I have filled in on the Windhoek freight run as a pilot and aircraft owner for the past six years and it has been a dogshow every night. I believe one of the problems has to do with the rights to operate between JSA and ERS/WDH. The aircraft has to be below 5700kg. Every night there must be about five aircraft fighting the headwinds west. C208, C406, Metro, BE20. One or two of them even have to land at WDH, backtrack and then take off again to fulfil some conditions. Is this normal? Recently an operator tried to put a larger aircraft on the route, but this only lasted a few weeks before they had to pull out on some technicality. I think that the CAA or whoever should lighten up and allow one larger aircraft to do a route it was designed for. I don't know of any aircraft below 5700kg that is happy with a flight of 3h30 or longer with a full load. The other night one of the C208s took nearly 5 hours with the headwinds. If operators are forced to use this type of aircraft on the route, there will always be problems. One problem with a larger aircraft is that there will be two pilots flying the route instead of 10. Complaints will always be kept to a minimum until there is a disaster like on Satuday morning.
I was surprised that the unfortunate pilot had so much experience on the type. I don't believe that a pilot with that kind of experience is "forced" to fly. I have seen pilots with low time and a fresh rating that will fly anything, but the blame for this lies partly with their ego. When everything runs smoothly the operator is being mean by not letting him lose in an aircraft he knows(?) he can fly. He will assure the operator that "He can do the job, even if others can't" When something goes wrong, he was forced to fly an aircraft he didn't want to.
Let an aircraft that was designed to fly the route do the job and stop the nightly circus that has claimed more than enough lives