SANParks Air Wing

Information and Discussions on Management Issues of Concern in Kruger
Klipspringer
Global Moderator
Posts: 5862
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:34 pm
Country: Germany
Contact:

SANParks Air Wing

Post by Klipspringer »

https://www.verticalmag.com/features/sa ... -poaching/

The decade-long fight to save the Kruger’s rhinos from poaching

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Elan Head


As Mbongeni Tukela recalled, it started in 2008.

“One Saturday morning, we lost a rhino.” Then it was another, and another — 11 more that year, he said. By 2009, rhino poaching in Kruger National Park had become an epidemic.

“It was incessant. It just happened every day.” Tukela is a former park ranger who now directs the operations center at Kruger National Park, the sprawling South African wildlife refuge on the border with Mozambique. “We threw everything we had at them,” he said. “We were making arrests, but the poachers never stopped coming.”

Ten years later, the poachers still haven’t stopped coming, and the Kruger remains a central battleground in the fight to save rhinos from extinction. Historically, poaching cycles in Africa have waxed and waned over the decades. No one has pinpointed a single driver for the most recent, sustained wave of poaching, although likely factors are increasing wealth and demand for rhino horn in Asia — where the product is both a status symbol and traditional medicine — as well as poverty and longstanding social resentments in the local communities from which poachers are recruited.

What has made the current cycle of poaching especially pernicious is the widespread involvement of organized criminal networks. Their deep pockets have upped the financial stakes considerably, providing poachers with stronger incentives to undertake their risky work, and more resources to evade prosecution. Conservation organizations like South African National Parks (SANParks), which administers the Kruger, have felt forced to reciprocate.

“We’ve had to throw a lot of technology at it; we’ve had to throw a lot of men at it,” said Tukela. From his office at Skukuza Airport in the south of the park, Tukela monitors anti-poaching operations across the Kruger using customized command-and-control software, which consolidates rangers’ reports and location data onto a single screen. “I can see the activity and understand what’s happening in the entire area,” he said, explaining that this “big picture” helps him decide how to allocate more expensive resources such as K-9 units, and SANParks’ four Airbus H125/AS350 helicopters and two Cessna airplanes.

These investments, supported by benefactors including the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, have made a difference. With helicopter and K-9 support, two suspected poachers were arrested on the morning of our interview with Tukela. As we visited with him, SANParks chief pilot Grant Knight called to report that six additional suspects had been apprehended across three separate operations, with no rhinos lost.

“Not bad for a Monday,” Tukela reflected. Wins like these, he said, help sustain the morale of SANParks rangers, many of whom have “battle fatigue” after a decade of intense anti-poaching ops.

The pressure is unlikely to let up. According to Kobus de Wet, SANParks national head of environmental crime investigations, his Vietnamese informers tell him, “You know when it will stop? When we poach the last rhino.” But SANParks rangers aren’t ready to give up the fight.

“They’re passionate about it,” Tukela said. “They say, ‘Not in my lifetime.’ If the poaching will stop, the rhinos will respond positively.”

Extraordinary measures

There are two species of rhino at Kruger National Park, white and black. Cathy Dreyer is the park’s black rhino surveillance and monitoring coordinator. She explained that visitors to the Kruger are more likely to see white rhinos, both because of their greater numbers and because, as grazers, they prefer open grasslands.


By contrast, the smaller black rhinos are browsers who spend most of their time in dense brush, where they’re harder to spot. “If they are crossing a road, they’re not going to walk slowly across the road like a white rhino. You’re going to get a fleeting view of it, and it’s going to be gone and into the thicket,” she said.

Both species are threatened by poaching, which Dreyer suggested is largely “opportunistic.” However, there are so few black rhinos remaining that every animal lost has a disproportionate impact on the species as a whole. According to the World Wildlife Fund, conservation efforts have helped the global black rhino population double from a historic low 20 years ago. But the species remains critically endangered, with only around 5,000 animals worldwide.

Those staggeringly low numbers are why, in October, SANParks’ veterinary team was making a special effort to save a female black rhino who had been shot in the foot during an unsuccessful poaching attempt. By the time she was discovered by rangers and recovered to a secure boma, or corral, she had worn completely through her sole. The veterinary team had put a cast on her foot, but she kept wearing through that, too. “It’s not like a person who can stay on crutches,” Dreyer said, noting that the rhino was also suffering side effects from the high doses of antibiotics required to prevent infection.

