Ask the pilot

No ticket? No problem. Hitching a ride in West Africa, the world's most "dangerous" place to fly.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

March 30, 2007 | From the sun-fired dunes of a Saharan erg to the watery emerald sprawl of the Okovanggo, the vistas of Africa are primordially beautiful, their shapes and hues drawn from another epoch. A lucky few have beheld the thundering splendor of Victoria Falls, one of the planet's most unspeakably humbling places; or marveled at the baobab forests of Senegal, where a sea of gnarled limbs claw desperately at the heavens, frozen in suspended animation against a cobalt sky.

Then there's Kumasi.

Should anyone need a reminder that abstracting a whole continent into a slide show of romantic imagery is at best unfair, I welcome you to Ghana's second-largest city and one of West Africa's busiest commercial centers -- a swarming, oven-baked semitropolis marked by an ever-present blanket of filthy air and Bangkok-esque traffic jams. "Frenetic" some might call it, or to employ that most irritating of travel guide euphemisms, "bustling." To me, it's a great convective hurricane of a place that embodies everything one can and perhaps should despise about cities. You don't experience Kumasi so much as survive it: The simplest excursion is a battle against impenetrable crowds, scorching heat and a mad, horn-blaring rodeo of cars, trucks and buses.

To be fair, Kumasi provides an excellent base from which to explore Ghana's Ashanti region, but after three days in and around town, my traveling companion, Julia, and I want out.

And the best way out -- back to the capital, Accra, for the long flight home via Europe the next morning -- is by air. Somehow, six hours crammed into the back of a tro-tro (the taxi-bus hybrid by which most locals get around) along partially paved roads has us eager to splurge on the $80 plane ride.

Even if, according to conventional wisdom, we'll be risking life and limb. Technically, West and Central Africa are the world's most unsafe regions for air travel, where even the savviest fliers balk at climbing aboard. Here, roughly one in every 150,000 commercial departures is involved in a serious incident -- a rate some 30 times worse than in the United States. A stone's throw from Ghana is Nigeria, where aviation catastrophes are outnumbered only by Internet e-mail scams. In many ways, this is the last frontier of commercial flying. Almost everything risky about air travel seems to have a nexus here: shady airlines with questionable practices, ill-equipped airports, sporadic radar coverage and communications problems, hazardous weather, dangerous terrain and porous security.

Am I nervous? The above notwithstanding, Lord knows that if one thing drives me crazy, it's people's ignorant presumptions about the safety of foreign airlines. In four years of column writing I've devoted more ink to this topic than almost any other: debunking myths, tearing down stereotypes, and doing what I can to stick up for the underdog aviators of the developing world. One in 150,000? Not to worry; numbers like that make provocative blurbs, but they aren't the full story, lumping respectable scheduled airlines with all manner of shady ad hoc operators, from smugglers using creaky Russian freighters to bush runners in small Cessnas. I think of Air Afrique, defunct since 2001 but for many years the largest airline in all of West Africa. Its only fatal accident was the crash of a DC-6 in 1963. Or Ghana Airways, which until its demise three years ago was one of only four African carriers with full Federal Aviation Administration accreditation, allowing it to operate Ghanaian-registered planes with locally certified crews into U.S. airports without restrictions. Its safety record was even cleaner than Air Afrique's, marred by a single fatality in 1969.

So why then, in shameful contradiction to my own sensibilities and snotty advice, am I less than fully confident?

To begin with, I'm going with a company I'd never heard of before. It's something of a weird bragging point, but my familiarity with the planet's airlines, large and small, is pretty comprehensive, and it's not very often that you can sneak one past me. But I had not heard the name "Antrak Air" until I got to Kumasi, and the Canadian expatriate owner of our hotel recommended it.

"Antrak are usually very good. On time, and price is more than reasonable."

"Who? You mean like the train?"

"No, not Amtrak, Annnnn-trak."

The name, so generic and apparently meaningless, has me baffled and wary. And when I call to book, I'm asked only for first names and a contact number. It just doesn't feel right.

But chickening out would be rank hypocrisy. And besides, it can't be any less safe -- or any more horrible -- than an overnight trip by road.

The drive to Kumasi's airport takes about 45 minutes. That's five minutes of actual travel time and 40 minutes of idling in gridlock amid mufflerless trucks, overpacked tro-tros, ambling goats, and gangs of adolescent hawkers going car to car peddling everything from cellphones to wallets to burlap sacks of that staple of Ghanaian subsistence, the cassava root.

The terminal is spartan and cheerless, but a pleasant enough place, all things considered. It's a single-story block with windows facing the runway. The arrival and departure zones are basically the same room, separated by a corridor of offices and a small waiting area cooled by ceiling fans. I'd describe the décor as "Soviet tropical." The Antrak ticket counter, if we can call it such, is a claustrophobic room on the arrivals side.

Inside, two women are seated behind a small desk. Like almost everybody in Ghana, the women are remarkably friendly. They recognize me from the earlier phone call and extend a warm greeting.

"Is the flight to Accra on time?" I ask.

"Yes, of course!"

The women tick our names from the reservations list, then politely ask us to pay.

"Sure." I nod toward Julia, who has already pulled out the Visa card and placed it on the desk.

With this, one of the women opens her eyes wide and makes a moaning sound. The other makes a tsk-tsk noise and shakes her head. They appear startled, eyeing the credit card as if were a rotten cassava.

"Oh, I'm sorry. We don't take credit cards."

"But ... you mean?"

"Cash only, please!"

"Um."

Now, maybe I'm not as well traveled as I think I am, because who ever heard of an airline, particularly one with resources enough to operate a $9 million ATR turboprop on scheduled services, that doesn't accept credit cards? I'm either too jaded, or too naive, but I think to myself: This isn't Congo or Mali, for heck's sake, it's Ghana!

The problem is, we're out of money. The nearest ATM is back downtown, and departure is only half an hour away. There are no more flights until tomorrow.

"But this is all we have."

"I'm sorry" is the verdict, delivered with a huge, beaming smile. "Then I guess you cannot fly today!" Everybody smiles in Ghana, even when they're hitting you with the worst possible news.

Next page: In all that fancy wiring and plumbing, they forgot the air conditioning