TUESDAY MORNING, following my first meeting with Gerber, I entered the Flying Doctors Service hangar and found it a mess. Surplus equipment lay abandoned in every corner. Damaged propellers hung from the walls, old engine blocks gathered dust in the back corners of the stock room, and tools were scattered everywhere. More than half the hangar floor was occupied by two “hangar queens”—partially dismantled planes that were a permanent feature of the hangar but had not flown in years and were not even owned by the Flying Doctors Service. Aircraft wings, parts of airplane fuselage, spare seats, damaged instrument panels, the list went on and on. Parts were piled high to the ceiling. A pack-rat mentality prevailed, understandable in Africa, where spare parts were almost impossible to obtain. The place had not been properly cleaned in years.
On the mezzanine floor I toured the offices of the manager, the chief pilot, and the dispatcher, as well as the pilots’ common room. At the far end of the corridor I found the flight records squeezed in alongside the HF radio set. Space was at a premium, and here, too, nothing was ever thrown out. Loose papers and files bulged from filing-cabinet drawers and shelves sagged under the weight of aviation operating and regulation manuals.
Engineering and maintenance departments were housed on the hangar floor, with their own set of records and a sizable inventory of spare parts. Aviation legislation required detailed records, which added to the duplication of paper, spare parts, and tools. It was all an invitation to waste, inefficiency, and loss of money.
The magnitude of the task of transforming the Flying Doctors Service into an efficient, self-sustaining operation hit me like a ballpeen hammer. The clean-up alone would be monumental, let alone the necessary change in attitudes among the personnel. Suddenly, the idea of coming to Africa on such a project seemed ridiculous. This assignment had the sag of hopelessness about it.
Even so, I felt confident I could assist the Flying Doctors Service. I had had considerable experience running small entrepreneurial companies. The challenges facing an expanding business almost always fell into a familiar pattern, and the Flying Doctors Service was no different. However, this was Africa, and I was there as a consultant, not the president responsible for the organization—two significant differences. I needed to win over the managers and those on the hangar floor before making recommendations. So I spent my first days listening to complaints and recommendations, which flooded in from every direction.
Disorganization in the hangar placed inordinate demands on employees, who were expected to work long hours with little pay. Employee disgruntlement permeated the place, occasionally erupting into a crisis that brought activity to a stop. Jim Heather Hayes, manager of the Flying Doctors Service, had threatened to fire the lot countless times. The subsequent impasse inevitably ended in the granting of minor concessions that still left workers underpaid and overworked.
Jim Heather Hayes in his youth had been rakish and handsome. He had a well-established rally-driving reputation and a special talent for flying airplanes. In his day, he had been the closest thing in Africa to an American barnstorming stunt flyer. His acrobatic exploits were legendary: landing on the roof of a moving Land Rover, hydroplaning on water, flying under hydro wires, and setting down on the front lawn of a safari lodge in front of startled tourists. These days, though, Jim was a harried man. He spent hours on the phone tucked in a small corner office under the sloping roof of the hangar, chain-smoking, trying to resolve a cascading number of problems. He was big and gruff, with sandy-blond hair and a ruddy face blotched from sunburn and repeated attacks of malaria. I felt he was unfairly criticized as manager of the Flying Doctors Service by both the Society and by AMREF. The Flying Doctors Service had become a convenient dumping ground for most of AMREF’S unwanted problems. He had taken on responsibility for the maintenance of the organization’s 150 vehicles on the basis that he used to be one of East Africa’s premier rally drivers. However, the operation of a garage at the back of the hangar not only encroached on Jim’s time and attention, it was also a money-loser and took up valuable space, diverting resources from the Flying Doctors Service.
“What does vehicle maintenance have to do with the Flying Doctors Service?” I asked.
“Who else is going to take it on?” Jim replied with a look of pride. “Besides, it’s extra revenue for the Flying Doctors Service.” This typical entrepreneurial approach, while admirable, led to organizational chaos. The back of the hangar had become a dirty oil-soaked garage, where old cars and spare parts occupied the turning space that ambulances required to access the rear of the hangar. Jim’s tendency to focus on his current problem, at the expense of long-term solutions, meant that his office groaned under mountains of unreturned phone messages and defective airplane and car parts, all of which required immediate attention.
As manager of the Flying Doctors Service, Jim was responsible for the pilots, the planes, the radio network, and the maintenance of aircraft in the hangar—all the operational details of a small airline. The Service owned seven different types of aircraft, each one with a different manual, different parts, and different flying characteristics. The updating of the charts of landing strips and radio frequencies for Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi required a sizable database of current information. The workload was punishing.
Jim’s close friend, Colin Davies, was the flight engineer, and he exercised absolute rule over the hangar floor. Colin never really trusted me, and it was not until much later that I got to understand and like him. He viewed my arrival as an intrusion by a starry-eyed North American, naively optimistic over possibly changing the Flying Doctors Service.
Colin was tough, rugged, down on his luck, with a chip on his shoulder. He was personally shy and publicly aggressive, constantly digging himself out of problems of his own making—and irritated by his string of misfortunes. He was short and pugnacious, and yet still retained a vestige of his former good looks, the kind of man that could break a woman’s heart if she fell for him—and many did years ago. He was a true white-African character. He attributed his problems to Kenya’s general decline following the country’s independence in 1963, and he was quick to point out that his misfortunes coincided with President Moi’s accession to power and the country’s subsequent descent into corruption.
It was easy to be dismissive of white-Kenyan types like Colin, but they were born in the country and considered themselves part of Africa, emotionally committed. They accepted that blacks, democratically elected, should run the government, as long as it was based on parliamentary traditions and the rule of law. Every year, though, they witnessed more corruption, increasing crime, and outright prejudice towards the Asian and white minorities. This they bitterly resented. It was too late for them to leave the country, to start up elsewhere. Life was slipping by, and they were swept reluctantly into what they saw as Kenya’s accelerating slide into chaos.
Colin was a genius around airplanes. I have never seen anything quite like it. His instincts were uncanny. He understood planes— their design, construction, and operation—even though he’d never learnt to fly one. He would stride around the hangar in short pants, chin thrust out, eyes glaring, yelling one expletive after another at the incompetent hangar staff. Without warning, he could suddenly ground an aircraft just as the pilot was taxiing off the ramp. David Mutava, the chief mechanic, or his assistant, Stanley Gakure, would be instructed to have the pilot shut down the engine if Colin didn’t like the sound of the motor. Sure enough, a problem would be