Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
by Gatimu Juma
It should have been a routine flight. The Bush War was well underway in Rhodesia, but on that day in 1978, civilian air travel was safe. Or so it seemed. On the afternoon of September 3, 1978, the passengers and crew aboard Air Rhodesia Flight 825 learned how fragile that illusion really was.
The Vickers Viscount VP-WAS lifted cleanly off the Kariba runway for a short hop to Salisbury. On board were four crew and 52 passengers, most of them weekenders heading home. At 5:05 p.m., as the wheels left the ground, no one on the manifest had any way of knowing that almost all of them had less than 10 minutes left to live.
At the time, Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) was gripped by a complex conflict that saw rival insurgents fighting one another and the government. One group – ZIPRA – was supported by the Soviet Union; another – ZANLA – was backed by communist China. By September 3, the overall war had claimed more than 3,000 lives since the start of the year.
Against that backdrop, the Hunyani took flight.
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In the cockpit, Captain John Hood, 36, a veteran with 8,000 hours in his logbook, set his heading southeast. Beside him was First Officer Garth Beaumont. Their aircraft was a British-made four-engine turboprop with a reputation as a solid, reliable workhorse.
As the flight got underway, air hostesses Brenda Pearson and Dulcie Esterhuizen rolled a trolley down the aisle. The plane flew over lands of the Urungwe Tribal Trust. This was ZIPRA country. The plane was inside a kill box.
Twenty miles from Kariba, in a patch of thick bush, a ZIPRA missile team waited. They knew the schedule. They knew the route. And in the fading afternoon, they brought a Soviet-made Soviet Strela-2 surface-to-air missile to life.
The Viscount was still climbing when the missile shot skyward. It punched into the plane like a hammer from Hell. The inner starboard motor exploded, followed by the outer engine.
An Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount.
The few who survived later said they saw fire streak past the windows. Thick black smoke and chunks of debris trailed behind. The aircraft convulsed and shuddered, while the horrified passengers knew their situation was hopeless.
On the flight deck, Hood and Beaumont stayed cool. They enacted the drill for an engine fire. They shut down fuel lines, and worked through the procedures. But this wasn’t an engine fire. The Viscount was breaking up around them.
At about 5:10 pm, a mere five minutes after take-off, Captain Hood transmitted his last message to the world. A National Parks Board pilot who was listening to the frequency picked up a few garbled words.
“I can’t … the engines are going like f . . . Help me. I have lost both starboard engines… Were going in.”
Captain Hood then switched to the internal PA system. He told his passengers to stay calm, fasten their seatbelts, brace, and prepare for impact: “We are going in for an emergency landing.”
He aimed for a rough belly flop on whatever clearing lay ahead. As the ground closed up toward the plane, Captain Hood announced what no one ever wants to say or hear from the cockpit:
“Brace for impact!”
The aircraft clipped the tops off trees, slammed down hard, and plowed 100 yards. The forward fuselage disintegrated in a blast of fire and fuel. The last five rows of seats tore free, skidded, and held.
Eighteen people crawled out from those rear seats, dazed and bloody. The stunned survivors had escaped death by fire. Now they would meet something worse.
Within 30 minutes, armed ZIPRA fighters – young, excited, carrying AK-47s – emerged from the bush. Some survivors thought the men were friendly. They believed help had come.
The gunmen told the survivors to gather in a group. They lifted their weapons.
Tony Hill, a tobacco farmer who had felt a strange dread before boarding, ran with two others. He reported later that he heard the cries behind him: “Please don’t shoot us… please…” He heard the answering volleys. He kept running.
“It’s only because I know a terrorist when I see one that I’m still alive,” he later said.
Further off, another small group fled through the bush as bullets cut branches above them. They thought ammunition was exploding in the wreck. They ran harder. Some later reported the sounds of a woman screaming.
Night fell like a curtain on the killing ground. Survivors huddled in a dry riverbed, shivering in the cold. They listened for footsteps, for voices, for the crack of a twig that might signal death.
Spotters found the crash site by midday. Men from the elite Special Air Services Regiment arrived, followed by paramedics. The full horror became known. Bodies burned. Bodies shot. Bodies mutilated. The Rhodesian bush had become a slaughterhouse. Only eight people lived to speak of what happened to RH 825.
The attackers’ leader, Jushua Nkomo, appeared in an interview with BBC. He claimed responsibility for the attack. The presenter asked him what weapons were used, and he laughingly said his fighters brought down the aircraft with stones.
Nkomo insisted the Viscount had been used for military purposes, and flatly denied that his fighters had executed survivors on the ground. Inside Rhodesia, almost no one believed him. Black and white alike saw the shootdown as a cold act of terrorism.
International media outlets such as Time wrote about the brutal attack, but foreign governments offered little more than silence.
At a memorial service in Rhodesia, the Rev. JR Da Costa condemned the international lack of response, and lambasted the attackers:
“This bestiality, worse than anything in recent history, stinks in the nostrils of Heaven.”
The airline took countermeasures. It began fitting its Viscounts with improvised anti-missile defenses, but the upgrades weren’t finished when disaster struck again. On 12 February 1979, the Umniati – Air Rhodesia Flight 827—was hit by a missile. This time there were no survivors. All 59 aboard were killed.
Only after that second shootdown did the airline finally complete its defenses. The undersides of the Viscounts were coated with low-radiation paint, and their exhaust pipes were shrouded to mask the heat signature. Tests later showed that once a modified Viscount climbed above 2,000 feet, the Soviet-made Strelas couldn’t lock onto it at all.
No more airliners were shot down in Rhodesia.
The Bush War continues to be studied by Western military strategists. The U.S. Army War College is among those that have launched case studies.
“Rhodesian counterinsurgency strategy remains a model of successful counterinsurgency warfare,” one 2023 case study notes.
Others commemorate the day insurgents reached past the battlefield and dragged civilians into the crosshairs. In 2012, a memorial to the attacks on the two civilian aircraft was erected in Pretoria, South Africa.
Gatimu Juma writes from Africa.