Treatment efforts like these are unusual for the SANParks team, explained Dr. Peter Buss, the Kruger’s veterinary senior manager. While domestic animal veterinarians treat individual animals as a matter of course, wildlife veterinarians are typically “much more interested in populations and in systems,” he said. Indeed, through an initiative called the Black Rhino Guardian Program, most of Dreyer’s work also revolves around systems: collecting data to better describe and manage the black rhino population in Kruger National Park.

Image
This black rhino sustained a gunshot wound to the foot during a failed poaching attempt in Kruger National Park. She was recovered to a secure boma where, in October, SANParks veterinarians were making an effort to treat her. Lloyd Horgan Photo

However, with fewer than 500 black rhinos remaining in the park, extraordinary measures are sometimes warranted. In October, as she fed the injured rhino segments of the succulent plant called tree euphorbia, Dreyer acknowledged, “We’re not sure if we can get her healed . . . but with the numbers being what they are, we must try.” Dreyer pointed out that even in a worst-case scenario, lessons from the animal’s treatment would be used to refine protocols for treating gunshot wounds in rhinos — which, unfortunately, remain frequent occurrences.

“It’s eight, 10 years down the line now, so a lot of people have just moved on,” she said. “But it’s important for people to know [that] rhino do get shot daily in Kruger, and there are tons of orphans — tons of orphans — that are sometimes hacked with machetes when they’re tiny things, like days old, because they come and try and protect mom when the poachers are busy. So there [are] gory and horrific things, and people still need to know what’s happening.”

Formidable adversaries
Looking back on the surge of poaching that began around 2008, SANParks helicopter pilot Charles Thompson recalled, “We were caught completely by surprise when it started happening. We were just putting out fires.”

Like two of his colleagues in the SANParks Air Wing, pilots Jaco Mol and Grant Knight, Thompson came to flying from a conservation background, not a law enforcement one. “We were game capture pilots — we were really good at catching animals,” he said. When it came to anti-poaching, “we had to quickly learn, and it was trial-and-error.”

In 2008, SANParks was flying two Airbus (formerly Eurocopter) AS350 B3 helicopters, having upgraded from the Eurocopter EC120 in 2006. In 2014 and 2015, funding from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation allowed SANParks to acquire two additional AS350 B3e (now called H125) models to expand its anti-poaching operations.

Before 2008, SANParks’ helicopters supported conservation projects across South Africa, but in recent years, the scale of poaching in the Kruger has necessitated that all four aircraft be based in the park full-time. Between them, they log around 2,000 flight hours per year and could easily fly more, if SANParks had more than four full-time helicopter pilots.

“For four aircraft, to operate them 24 hours a day, we would require triple the amount of pilots,” explained Mol. “One of our biggest problems is crew availability.”

The helicopters support anti-poaching operations in a number of ways across the Kruger’s 7,500 square miles or 2 million hectares (an area larger than Connecticut). The park relies on rangers to identify incursions and begin tracking suspects; then, helicopters are used to fly in K-9 units and provide top cover when contact is imminent.

“Suspects tends to hide from aircraft, and because they’re hiding, they can’t run,” Mol said.

Image
Helicopters are used to transport K-9 units to the field to assist with tracking and arresting poaching suspects. Lloyd Horgan Photo

The flying can be dangerous. Arrests are sometimes preceded by shootouts, and SANParks helicopters have been targeted on multiple occasions. The Air Wing has consequently installed ballistic measures in its helicopters, a highly unusual modification in a civilian aircraft. The armor provides protection, but comes with an increased weight penalty.

“Experienced [poachers], they get to know what our limitations are in the aircraft,” Mol observed. “You see a constant adaptation and change in tactics.”

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game all the time,” echoed Thompson, noting that while poachers may be drawn to the work from poverty, they are formidable adversaries: extremely fit, used to their conditions, and highly driven. “You have to have respect for them,” he said. “If you don’t have respect for them, you will underestimate your enemy, and you will fail.”

No easy solutions
The dynamics of anti-poaching operations — which typically involve deadly weapons in austere environments, with existential stakes for the animals involved — lend themselves naturally to military terminology. That is why it is common to speak of a “war on poaching,” and indeed a handful of conservation groups have embraced an explicitly militarized approach to their work.

