Ama kweli huko Afrika Magharibi kuna mambo. Ilichukua siku kadhaa kuona ndege ya abiria ya Kenya Airways iliyoanguka huko Cameroon, na sasa kuna ndege ndogo iliyokuwa inaendeshwa na rubani wa kizungu mwanamke imepotea ikitokea Ghana kuelekea Afrika Kusini.
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Kansas Pilot Disappears While Flying Over Africa
8-24-07
MIAMI -- The first few hours of silence after Lori Love's plane disappeared off West Africa didn't come as much of a surprise to those who know her.
The "lone wolf," as she likes to call herself, doesn't like mid-air chatter. She had asked for this solo flight through long stretches of sky not covered by radar.
A longtime friend, Steve Hall, had hired her to ferry a single-engine Beechcraft from Florida to South Africa. She exchanged a cheerful, routine radio transmission with another pilot about an hour after taking off from Accra, Ghana, last Friday night, Hall said.
That was the last time anyone heard from Love. Ghana air traffic controllers failed to establish contact with her about 15 minutes later. Her expected arrival time in Windhoek, Namibia, late Saturday morning passed without her wheels touching down.
Most troubling: The ace pilot and skydiver never activated a handheld emergency beacon that would have tipped rescuers to her location by GPS, Hall said.
Search efforts from several African countries have stopped tracing her expected flight path, failing for almost a week to find any sign of her plane or her emergency raft, Hall said.
Love would not have taken off from the Ghanian capital if she hadn't been confident her plane was fine, Hall said. A minor electrical problem in the plane's alternator switch had been fixed during a brief layover in Accra, and she had 18 hours of fuel for the nearly 2,300-mile flight south to Namibia.
"Something catastrophic must have happened," he said. It's not known whether the electrical glitch resurfaced, or if it was part of some fatal problem.
"I'm just praying she will reappear and give me hell and say, 'You gave me a lousy airplane,"' he said.
If it flies, Love knows how to keep it in the air. The 57-year-old woman raised in Wichita, Kan., was certified to teach flying and skydiving, rig parachutes and fly helicopters, gliders, single- and multiengine planes that could touch down on land or sea, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
She logged 15,000 hours as a pilot and completed 4,000 parachute jumps before a bad back made her give up skydiving in 1999, her colleagues said. Love never stays in one place too long, but she ran her own airport in Alabama for five years before feeling the itch to move again.
She keeps her late 1970s Dodge Maxivan rolling, too - 555,000 miles and counting, Hall said, tuned with a set of tools at least as old as the vehicle.
"Everything I own is inside it," Love told a National Air and Space Museum photographer for a 1997 book about women pilots. "I honestly thought by now I would be tired of that lifestyle and be ready to settle down, but it hasn't happened."
She's had a couple scrapes: a brief marriage after college, a tangle of power lines that dumped her crop duster upside-down in a cotton field. Nothing she couldn't walk away from.
Love wasn't a daredevil child, but it was hard to keep her on the ground once she picked up skydiving at the University of Kansas, said her father, Loren Fred.
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