The Knysna holiday came to an end, and it was time to head back to Johannesburg. Knysna doesn’t have an airfield of its own — it uses Plettenberg Bay, which is maybe 15 kilometres up the coast. It’s a decent little airport: good tarmac strip, not manned, but equipped with a non-directional beacon (NDB). The plan was that the same group who flew down — my mom, Terry, myself, Mikey, and Terry’s mom, Mary — would fly back in KAJ. Poor old Malachy and Paddy had the job of driving the old family Toyota back to Joburg.
The weather on the day wasn’t ideal — overcast, with the threat of worsening conditions. But I had my instrument rating, and KAJ was a capable aircraft. I did a careful preflight plan and realised I’d have to do a slow spiral climb over the Plettenberg Bay beacon until I reached a safe cruising altitude high enough to clear the Winterberg mountains, about 60 or 70 kilometres inland. From there, the forecast showed things clearing up. The plan was to refuel in Bloemfontein.
I phoned through and filed an IFR flight plan with Port Elizabeth, the closest manned ATC. Once airborne and in radio contact, I activated the flight plan and we were off.
I circled in cloud as planned, and thankfully, Terry, Mary, and Mikey all went straight to sleep. From memory, it’s about a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Bloem. Once I’d gained sufficient altitude over the beacon, I set course — but we still weren’t clear of cloud, which I’d hoped to be by then.
And this is where things started to darken. Literally.
The light outside dimmed. The cloud thickened. Turbulence increased. KAJ didn’t have an autopilot, so I was manually flying the whole time. The aircraft had a stormscope — not a radar, but it could detect lightning. Soon, it began lighting up with electrical activity ahead of us. Not a great sign.
I was at Flight Level 90 (9,000 feet) and figured climbing above the weather might improve things. So I radioed Port Elizabeth and requested a climb to FL110 (11,000 feet). We had full fuel tanks but were light on passengers, so KAJ handled it easily.
And then — the mistake that nearly killed us all.
There’s a little switch on the bottom left of the control panel: pitot heat. It activates tiny heating elements in the pitot tube under the wing — the tube that senses airspeed. And I had forgotten all about it. When we left Plettenberg Bay, it was 35 degrees. Icing was the last thing on my mind.
But as we climbed higher, the temperature plummeted. My mom, sitting next to me, casually said, “Aren’t you worried about ice?” I looked at her like she was mad.
She wasn’t.
Soon we were being buffeted around. Sleet hit the canopy. Visibility was zero. I was flying purely on instruments, and every bit of training screamed: trust your instruments. But the airspeed was dropping, which didn’t make sense. I was adding power and nudging the nose down, thinking we were climbing in a strong thermal.
Then I noticed something odd — a high-pitched whistle from the air vent above my right ear. A sound I’d never heard before.
I looked down at my Magellan GPS, a bulky manual device sitting on my knee. Back then, GPS wasn’t even approved for aviation — you used it for positional awareness only. But I caught a glimpse of my ground speed: 196 knots.
Now, KAJ in level flight cruises at 155 knots. Its never-exceed speed is 205.
In that instant, I realised: I’m in a dive. Another couple of minutes in that dive and we'd either have smashed into the moutains of the wings would have come off.
I pulled the power back immediately. The airspeed had been false all along — the pitot tube had iced up, feeding the instruments bad data. I finally flicked the pitot heat on. Within half a minute, the readings normalised.
We’d come terrifyingly close to catastrophe.
To say I was shaken would be a massive understatement. I was shocked to the core — not just by how close we came, but by how avoidable it had been. A tiny oversight. A forgotten switch. And it could have killed every one of us.
I’d always prided myself on being a cautious pilot. I’d never cut corners. But that day reminded me that aviation — like life — doesn’t forgive complacency. The pitot heat? In African flying, you hardly ever think of it. But that day, it was the difference between life and death.
The rest of the flight, thankfully, was uneventful. We landed safely in Johannesburg after refuelling in Bloemfontein.
My mom’s intuition, though, had been dead-on. And to be fair, she’d flown to Europe five or six times with my dad in a light aircraft. She was never a pilot, but she had an instinct for the sky — and that day, it probably saved us.
Thank you, Mom.