Image
Mbongeni Tukela, left, directs the operations center at Kruger National Park. Kobus de Wet is SANParks’ national head of environmental crime investigations. Lloyd Horgan Photos

For all of its advanced technology, however, SANParks holds the perspective that poaching is essentially a criminal problem, not a military one. Animal lovers on social media may call for poachers to be shot on sight, but SANParks employees understand that such attitudes are fundamentally incompatible with democratic norms (not to mention counterproductive, since even the killing of poachers in self-defense can stoke outrage and resentment in local communities). “We are doing all we can to respect human rights,” said the Kruger’s chief ranger, Nicholas Funda.

Locating and apprehending poachers is therefore only half the job. Rangers must follow correct procedures of arrest and later be prepared to present evidence in court. Meanwhile, SANParks investigators working under de Wet meticulously document each crime scene, collecting evidence including human DNA — which can aid in prosecutions — and rhino DNA, which can link recovered horns to specific poaching incidents within the park.

Investigators also collect information on the crime syndicates that orchestrate the poaching. “This is organized crime, that’s why it’s so difficult to put a lid on it,” said Tukela. Corruption and a lack of international cooperation have made it hard to prosecute high-ranking individuals within these organizations, while many lesser prosecutions are stalled within South Africa’s judicial system, he said.

Like other law enforcement “wars” — such as the war on drugs — the war on poaching presents no easy solutions. Long-term success will require addressing demand for rhino horn in consumer markets. Along the way, greater community engagement might help, as would more vigorous measures against corruption. On a tactical level, the Kruger’s front-line defenders would like to have more money, manpower, and technology to help them solidify the gains they’ve made thus far.

“There’s no silver bullet for any of this. Nothing is going to solve everything,” acknowledged Thompson. But the prospect of a world without rhinos is why so many people are committed to trying something.

“This is basically the last stand of the animals in a wild area . . . it’s a critical period now,” Thompson said. “But there’s a lot of good will out there, and there’s a lot of people who want to help.”


Klipspringer
Global Moderator
Posts: 5862
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:34 pm
Country: Germany
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Klipspringer »

The tricky business of darting an elephant from a helicopter
Posted on January 23, 2019 by Elan Head


Sometimes a wildlife darting mission goes according to plan. Sometimes the wildlife has other ideas.

It has now been seven or eight minutes since the veterinarian in the back seat of our Airbus H125 helicopter, Dr. Peter Buss, took aim at the young bull elephant below us. It was a clean shot, delivering a cocktail of thiafentanyl, an opioid, and azaperone, a tranquilizer, into the animal’s hindquarters.


Image
A SANParks H125 helicopter manages an elephant that has just received a tranquilizer dart to its flank. The time between when an animal is darted and when it falls asleep is critical for both the safety of the animal and the success of the mission. Lloyd Horgan Photo

At the doses contained in the dart, the drugs usually take full effect after 10 minutes. That’s a problem, because with just a couple of minutes left on his feet, this young bull is being stubbornly uncooperative. Pilot Brad Grafton is doing his best to urge him into a clear area, but the elephant seems impervious to our rotor wash. Instead, he keeps stumbling through the bush towards a tourist road in Kruger National Park, where a handful of safari vehicles have pulled over to watch the show.

Finally the elephant pauses next to a small dead tree. He sways a little on his feet, then tips over on his side, bringing the tree down with him. It’s not the outcome Buss had hoped for.

Grafton lands the helicopter and Buss jumps out to join his ground team, who are already at the elephant. They won’t be able to perform their research tasks on this one — his awkward position across the tree puts him at risk of injury, so it would be unwise to leave him there for long. Buss administers an antidote and returns to the aircraft. We lift off in time to see the elephant wake up and heave himself to his feet, then amble off, apparently unconcerned. Across the radio comes a general sigh of relief.

Fortunately, the next elephant that Buss darts is much more tractable. He submits readily to Grafton’s herding, finally passing out next to a dirt road that’s far from the prying eyes of tourists, yet readily accessible to the ground crew. Grafton locates a clear patch of veld and lands again, this time shutting down. The veterinary team’s work is about to begin.

Safety first
Few helicopter missions are as challenging or rewarding as wildlife darting and capture — both from the perspective of the pilot, and the person with the dart gun in the back.


“The big thing about darting wildlife is it looks fairly simple and straightforward, but it’s got multifactorial components to it to make sure that it’s successful,” said Buss.

