Expecting to Fly
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The motto of Interavia, the motley crew of Lebanese aviators trying to get their flying machines – and public interest in them – off the ground, is simple: “Work Hard, Play Harder”. In truth, the verbs should be reversed. “We’ve been at it since the 1990s and we’ve had to fight all the way,” says Ousama Rawdah, an unlikely trailblazer for the Middle East’s first hang-gliding club open to tourists, his spectacles and sensible shoes more the uniform of a geography teacher than daredevil entrepreneur and adrenaline junkie. But Rawdah, it turns out, is a man of significant endeavour.
Simply registering an ultra-light plane in Lebanon was a challenge of Kafka-esque proportions. Under the country’s civil aviation law, largely copied from the French, such small planes did not exist so could not be registered. Fifty years on, however, the planes existed but the law for them did not.
To take to the air myself, I head to Jounieh Bay, a dramatic sweep of turquoise sea enclosed by giddying green cliffs dotted with white apartment buildings and, today, Lebanon’s first dedicated civil aviation training area. The hang-glider has floating pontoons, which means it can land on the sea. The boat has a wire winch and launch platform to catapult the glider into the air, once Captain Bob hits a certain speed. Habchi has complete confidence in it all and, soon to be strapped to his back, I’m in no position to argue. But, before getting airborne, the other side of Beirut’s civil aviation experience awaits.
A week later, it’s Saturday morning and I’m running an hour late. “No problem, my friend. Take your time.” Anwar, an Interavia stalwart, sounded sure enough, so I plunge headlong into the highway traffic, going north. A long time later, the assembled men reach their conclusion: the seas are too rough for Captain Bob to achieve the required take-off speed.
“You waited a long time expecting to fly,” says Habchi craning his neck around to see my face grinning compulsively. “And it was worth it, wasn’t it?” www.interaviasal.com |
If you go hang-gliding in Beirut, you’ll need more than just a favourable breeze to get off the ground…
As a professor of engineering, Rawdah inspired his students to build Lebanon’s first winged hovercraft from parts he imported, and paid for out of his own pocket, from the US. The contraption burned to a crisp before its maiden voyage, victim of a warehouse fire started by a cigarette. Unperturbed, the aviator inventor began a series of experiments with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). They too were costly. “I’m probably the only guy who worked as a teacher and lost money,” he concludes, chuckling.
Rawdah’s passion for flying can be traced to his father, a pilot who was tragically killed in the 1976 bombing of Flight 438 over Saudi Arabia. To honour his father’s memory, Rawdah embarked on bringing private aviation to his homeland, everything from hang-gliders to parachutes to ultra-lights. “We faced two main problems: mafia and novelty. For the Lebanese, aviation is a huge jumbo jet,” he says.
Unable to obtain permission to fly, Rawdah and a friend strapped one of the ultra-lights to the top of an old VW Golf and headed overland through Syria to Jordan, where they could train. The 260km journey to Amman took 38 hours, including a night spent sleeping rough in the no man’s land between Lebanon and Syria, and they were greeted in the Jordanian capital by maddening bureaucracy and expenses. In the end, they donated the small plane to Jordan’s Royal Parachute and Air Sports Club so as to avoid a rolling fine that would have left them bankrupt. “Back in Lebanon I saw King Abdullah on television one day flying over Petra,” says Rawdah. “And I shouted, ‘That’s my plane!’”
For Boutros Habchi, who learned to fly Cessnas and gliders in the US and who teamed up with Rawdah to create Interavia, simply finding a spot to land his hang-glider was risky. “I used to launch from high up near the Cedars and fly east over the Bekaa Valley,” says the well-tanned electrician. “But this was when the Syrian army was still in Lebanon and so when they saw me flying over them in the Bekaa they got hysterical and were running to shoot me down. Luckily my brother saw and stopped them.”
It’s noon and Rawdah has just finished another rambling, hilarious tale of triumph over adversity, but I am concerned. We’re into the third hour of our lunch and still no word from the errant mechanic who called to say he’d forgotten to inflate something on the flying machine. We head for the marina anyway, only to find Captain Bob waist-deep in the bowels of the boat, gutting engine parts like a fishmonger. There will be no flying today.
We were third time lucky. The army’s helicopters had cleared off and we had permission to fly. A new safety pin had been found for the wire winch. Captain Bob was yelling instructions and I was dangling from the garish wing. The wind howled past us, the boat pounded the waves into a fine white spray and then, so quickly, we rose into the air as if drawn into a vacuum, suddenly suspended hundreds of metres above the rippling sea, Captain Bob and his crew reduced to a speck of splashing. We drop the cable and all is peaceful, all is bright and very beautiful indeed.