Captain Jan Andre de Plessis

First Officer Michael Thomas Moolman, 37

Hostess Caroline
Du Chemin

Hostess Kathryn Creigh Smith

Trainee Hostess

Regina Chigwada

Crash Site pics.

Army Chaplians Major the Reverend Bill Blakeway (left) and Major the Reverend Bill Dodgen.

A Memorial being laid in 1998

The Viscount Disasters - The Story
Crew & Passenger lists

Put together from various books and news reports. 'Quotes' from survivors may be the journo's own interpretation. ie Mayday call variations.. ..."Under the Skin" by David Caute ..The Times...The Rhodesia Herald....The Sydney Morning Herald
The Umniati Disaster
At 6 minutes past 5 in the afternoon of  March  (error should be February.. webmaster)1979 a Karoi farmer, John Ashton, looked up, due north, and saw a ball of flame followed by dense smoke falling out of the sky. Two busloads of white holiday makers had driven from Kariba to the airport in convoy. On arrival they mingled and chatted round the bar and shop, awaiting the order to board the two Viscounts (painted camouflage grey since the Hunyani disaster five months earlier) scheduled to fly them back to Salisbury. Some felt nervous; others believed the Hunyani had been a one-off fluke; and some were simply accustomed to take risks.

Prominent among these was Lt.-Gen. Peter Walls, Commander of Combined Operations, and his wife. Those issued with red boarding-cards were called first and boarded the "Umniati". Passengers carrying green boarding-cards were informed they would leave fifteen minutes later. Walls was among the latter and lodged no complaint, pulled no strings - Rhodesia is an egalitarian society. The Umniati took off, heading due east. As it passed overhead a Zipra section fired a flare to indicate its flight-path The signal was picked up by a missile crew.

At 6 minutes past 5 the Kariba Control Tower heard the plane's 'mayday mayday' distress call and passengers waiting to board the second Viscount noticed four men racing across the tarmac to a light aircraft. This was the moment that the Karoi farmer, John Ashton, looked up and saw a ball of flame falling from the sky. Six months earlier Captain Hood had managed to bring the Hunyani down in a semi-controlled landing, but the Umniati, hit in the jet pipe of the inner port engine by a Sam 7, burst into flame and plummeted like a stone into a ravine in the Vuti African Purchase Area, where it burnt for six hours, incinerating almost all of the fifty-four passengers and five crew members beyond recognition.

Captain Jan du Plessis, formerly of the South African Air Force and a veteran of the Korean War, stood no chance. (He had recently lost his son Leon in a Rhodesian Air Force flying accident.)

The second Viscount took off in a different direction. It circled tightly over the lake, gaining altitude - the missile ceiling is 3,000 metres - and spiralling out of danger. (Two months later I experienced this corkscrew ascent over Lake Kariba in a military Dakota; one always assumes one is going to be lucky.) The crew of the second Viscount were informed of what had happened but passed on the news to only one passenger, General Walls.

Dear God, how can we be brave for the dead?

Rhodesia Herald reporter Heather Silk

I can’t believe we’re alive. Why we are alive and 59 people are dead. Fifty-nine laughing, happy tanned people who had spent a few glorious, carefree days enjoying the fun and sun of Kariba Why? We were all there. Loving it, frolicking in the lake and the pools, fluttering at the casino. Losing some, winning some. And loving it.

We were away from the news, the incessant communiqués, the pressures of war-torn Rhodesia. We went to the airport together. Two bus loads. Two little girls with tousled blonde heads sat in front of me. Sisters in a large family party I’d seen. Frolicking in the water, sitting at the pool-side, eating in the dining room. They’re dead. At the airport we queued together, milled around the booking clerks, checked our flights. Some were given red boarding cards. We were given green ones. The red ones were for flight RH827, the green ones for flight RH825. We sat together in the departure lounge drinking soft drinks, admiring tans, burbling on about Kariba and how it really was the Rivera of Rhodesia, how there really was no need to go to the Seychelles. There was an English air hostess who chatted to one of our party. She was wearing stockings and it seemed so incongruous in, the Kariba heat. She had recently been on a flight to Moscow, 50 degrees below, and was enjoying a trip to Rhodesia. She had missed the previous day’s flight and my friend urged her to hurry along. She had a red card. Those on RH827, the early flight took off. There were 28 Adults and four children left for the second flight. We were due to take off 15 minutes later.

