Bush Piloting 70-Year-Old DC-3s in and out of the Amazon Jungle — Al Jazeera’s Video Shows the Risks that Poverty and Primitive Conditions Bring with Them

© 2012 Peter Free

 

07 March 2012

 

 

For much of humanity, it is still not all about the “beautiful people”

 

Al Jazeera is preeminent in regularly showing the developed world what it is like to live outside it.

 

Take the following video, for example.

 

 

Citation

 

Tony Comiti Productions, The daredevil pilots of Colombia, Al Jazeera (07 March 2012) (25:00 minute video)

 

 

Poor maintenance, stormy weather, and no place to crash land — day in and day out

 

Recipes for catholicized anxiety (pun intended):

 

(i) maintenance by breakdown, rather than schedule

 

(ii) repair, apparently done by instinct

 

(iii) too-short, slippery, wet mud landing strips

 

(iv) measuring fuel by the liter, so as to avoid being too heavy to take off on inadequately long air strips

 

(v) pilots having to supervise cargo-masters, who make more money by deliberately underestimating cargo weight

 

(vi) jungle so dense that crashed planes can’t be found

 

and

 

(vii) isolated communities and passengers that depend on the arrival of these falling apart 70-year-old Douglas DC-3s

 

 

An example from one flight— flying a gasoline vapor bomb

 

Perhaps the most telling part of this video is the segment that shows a fuel attendant filling numerous plastic barrels in the plane’s cargo area with 1,800 liters (476 U.S. gallons) of gasoline.

 

The flight mechanic has to remove the plane’s door for the duration of the flight, so as to avoid an explosion from building gasoline vapor.

 

And the pilots know that they are going to have to land this volatile cargo on a mud strip that is so short, that touchdown has to occur immediately on the slide-inviting strip’s incoming end.  The inadequate runway is situated next to an 80-meter deep (262 feet) river-filled ravine.

 

A master stroke in Tony Comiti’s video occurs when he shows the stoic female copilot crossing herself, with deliberation, just before this perilous flight takes off.

 

 

The moral? — Poverty and risk are never separable

 

Which may explain the religiously based fatalism that permeates this and similar regions of the world.