1930s biplane landed at the Pyramids on Sunday, the first such landing in decades, as part of a vintage aeroplane rally organised by a former British Army pilot.
The Stampe SV4 aircraft, flown by a Belgian pilot, wove between the ancient structures before coming to land on a narrow strip of road near the base of the Pyramids.
“It was so intense, it was impossible to take pictures or to film,” said Cedric Collette, the pilot. “The eyes were so full of what we were seeing.”
Mr Collette’s Belgian aircraft, which he flies with his wife Alexandra Maingard, is one of 15 vintage planes taking part in a five-week journey across Africa, which began in Crete and will end in Cape Town.
Teams from around the world, some of them husbands and wives or parents and children, are taking part in the flying trip and maintaining their ageing aircraft as they go.
The Vintage Air Rally is the brain child of Sam Rutherford, a former Army Air Corps pilot who flew helicopters in Northern Ireland and with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.
“It’s been an ambition for a long time and its taken 18 months of pure work to get to this stage,” Mr Rutherford said.
The landing at the Pyramids is the first in 80 years, he said, and other landing zones were just as ambitious. In Kenya, authorities have agreed to cut a landing strip into a national park while in Tanzania the vintage planes will land on the edge of the Ngorongoro crater.
There are several British crews taking part in the rally, including one pair flying a de Havilland Tiger Moth, an RAF training plane built in 1940.
“It’s fairly easy to find the parts for the plane but it’s harder to find the right people,” said Stuart Beatty, one of the Tiger Moth’s two pilots. “Not many people know how to maintain a 1940s aircraft anymore.”
Mr Beatty, a 50-year-old farmer from Northamptonshire, became interested in vintage aircraft after watching his uncle fly old planes in Britain.
COURTESY: THE TELEGRAPH