For the South African National Parks (SANParks) veterinary team, the first challenge is in formulating a chemical concoction that packs enough punch to immobilize a 10,000-pound (4,500-kilogram) animal, while still fitting in a dart with a maximum volume of three milliliters. According to Buss, the powerful, potentially deadly mixture of thiafentanyl and azaperone is the only thing that fills the bill, and “we have to be very careful with how we, as humans, use it.”

Then there’s the matter of delivery, which requires a steady aim and clear communication with the pilot. From that point, said Buss, “you have to be very careful about how you manage that animal in terms of limiting the risks to them. So, for example, you don’t want to chase them too far, because they’re not endurance animals, these things.”

For the pilot, that process of managing the animal is a balancing act — knowing when to move in and when to back off. “You’ve got a bit of a goal that [you] set yourself, and that is to try to get the animal close to the ground crew and in safe proximity,” explained SANParks chief pilot Grant Knight.

Image
“Pretty much all our work, particularly in the field, particularly with the large mammals, is done with the Air Wing. We pretty well can’t do without them,” said Peter Buss, shown here darting an elephant. Lloyd Horgan Photo

Yet at the same time, the pilot can’t become so fixated on this goal as to lose situational awareness. Maneuvering so low to the ground leaves no room for error, and even a surly, drugged-out elephant can’t be allowed to distract from the branches waiting to snag the tail rotor.

“You’ve always got to take a step back and realize you’ve got a tasking that’s flying safe; keeping the aircraft, the crew safe, and the guys on the ground safe,” said Knight. “It’s just important to always keep safety as the highest profile within your operation” — even if that means having to wake up an anesthetized animal and try for a different one.

An essential tool
Chemical immobilization is a vital tool for SANParks’ conservation missions, and one that is used regularly in Kruger National Park for a variety of large mammals.

With rhinos under particularly intense pressure from poaching, SANParks established the Black Rhino Guardian Program to understand the most vulnerable rhino population in the park. According to the program’s coordinator, Cathy Dreyer, “In order for us to get to know them, we needed to be able to, on an individual basis, tell the animals apart. And the only way that we could reliably do that was to ear notch animals. So that means immobilizing the animal, and once it’s darted by a vet and down, we give it a specific ear pattern.”

As of October 2018, more than 50 black rhinos in Kruger National Park were individually identifiable by ear notches.

Image
Researchers collect as much information as possible while an elephant is anesthetized. Because of the time and expense involved in darting each animal, it only makes sense to take full advantage of the opportunity. Lloyd Horgan Photo

“We’ve also fitted a lot of animals with satellite collars, to be able to get an idea of what the movements are, the seasonal movements, distances they’ve covered, what are the sizes of their home ranges,” Dreyer added. “And those collars required, again, that the animals be immobilized.”

Chemical immobilization is also used to recover young animals — whether black or white rhinos — that have been orphaned by poaching incidents. Once sedated, very small calves are sometimes loaded directly into the helicopter and flown to an orphanage outside the park’s boundaries, while larger animals may be slung out by their forelegs, or loaded into crates and trucked to bomas to grow up in safety.

“The really small ones don’t have a very long time,” Dreyer pointed out. “If they are really tiny and they are left out for a day or two, between the lions and the hyenas, they’ll often have horrific injuries or they’ll be taken out before you actually have a chance to recover them. So you need to get to them really quickly.”

In service of science
The elephant darting that took place during our visit was in service of several research projects, approved by committees well in advance. The primary research objective was to study how the sedative drugs themselves affect the elephants physiologically.

“By that we mean, how does their respiratory function change, how does their heart function and blood circulation change?” explained Buss. “Once you understand that, you can start saying, OK, what are the interventions that we need to put in place to reduce the risk to the animal? [And] not only reduce the risk to the animal, but make sure that you don’t increase the risk to the people working with them — because obviously what you don’t want is an animal suddenly waking up or getting up when you have lots of people around them.”

Image
Treating individual free-ranging animals for a disease like tuberculosis is nearly impossible, so the aim of SANParks’ TB study is to better understand its prevalence in the wild population. “Our interest really is to see how the system responds,” said Peter Buss. Lloyd Horgan Photo

A secondary research goal was to screen the elephants for tuberculosis (TB). This bacterial disease is widespread in water buffalo within the park, but it hadn’t been seen in elephants until two years ago, when the necropsy of a dead elephant here revealed that the animal had suffered from advanced TB.

