Desert Caravan

Lane Wallace

Sunday, January 06, 2008 at 10:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Pilots navigate treacherous, unmaintained airstrips in Sudan under extreme weather and primitive conditions while conducting humanitarian flights.
Despite an official peace agreement, the region remains volatile with persistent tribal violence, highlighted by a mission to rescue hostages from a hospital uprising.
The narrator voluntarily sought out this high-risk, adventure-filled flying to apply their Caravan pilot training in support of humanitarian relief efforts in unstable African regions.

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The tiny desert strip of Julud is receding below the Caravan’s wheels, and I’m beginning to breathe a little easier. With its 2,000-foot elevation, a rough and almost indiscernible dirt runway that changes heading more than 10 degrees in its 750-meter length, a tall ridgeline close in to downwind and a mountain less than a half mile off the end of the strip, Julud is a dodgy place to take off and land, even without 95-degree temperatures and thunderstorm cells bearing down on the field.