Then a light aircraft took off. We had seen some people running for it, but we didn’t know why. It was a Police Reserve Air Wing plane. We boarded, shortly after five, jostling good naturedly for the back seats - and ended up in the middle. We seemed to take off in a different direction to our sister plane, banking sharply to the right. We went over Kariba mainland and then, strangely, circled. I said, we’re going back, there’s something- wrong." But we made a full circle and went out over the lake. It was hauntingly beautiful. The whole lake seemed to stretch-out below us, the Kariba hotels, the dam wall, Zambia. We went up over the lake and then over Fothergill and Spurwing Islands and we circled again and again, rising, with everything beneath us in devastatingly beautiful relief. The man behind me said: "It’s not often Air Rhodesia gives you a flip like this. "No" I laughed, "It’s more than 40 bucks worth. "Dear God, how could we have laughed? How could we ever laugh again? The first we knew something was wrong was when an airhostess crisply dressed in mauve, brought the first drinks and stumbled when she reached us. She was tearful and pale and she ran back to the galley. On board was Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, Commander of Combined Operations, and his wife, Eunice, returning from holidaying. They had boarded ahead of us. He passed our seats and told my companion: "She’s had a bit of an upset," referring to the hostess. We were worried. Concerned-inexplicably really-about the Viscount ahead of us. I thought of the man in his Caribbea Bay T-shirt and worried. Then we said: "What nonsense. Of course not. It couldn't be. It can’t be. It won’t be." And we flew to Salisbury, high, high above the clouds, with the air vents frosted up, and we smoked incessantly and nervously. But we knew it couldn't be. We landed with relief. There was a Viscount in front of the domestic terminal and my heart leapt. My companion went out ahead of me. As he left he asked the general if the bad news concerned our fellow flight. He nodded. Was it down? He nodded. I cried. All the way to the terminal. I couldn't  believe it; wouldn’t believe it. I wanted to shake the general and make him tell me it wasn’t true. We asked the hostess at arrivals, standing on the tarmac, if the flight was coming in. "In a few minutes," she said. And there was an aircraft in the air and my heart was with it because I was sure it was the Viscount. But it was a Boeing. We walked through the people in the waiting area and I wiped away my tears for they didn’t know and I wanted to throw myself round them all and share their grief which I feel so. At the luggage belt I wept bitterly and Mrs. Walls came up and said: "Be brave. They don’t know yet." And, dear God, how do You be brave when it could have been, should have been you . But for the whim of some strange booking agent, some faceless person in Salisbury who put us on RH825 the second flight. And be brave for all those others who have to face what happened to RH827?

Air Rhodesia had a passenger list for the two flights combined, but the red and green cards had been handed out at random and there was going to be a grim process of checking the survivors before notifying relatives. By a grim coincidence, Dr Cecil McLaren, hero of the Hunyani, was a friend of Ian Boyd, who died in the Umniati. And a lot worse than that -almost the entire Boyd family was wiped out: Desmond, 53, his wife Gladys, 51, their sons Noel, 26, and Ian, 25, and their daughters Andrea, 16, and Leonie, 14. Ian had arrived in Rhodesia from New Zealand in 1976, worked on a farm, made friends, liked the country, become a patriot, volunteered for military service and become manager of the Old Hararians Club. The other members of his family had arrived for a long visit on 2 z December.

It fell to Cecil McLaren to search Ian's flat for the Australian address of the single surviving member of the family, Warren. After that McLaren flew to Kariba no more. On the following day, speaking in Addis Ababa, Joshua Nkomo claimed credit for the deed, adding that his men had believed General Walls to be on board. In the House of Assembly Minister of Transport Bill Irvine blamed the British Government as 'really responsible', having supplied arms to Zambia and having admitted that 'vile murderer' Nkomo into Britain. (It was little more than a year after this remark that the same Irvine walked into the same House of Assembly at the side of the same vile murderer: the squeamish do not survive in politics.) Meanwhile Rhodesian security forces, spearheaded by the elite Special Air Service, began a ruthless search-and-destroy operation in the Vuti Purchase Area, designed to drive out of their homes and fields all inhabitants living under the flight paths of aircraft leaving Kariba.

At Warren Hills cemetery a single coffin was cremated to represent all fifty-nine victims. Dean da Costa referred to the symbolic Unknown Victim' but carefully avoided any repeat of his disastrous sermon, 'A Deafening Silence'. Ian Smith and his wife attended the ceremony; Smith knew he was stuck with an internal settlement that couldn't work.

Seven out of fifty Air Rhodesia hostesses quit. New heat-deflecting devices were fitted to the engines of Viscounts. South African Airways cancelled its twice-weekly Boeing 747 service between Salisbury and London, as well as its twice-weekly tourist flights from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls. A further nail in the coffin of the tourist industry. Then, ten days after the disaster, Air Rhodesia itself terminated all flights to Wankie and all flights between Kariba and Victoria Falls, although it was still possible to fly to the two resorts from Salisbury.