“So the question then was, how big a problem is this?” Buss said. “Which sounds fairly simple, but the procedures that we use, we’ve had to develop in order to do [the study].”

One of those procedures is a bronchial wash, in which sterile fluid is pumped into the animal’s bronchial tubes, sucked back out, and stored for later laboratory analysis. “The point being that if the elephant has got active TB and has lesions in its lungs and they’re shedding organisms into their respiratory tract, then by putting the fluid in and sucking it back out you hope to recover those organisms,” Buss explained. His teams performed similar washes of the elephant’s trunks, “because the trunk essentially is just another component of the respiratory system.”

According to Buss, the extensive preparatory work involved with this type of research means that the actual darting of animals in the field is just a small part of his responsibilities. But he said it’s also the most enjoyable aspect of his job, and his aerial vantage point is part of that.

“We are very fortunate that we do have helicopters to support us, so you get this totally unique perspective on the Kruger park, and the national parks that we work in,” he said. “It’s fantastic to be out there in that sort of environment.”


Klipspringer
Global Moderator
Posts: 5862
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:34 pm
Country: Germany
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Klipspringer »

The helicopter pilots who keep watch over the Kruger
Posted on January 25, 2019 by Elan Head


For South African National Parks (SANParks) chief pilot Grant Knight, one number encapsulates how his job has changed since he first joined the SANParks Air Wing in 2004.

It’s not the number of rhinos that have been killed since the current epidemic of poaching began in 2008, or the number of animals he has helped save. It’s not even the number of hours he has flown in SANParks’ four Airbus H125/AS350 helicopters (around 6,000 since the organization acquired its first AS350 in 2006).

It is, instead, his golf handicap.

“When I first got here, I had a golf handicap that was brilliant,” he said. However, as poaching pressure intensified, so did demand for helicopter anti-poaching support, altering his schedule in ways that left him with little free time.

“So we [went] from a very pre-defined type of flight, such as game census or game capture many years ago, and to not flying over the weekend, having afternoons off… to the very hectic unpredictable day you see now.” His golf game was simply one of many things that were sacrificed in the process.

Knight is based in Kruger National Park, the largest game reserve in South Africa, which covers an area nearly the size of New Jersey. Home to embattled populations of white and black rhinos, the Kruger is critical to the continued survival of these species, and its rangers count on helicopters for vital support during anti-poaching operations.

It’s a tremendous responsibility, yet it falls on just four full-time helicopter pilots and two maintainers. Of those four pilots, only one of them, Brad Grafton — a former South African Air Force and South African Police Service pilot who joined SANParks in 2014 — had prior law enforcement experience.

For Knight and pilots Charles Thompson and Jaco Mol, their current job description isn’t something they necessarily expected. “You join initially as a conservationist, and you’re thrust into kind of this war mode,” Knight reflected. “We have all of this training now that is far removed from the conservation work.”


They also have a higher risk profile than the average game capture pilot. As international crime syndicates have pumped more money into the poaching business, gunfights have become more common during contacts between poachers and rangers. The SANParks helicopters have been outfitted with ballistic measures, and the pilots wear body armor during anti-poaching missions.

“In those types of missions, the whole mission is fraught with hazards,” said Mol. “We have been shot at. We haven’t been hit — yet.”

Support for rangers
According to Knight, SANParks has been using helicopters in support of its conservation missions for decades. Early models included Bell 47s and JetRangers; more recently, the Air Wing flew Eurocopter (now Airbus) EC120 helicopters before upgrading to the AS350 in 2006.

The four helicopters the Air Wing operates today include two older AS350 B3 models, and two AS350 B3e (now H125) helicopters acquired a few years ago with funds from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. They are significantly more versatile and powerful than the EC120s they replaced, and the Air Wing has leveraged their capabilities to the max.


Image
Rhinos have now been under intense poaching pressure in the Kruger for a decade. SANParks pilots have evolved their tactics, but poachers have adapted theirs, too. “For anything you deploy, there are countermeasures,” said pilot Jaco Mol. Lloyd Horgan Photo

“I was here before we got these aircraft, and since operating and implementing them in 2006, it’s a dream come true,” said Knight. “It’s a platform that meets our requirements in all the different missions and aircraft configurations, and it’s a friendly aircraft for what we do.”

