A drama unfolded when the first aeroplane in decades had to make an emergency landing at the Carletonville airfield on the afternoon of Friday 12 February.
The incident happened at about 14:30, shortly after an Atlas Angel aeroplane with two pilots and six skydivers had taken off at the Johannesburg Skydiving Club (JSC). According to police, the pilot told them that the aeroplane suddenly lost power and he decided to make an emergency landing in an open veld on the farm next to the club. Unfortunately, one of the aero- plane’s wheels struck an obscured hole in the grass and it tipped over, ripping off the plane’s under- carriage. Emergency services and the fire and rescue services department arrived at the scene shortly after the incident. Two skydivers were seriously injured. One, who had a spinal cord injury, was airlifted to the Milpark Hospital in a Netcare helicopter. The other, who had a serious chest injury, was flown to the same hospital in a helicopter belonging to the independent aeromedical evacuation company, Halo. An ambulance evacuated four others from the scene. The pilots escaped injury. By Tuesday, the seriously injured skydivers were still in hospital. While the Carletonville police were at the scene, the South African Civil Aviation Authority is handling the investigation. “This is the first time in the 18 years I have been skydiving that there has been such an incident at the JSC. We don’t know what went wrong as this was a reliable aeroplane from a service provider we have used many times. The pilots are also very experienced. We are now waiting for the results of the investigation,” says the JSC’s chairperson, Mr Eugene (Pottie) Potgieter. He said it was still too early to know how well the injured skydivers – especially the one with the spinal cord injury – would recover or how long their recovery and rehabilitation would take. “We are all like family at the JSC and are very concerned about them. All we can do now is pray,” Potgieter told the Herald. “This was an unforeseen accident and the pilot did the right thing to make an emergency landing. There is no way he could have seen the hole; I walked right up to it before seeing it because of the long grass. I want to assure the public that the club is still very safe. It is so safe that I was in the next load after the accident,” says Potgieter.
