One evening in October 2021, a man whose head was swathed in a scarf, hoodie, mask and dark glasses, entered the offices of Gqeberha newspaper, The Herald and dropped a parcel at the reception desk addressed to Mr Wouter Botes. He asked if it could be delivered to the night editor, John Harvey, who was requested to see to it that Botes received the parcel unopened.
It contained a typed up account of what transpired between the captain of doomed SAA flight No. 406 — known as the “Rietbok” — which crashed into the sea off Kayser’s Beach, 20km south of East London on March 13 1967, and the airport control towers between Gqebereha and East London.
Botes, an aircraft crash investigator, commercial pilot and plane wreck hunter, has recently taken a major interest in the fate of the Rietbok and undertaken extensive investigations into the details concerning the flight.
However, he lacked certain vital information but armed with the contents of the parcel from the anonymous donor, he believes he now has all the evidence needed to put together the final pieces of a puzzle that has been riven with conspiracy theories and rumours for 57 years.
Botes is of the opinion that the official report, submitted by the Margo Commission, lacked important details and contained incorrect conclusions.
The commission was of the opinion that while the aircraft was structurally sound and wholly airworthy, the pilot, in all probability suffered a heart attack or stroke and collapsed over the control panel obstructing the first officer from accessing the controls and preventing the aircraft from plunging into the sea. They also could not rule out spacial disorientation but noted that this was unlikely.
Botes, on the other hand, says a simple, but vitally important aspect of the landing procedure — the altimeter reading — was omitted and this is what brought the plane down.
No instruction was given to the cockpit crew from the East London control tower and neither did the captain alter the altimeter setting from the international reading to which pilots worldwide adhere, to the prevailing local one. He had no idea at what height he was at the time of the crash.
These new developments throw an entirely new light on what occurred on that fateful night and should go a long way to confer final closure to the 25 families who lost loved ones.
It was a filthy evening in East London that Monday in March, 1967, with heavy rain lashing a wind-swept runway when former World War 2 fighter pilot and respected SAA commercial captain Gordon “Lippy” Lipawsky, 48, was assessing the odds of a safe landing.
He was piloting a Vickers Viscount 818 ZS-CVA aircraft powered by four Rolls Royce Dart Mark 525 turbo prop engines, approaching from the seaward side in the vicinity of Kayser’s Beach, flying the plane on instruments in near total darkness, heavy cloud and rain which had persisted since the aircraft had left Gqeberha.
Lipawsky believed he was at 2,000ft. At 7.09pm, he had radioed in: “At 2,000 ft and the coastline is in sight.” One minute and eight seconds later the Viscount crashed into the sea and all 25 people on board were dead.
At the time the Nationalist government was becoming increasingly aggressive in its actions against those who opposed their policies and they had just banned the ANC and PAC. Because the passenger complement of the Rietbok included two people who were perceived to be against the ruling party’s policies — one a highly prominent Afrikaner and the other, an American woman working for an organisation which helped the families of the banned political associations, it was postulated that the crash was a carefully planned assassination.
But, says Botes, it was nothing of the sort.
The plane suffered a bird-strike on take-off but was declared airworthy.
Three eye witnesses were later to testify that the aircraft was descending in a natural way but at just after 7.10pm, all three heard the sound of the aircraft hitting the sea.
Word soon reached the maritime authorities in East London and no time was lost.
No survivors were found. Extensive salvage operations were later attempted but were hindered by murky water and dangerous sea conditions.
Botes is fund-raising to put together a team to salvage parts of the wreckage which, he says, will be a mammoth task given the capricious nature of the tides in the crash area. This, he estimates, will take place in the next two or three months.
Careful calculations have given him the exact sites of two debris fields and he intends to recover no more than two pieces — one for the East London Museum and the other for the SAA museum in Gauteng. The remainder, he says, will remain under the sea as a graveyard and as a mark of respect for those who perished.