“In the light single turbine range, it does everything that we require,” Mol echoed, noting that the helicopters can carry full fuel and a full complement of passengers and gear without exceeding performance limitations. “It’s fast — we can do 120, 130 knots to get to where we have to go. [It has] three hours’ endurance, which gives us a decent range. On a full tank of fuel I can traverse the park from the south to the north and halfway back.”

Before rhino poaching intensified in the Kruger, the Air Wing worked in parks across South Africa, but “now I can’t remember the last time I flew out of Kruger National Park because of the anti-poaching support demand we have here,” Knight said. The Air Wing is based at Skukuza Airport in the south of the park, next to the operations center that coordinates all of the anti-poaching activities.

Although staffing levels fluctuate, the Kruger typically has around 500 rangers stationed in outposts throughout the park. These boots on the ground are the first and most essential defense against poachers, performing the difficult work of tracking intruders through the veld and arresting suspects. As chief ranger Nicholas Funda pointed out, “You cannot replace people with technology. You cannot replace them with helicopters.”

What you can do with helicopters, however, is provide those rangers with much-needed backup. When rangers report that contact with suspects is imminent, “we’ll respond with one or preferably two aircraft — the one doing low-level cover for the guys on ground, and the other doing high-level suppressive work,” Mol explained. “We’ll fly out there, assess the situation, find out what they require from us, and then the reaction aircraft will maintain station over the guys on the ground, so that we can cover them in the event that something happens.”

Image
Maintainer Agnesia Makgotla works with maintenance manager Byron Sclanders to keep the Air Wing’s helicopters ready for their demanding missions. Lloyd Horgan Photo

The urgency and unpredictability of anti-poaching missions poses special challenges not only for the Air Wing’s pilots, but also its maintainers. “We have to be sure [that] should the choppers be needed, the pilots always have some aircraft to go with,” said maintenance technician Agnesia Makgotla during Vertical‘s visit in October. “For example, just yesterday, eight poachers were caught, because we had all four [helicopters] working.”

According to maintenance engineer and maintenance manager Byron Sclanders, keeping all four aircraft 100 percent serviceable can be a daunting task. The remoteness of the operations base is one of the biggest challenges, making it necessary to stock a large supply of spare parts on site to be ready for both routine and unexpected maintenance.

However, Sclanders and Makgotla are both passionate about their work, recognizing how important safe, well-maintained aircraft are to the success of the Air Wing’s high-risk and volatile operations. They are assisted by supply chain and quality assurance consultant Elana Mol and a team of hangar and administrative assistants, all of whom help ensure smooth, uninterrupted operations at the Skukuza base.

Diverse missions
Anti-poaching operations now constitute the bulk of the Air Wing’s missions; nevertheless, its work in the Kruger is varied.

“Anything you can think [to] do with helicopters, we do it here in the park,” said Mol. Foremost amongst those operations are the conservation missions — which, as he pointed out, are “actually why we all joined SANParks in the first place!”

A conservation mission, he said, “could be census operations to determine the specific species numbers we’ve got within the park. It could be demographic surveys, where we’ll see what the age ratios and the sex ratios for specific species are throughout the park. It could be a localized survey like a riverline survey, when we look at hippo or crocodile populations.”

Or it could be a darting mission, in which a veterinarian in the back seat shoots a tranquilizer dart into one of the park’s large mammals for purposes of research or treatment. Such chemical immobilizations account for most of the Air Wing’s game capture operations, although the pilots will sometimes assist with mass capture operations by herding a group of animals into a specially designed holding pen, or “capture boma.”

The Air Wing is also occasionally tapped for firefighting. According to Mol, the fire management policy within Kruger is to let many fires run their natural course, “but where a fire would threaten property or life, we’ll intervene.” Other common missions include casualty evacuations, passenger transport, and sling work. “It depends on what that day throws at you, and when you wake up in the morning, you don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

The variety of missions notwithstanding, there are a few constant challenges. For example, the vast majority of the Air Wing’s landings are on unprepared surfaces. “We’re not operating from tarred airstrips and those kinds of things,” said Mol. “So it’s landings in the bush with the associated trees, dust, brownouts, wind.”

Moreover, although elevations in the park are not particularly high — ranging from around 700 to 2,700 feet above sea level — temperatures that routinely exceed 40 C (104 F) can still tax aircraft performance. (They can tax human performance, too. In the summertime, Knight said, “by the end of the day, my head is boiled like an egg.”)

