The history of Nigerian aviation will be incomplete without the
mention of Maiduguri and Kano city, where the first aircraft landed in
Nigeria on November 1, 1925.
It is exactly 90 years since the historic flights, involving three De
Havilland DH 9A aircraft belonging to the Royal Air Force, RAF.
Vincent Orange’s book, the “Coningham: A Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham”, vividly captured the expedition.
The air trip, led by the then Flight Lt. Coningham, began from Helwan
(a town in Egypt) to Kano, with several stopovers with Egypt, Sudan and
N’Djamena – then known as Fort Lamy.
Excerpts from pages 44 to 46 of the book revealed details about the
journey, including how the pilots played polo with Emir of Zazzau,
Ibrahim Kwasau and how Shehu of Borno Sanda Kura offered them rams.
“By 1925, interest was growing in the problems and possibilities of
opening up the African continent to civil aviation. The French and
Belgians had plans for their own territories and Britain did not wish to
be left behind. In September, the Air Ministry announced that three DH
9as of 47 Squadron (stationed at Helwan, near Cairo) would fly from
there to Kano in Nigeria ‘for the purpose of gaining experience in long
distance flights over tropical countries, where few facilities in the
way of the ground organisation required by aircraft exist, and with the
object of allowing Nigeria to see the capabilities of British aircraft’.
“The venture would be led by Squadron Leader Coningham. His major
problems would be navigation and engines. Although there were wireless
telegraphy stations at some points along the route, the aircraft carried
no transmitting or receiving equipment and had to rely on compasses and
on maps which were nearly useless. The engines, reconditioned American
‘Liberty’ engines of 400 hp, had an unreliable record, so Coningham
decided to run them gently, reducing the DH 9a’s normal cruising speed
from 90 to 80 mph.
“The aircraft took off from Helwan at 7 am on 27 October, waved away
by a large gathering of soldiers and airmen and landed at Wadi Haifa –
644 miles south of Helwan – after eight hours and twenty minutes in the
air, all three pilots aching in arms and chest because, as Coningham
frankly admitted, he had misjudged their weight distribution and they
flew tail-eavy. Fortunately, this first day of their journey was both
the longest and hardest of the sixteen they spent in the air. At Wadi
Haifa, Coningham boldly reduced the load carried and, taking off at 4.50
am next morning, they reached Khartoum at noon. With a lighter, better
distributed load, it proved a faster and more comfortable journey. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham
“En route due west to El Fasher, a ‘considerable range of hills’ soon
appeared and perturbed Coningham, for it was not marked on his map.
Believing El Fasher lay east of such a range, he looked for it in vain
and then decided to press on towards another range, some twenty-five
miles farther west, which was marked. After fifteen anxious minutes, the
town appeared and the flight landed safely (despite three punctures),
everyone much relieved. Refuelling began at once, ‘assisted by the
officers, who had cancelled their polo, and the men of the garrison’. It
was while in El Fasher that Coningham again contracted the malaria that
would plague him at intervals during the rest of his life.
“’The country from this point onwards,’ he wrote, ‘had never been
traversed by aircraft.’ Visibihty as far as El Fasher had been
‘phenomenal’, but westward fires had been deliberately started to trap
game ‘and at times it was so smoky that at 4,000 feet one was now and
then taken unawares and compelled to make sure that nothing in the
machine was burning’. For some time after leaving El Fasher, they were
able to follow a well-worn camel track, used by Muslim pilgrims making
for Mecca, until it ran into mountainous country. After an overnight
stop at Abecher, they flew over the landing strip at Fort Lamy, for
Coningham had intended to press on to Maidugari, but noticing that more
smoke than usual was coming from Herbert Rowley’s exhaust, he decided to
turn back. At Fort Lamy, he learned that Rowley had lost most of his
fuel: had they kept going, ‘he would have crashed in rather thick forest
twenty miles beyond’. Not surprisingly, Rowley remembered the incident
vividly, as we shall see.
“It was not until 10.20 next morning that they were able to leave
Fort Lamy and French territory for Maidugari in British Nigeria. ‘Crowds
had been out on the main road from Maidugari to Kano from dawn looking
up into the sky,’ he wrote, ‘and people assembled in the towns on that
road, coming in from considerable distances north and south.’ Coningham
landed to apologise for not having arrived the night before, but soon
regretted his generous impulse because all three machines got stuck in
soft yellow earth on the landing strip and it took forty-five minutes to
free them, by a combination of engine and muscle power, and run them on
to a harder polo ground. More harm was done to the engines during those
minutes than would normally occur during at least twenty hours of
flying time.
