Sorry, your contact comes up as 'invalid hash' try a PM?
As for the Neptune - if you can find anybody from Field Aircraft Services (who, as I posted before, did the ground servicing at Cotonou) they could verify it. I can only say that one time I was there I saw a Neptune take off immediately after a DC6 and that is what I was told - carrying arms, and therefore surely actually landing at Uli. If only I had asked more questions when I was in ex Biafra - unfortunately I was too busy trying to get fuel supplies in. There must be some Ibo people who will remember it (all my friends were from the Fed side).
On that score, did you know that the post-war relief helicopters lifting supplies locally were from Arizona Helicopters (aka Air America / CIA)?
I went berserk one day with one of their pilots.
Getting in fuel was supremely difficult before the Niger bridge was temporarily repaired - I had to do it by small trucks carrying drums, going across on a ferry-barge. All our road tankers were 32-36 ton size. Small conventional trucks were at a premium and my good friend Allen Jones who ran the ICRC logistics (got an MBE for it) and I used to share the few we could get. Using helicopters locally was crazy but what the Western media/public opinion wanted - it looked dramatic but every drum of fuel was one less crate of food.
Then this pilot told me that when he got tired of the heat he went up to 5,000 feet, opened the door and cooled off. I could have killed him.