The sheer vastness of the Kruger poses its own operating challenges. Because missions may require extended time on station, the Air Wing has had to cache fuel in 200-liter drums throughout the park. And, if something breaks in the field, the Air Wing can’t immediately count on outside organizations for help. “We are literally in the middle of the bush, operating sort of on our own here,” said Knight.

Of course, that remoteness is also part of the appeal of flying for SANParks. The Kruger’s extraordinary natural beauty may be impressive enough from the ground, but it’s breathtaking from the air.

“I think just the opportunity to be able to fly in a place like this, it beats everything,” said Mol. “No two days are the same, no two missions are the same, and flying through this park and every time you’re realizing how big it is, how vast it is, how wild and untamed it is — it’s brilliant. Nothing beats that.”

The wish list
The scale of poaching in the Kruger has attracted considerable attention and investment over the past decade, not only from the South African government, but also from individuals and organizations like the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. That has resulted in the deployment of some new technologies, including motion detectors along the park’s boundaries that help detect incursions, and customized command-and-control software to coordinate anti-poaching activities.

“In this anti-poaching campaign, it’s one big laboratory where we try to see if things can work,” said Knight.

Unmanned aircraft may be part of the Air Wing in the future. However, because large commercial drones can be as expensive as conventional fixed-wing aircraft, the Air Wing’s pilots said they would prefer to first install thermal imaging technology on a turbine or twin-engine airplane suitably equipped for night operations. (The Air Wing already has a Cessna 182 and 206 that provide much needed support for anti-poaching and conservation missions, but these older single piston-engine planes are more appropriate for daytime work.)

The Air Wing could use some more helicopter pilots, too. With only four full-time pilots, it’s impossible to staff four helicopters around the clock — and would be even if they didn’t also have to comply with civilian flight and duty time limits. Of course, as Mol noted, the Air Wing “can’t just pull anyone in.” Any new pilots would need to have a passion for the work, a tolerance for operating in a high-risk environment, and the skills and experience to perform the full range of Air Wing missions.

In the long term, SANParks’ pilots would love to have a more capable twin-engine helicopter, such as an Airbus H145, for safer nighttime operations over their austere environment. “There’s a desired state” — in terms of manpower and equipment — “where we know we would be really good at what we are doing,” Thompson said.

In the meantime, the Air Wing will continue to make the most of the resources it has.

“We’re making a difference, definitely,” said Knight. “That’s what helps to keep the passion going.” He said that for him, one of the greatest privileges of the job is in helping to protect the Kruger for future generations, while also raising his own children here.

“I hope that as adults, they’ll be able to say that their dad was the reason why there are still rhinos around.”


User avatar
Richprins
Committee Member
Posts: 75838
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 3:52 pm
Location: NELSPRUIT
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Richprins »

fascinating stuff, Klippies! :ty:

So many real heroes out there on the ground, so to speak. \O


Please check Needs Attention pre-booking: https://africawild-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=596
User avatar
Alf
Posts: 11606
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:40 pm
Country: south africa
Location: centurion
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Alf »

^Q^


Next trip to the bush??

Let me think......................
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Lisbeth »

None of them are easy tasks \O The hidden heroes of every day's duties in the Kruger Park and also elsewhere ^Q^ ^Q^


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
User avatar
Richprins
Committee Member
Posts: 75838
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 3:52 pm
Location: NELSPRUIT
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Richprins »

Image


Image



Lloyd Horgan
@lloydhphoto
What a flight this was... In fact what a week this was. Shooting all four of @SANParksKNP
aircraft in Kruger National Park for a @verticalmag
feature on the Air Wing, specifically focussing on their anti-poaching operations. @SANParks


Please check Needs Attention pre-booking: https://africawild-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=596
leachy
Posts: 2918
Joined: Mon Jun 04, 2012 12:17 pm
Country: rsa
Location: naspotie
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by leachy »

stunning images.

:shock: :shock:


the future is not what it used to be
User avatar
Flutterby
Posts: 44150
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:28 pm
Country: South Africa
Location: Gauteng, South Africa
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Flutterby »

^Q^ ^Q^


User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: SANPArks Air Wing

Post by Lisbeth »

\O \O


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
Post Reply

Return to “General Management Issues - Kruger”