“The flight had been expected to arrive at Kano about 10.00 that
morning and would have done so but for Rowley’s faulty carburettor. The
Resident Representative in Kano of the Government in Lagos told the huge
crowd which had assembled that the aircraft would now arrive about 5
pm. It was a rash promise, but Coningham redeemed it, landing on a polo
ground outside Kano’s ancient walls at 5.10 pm on 1 November 1925, the
sixth day of the journey. The Resident, greatly relieved, afterwards
told Coningham that ‘we had saved their prestige’. The machines were
carefully roped round to prevent damage and the whole airfield
completely surrounded by troops holding back a crowd of at least 20,000
people. The airmen had flown the official distance from Helwan – 2,904
miles – in thirty-six hours and fifty minutes, but the actual distance
covered, ‘allowing for finding the way’, was well over 3,000 miles at an
average speed of about 83 mph.
“Throughout the journey, Coningham closely observed the character of
the country over which they flew and concluded that good landing grounds
were few and far between. Distances and the time taken to cover them
impressed him deeply. If a machine had come down near Lake Fittri, for
example, the crew would have had to sit tight near the crash, living off
what they could shoot or buy from the natives until rescued – and that
would have taken at least forty-five days from Fort Lamy or Abecher: a
distance the aircraft covered in two and a half hours. However, there
was no possibility of a successful landing between Kaduna and El Obeid,
except for a short stretch west of Abecher. ‘The knowledge of this,’
wrote Coningham, ‘becomes a cumulative strain.’ And yet, flying
sometimes seemed to him the slowest means of transport. ‘At 3,000 feet
with visibility up to 150 miles, a hill comes into view quite two hours
away. You know that your destination is some way beyond. There is no
sense of speed and for hours the hill seems never to get any nearer.’
The temptation to hurry, to risk damage to elderly engines, became
difficult to resist towards the end of a long day, especially when an
airstrip lay in view for up to an hour.
“Flying from Kano 130 miles south-westward to Kaduna on 6 November,
the airmen were met by ‘everybody in full dress’, taken to Government
House and ‘lived in the greatest comfort’ until the 10th. ‘A special
grand- stand had been erected and the preparations were such that the
natives were convinced that the Prince of Wales liked Nigeria so much
that he had come back … I was again given two days very good polo and
well mounted.’ Coningham took up the Emir of Zaria, Flight Lieutenant
Humphrey Baggs took up the Sergeant Major of the Regiment and Rowley the
Sergeant Major of the Police, a Hausa. ‘He looked slightly thoughtful
as he clambered into the machine,’ wrote Rowley, ‘but once in the air he
broke into a great smile and then sang at the top of his deep voice
until we landed.’
“’The Qualities of a Senior Officer’ the machine,’ wrote Rowley, ‘but
once in the air he broke into a great smile and then sang at the top of
his deep voice until we landed.’
The three aircraft left Kano for Maidugari on the first leg of their
journey home at 7 am on 12 November. They flew at 1,000 feet for much of
the way ‘to give the people a better view of the machines’. Having
flown low over the native town, they landed or the same soft yellow sand
as before, only this time making sure to run on to the polo field
before stopping. The airmen were presented to the Emir of Bornu, who
presented Coningham with two huge white rams, which he accepted with an
enthusiasm made all the warmer by his knowledge that the Resident’s
staff would have to find some means of hiding them until long after he
had gone.
“They retraced their outward course without incident (except for
strong head winds and punctures at every landing) until arriving safely
at Helwan on 19 November 1925. Coningham and his men had flown on
sixteen of the twenty-four days spent on the total journey, covering a
distance that he estimated as about 6,500 miles. Exactly eighty hours
were spent in the air (apart from a few courtesy flights) and all three
of their much-maligned engines ‘ran faultlessly’ throughout, a fact that
greatly pleased the crews for ‘fifty-three successive hours were spent
over country ordinarily called impossible’. The Air Ministry proudly
announced two firsts: the first east-west crossing of Africa by air and
the first appearance of aircraft in Nigeria. That same journey, ‘by the
normal methods of rail, steamer, camel and bullock transport’, would
take about six months,” wrote Orange in the book.
However, Kano residents only saw plane again ten years after the
Coninghams’ departure when Imperial Airways aircraft landed during the
reign of Emir Abdullahi Bayero in 1935.
Coningham was presumed dead on January 30, 1948 when the airliner he
was flying, G-AHNP Star Tiger, to Bermuda got missing off the coast of
US. Coningham remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the aviation
history as his whereabouts remains unknown till date.
Source: Premium Times
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