bouncy ride. It's all quite informal - a friend claims he once got on a plane with a full manifest by being put in the co-pilot's seat, although sadly the controls on his side were disabled.
There are some commercial airlines, but they are not to be trusted. They all have peculiar names, like Feeder Air, and questionable safety records. There used to be a carrier called Icarus Air, presumably named by someone who read only the first half of the myth of Icarus.
I am told that South Sudan has no Civil Aviation Authority, a body that your average country has to tell people flying north to fly at one altitude and people flying south to fly at a different one, so quite some trust has to be put in your pilot's eyesight.
The UNHAS schedule is a mystery, and long waits in boring airfields are part of the game, where you can spot huge cargo planes from the old Soviet Union with curious hieroglyphics on the side. The best airfield is the one at the northern town of Wau, where the twisted carcasses of two planes that crashed just off the runway have been left where they fell, presumably pour encourager les autres. My favourite wreckage, though, is in the town of Rumbek, where a pilot once mistook the main road of the town for the airstrip.
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| Airstrip at Akobo East with Caravan |
You get from Juba to regional hubs Rumbek, Malakal and Wau on a 40 seater De Havilland Dash, and from a hub to the pointless village of your choice on a 10 seater Cessna Caravan. A trip on a Caravan is a lot of fun; you get a great view of take-off and landing through the windscreen, and pockets of hot air make for a bouncy ride. It's all quite informal - a friend claims he once got on a plane with a full manifest by being put in the co-pilot's seat, although sadly the controls on his side were disabled.
There are some commercial airlines, but they are not to be trusted. They all have peculiar names, like Feeder Air, and questionable safety records. There used to be a carrier called Icarus Air, presumably named by someone who read only the first half of the myth of Icarus.
I am told that South Sudan has no Civil Aviation Authority, a body that your average country has to tell people flying north to fly at one altitude and people flying south to fly at a different one, so quite some trust has to be put in your pilot's eyesight.
The UNHAS schedule is a mystery, and long waits in boring airfields are part of the game, where you can spot huge cargo planes from the old Soviet Union with curious hieroglyphics on the side. The best airfield is the one at the northern town of Wau, where the twisted carcasses of two planes that crashed just off the runway have been left where they fell, presumably pour encourager les autres. My favourite wreckage, though, is in the town of Rumbek, where a pilot once mistook the main road of the town for the airstrip.
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| Airstrip at Kapoeta with Dash |
