Despite their age difference, Birame Coulibaly, 36 and Maodo Ndiaye, 25, who initiated the Flightsen Project and share a passion for aviation will fly back to their native Senegal on Thursday after going on a sojourn between St Louis and Paris using a small-engined plane.
The two Senegalese pilots are intent on making their dream come true, through flying back to Africa from Europe in four days.
On the parking lot at the Iba Gueye Flying Club, housed in the former Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport in Dakar, the bushy-bearded Birame Coulibaly, also a public marketing agent has been pacing up and down one Friday morning.
In this area crammed with small planes, Birame, dressed in a white T-shirt on which the Flightsen logo was proudly showing, felt very relaxed with his young friend and professional pilot, Maodo Ndiaye.
The two Dakar natives with radically different profiles are linked by the love of aviation.
On 29 June, they took up the aeronautical challenge to join Saint-Louis, Senegal and Lognes, France, following in the steps of Mermoz and Saint-Exupery aboard their Piper PA-28, a 4-seater plane “with no automatic pilot.”
The two young pilots took off again on Monday, July 8 and will return to Dakar on Thursday afternoon.
At the beginning of this ‘physical and mental challenge,’ they made a total of “28 hours of flight,” a trip that required several stopovers.
The duo crossed “Mauritania, Morocco and Spain” before touching down in France.
For the return planned in the afternoon of July 11, 2019, “we intend to do the same thing, between 25 and 28 hours of flight,” said Birame, hoping that the winds will be “a little bit more favorable.”
The plane has “5 hours and 30 minutes of autonomy.”
But they try to use only four hours “to avoid worries, or in case they are diverted to another airport,” says Birame, recalling the circumstances of their landing in Paris.
“When we landed, Maodo and I looked at each other and we said – excuse the expression: ‘Damn, We Did It’. When we taxied toward the parking, we did not realize that there were so many people waiting for us. (…) We saw a lot of people with Senegalese flags and this touched us profoundly,” he said with a French accent, while Maodo Ndiaye recounted how tears quickly welled up their eyes when they saw members of their families among the well-wishers, the Mayor of Lognes in their midst.
Like Birame, Maodo was trained at the “Iba Gueye Flying Club” in Dakar after graduating in 2012.
He then went on to perfect himself as an airline pilot in South Africa, before working as an agent of the private Senegalese airline Transair. However, he finds more exciting “the passion” for private piloting with “rustic” planes.
In this world, he says, the pilot is freer as he ensures himself the “maintenance” of the aircraft.
Although Jean Mermoz and Saint-Exupery are trailblazers in this field, Mado and Birame are nonetheless the first models of Senegal’s airmen.
As a legendary figure of the Aeropostale, French aviator, Jean Mermoz died at the age of 35 in the crash of his four-engine seaplane off the coast of Senegal on December 7, 1936. As a tribute to his memory, a residential area and a high school in Dakar are named after him.
“We all think of Jean Mermoz who launched this undertaking, years ago between Toulouse, France and Saint-Louis, Senegal.
Ernest Discacciati, the boss of the Iba Gueye Flying Club may not be the best model for us, compared to Mermoz, but he has 15,000 flying hours to his credit and is in fact, the one who passed on to us, this big passion,” said Birame Coulibaly, a father of four children, who is also very supportive of his young teammate.
“We have to get along well and we have a very close bond. To make a trip like that, you have to choose a partner with whom you get along well, with whom you have great affinity. There can be moments of stress and disagreement, we have to listen to each other and find a compromise,” he added.
Flightsen, “a dream we have been nurturing since our first flights at the flying club,” really began to materialize on February 2019, Maodo Ndiaye said.
“Spurred on by our passion and the support of our private sponsors, we did all these things on time,” he said.
“It’s a big budget, hence the need for us to have sponsors. (…) For the moment, no public administration has really helped us. We had some support from the Ministry of Tourism, which encouraged us. But it’s really the private sector that helped us to achieve our project,” Birame Coulibaly said, stressing that the project aims to “promote Destination Senegal.”
He added: “The fact that we made whistle stops in several countries with our flag and our identity … was an opportunity for us to send Senegal into the limelight. We also wanted to show that aviation in Senegal was promising, and encourage young people to embrace the country’s aviation trades”.
He also expressed his will to involve more people in this project.
“The ultimate idea is to fly to all continents, with the same plane. (…) But we hope this time around, to bring back two planes. We also look forward to involving the Air Force, which is a major component of aviation in Senegal,” he explained.
However, Birame and Maodo do not think to limit themselves to this action because, sharing their experience with Senegalese schools is also something “very important to them”.
They plan to visit schools to “explain to the youth that they must go after his dreams,” Birame vowed.
“Never say it is impossible. We have the means and the resources in Senegal. We can do it on our own. We do not need to go abroad looking for skills.”
ODL/te/fss/as/APA