Under African Skies

Vast plains, monsoon rainfall, ancient peaks, and fantastical wildlife all come to mind when we consider the cradle of humanity. The birthplace of Mandela, Musk, and Tolkien, South Africa is a diverse nation with an albatross of a past and some of the world’s most incredible natural beauty. To see it on the ground is stunning, and to see it by air is exceptional.

The cradle of humankind

We visit Sling Aircraft at their home ‘drome of Tedderfield Airpark (FATA) in Johannesburg during the southern hemisphere’s summer when daylight stretches for 16 hours and beyond. Not only will we check out the new Sling HW (see “A New Goliath,” May 2025 AOPA Pilot), but while doing so, we’ll explore the country from aloft, starting in Johannesburg and ending in Cape Town.

The Sling folks have a series of adventures planned for us over our week-long stay. First up is a visit to a game lodge, the classic sub-Saharan Africa experience. We depart from Johannesburg as a flight of two, test pilot Riann Denner, AOPA Video Content Producer Bri Cabassa, and myself in a fresh-off-the-line Sling HW and co-CEO James Pitman, AOPA Director of Photography Chris Rose, and Pitman’s young family friend also called James (who is dreadfully airsick almost immediately after takeoff) in a Sling TSi.

With every minute away from Tedderfield, the wildness below increases. The tree-lined streets and high rises of the city thin, then disappear. The densely packed townships and suburbs go from Lego block underwing mosaics to Rothko red and orange. We approach a ridge that rocks us far more than its low height would suggest and find the field tucked among trees on the other side. It is hot and bumpy with an almost direct gusty crosswind when we land an hour after takeoff, but the Sling HW was born for places like this, and it handles the gravel strip and aggressive braking to slow down by the waiting Land Cruiser with no problem.

Our ranger, Jonas Phago, who will be our guide through our stay, helps us load up and takes us to the lodge, a drive of several miles that takes more than an hour with low speed and stops. The lodge itself is small, secluded, and unfenced, with a few rooms plus a dining area and small pool that overlooks a sloping plain. It is the perfect place to rest in between sunrise and sunset game drives and attempt a recovery from jet lag.

The evening is a cascade of first-time experiences. Spotting a lion just after his meal, looking for his lionesses and calling out to them; sundowners, the tradition of stopping for a drink to watch the sunset; the bull elephant that blocks our road home and requires us to sit in silence in the dark for half an hour while we wait for him to move; another elephant using its trunk to cool itself with mud; cutting through the persistent wild, animal scent, a breeze carrying a ribbon of oleander; the not-so-distant storm that cools the air in a gust of smoke, the result of lightning strikes; a cheetah that just earned a kill and rests next to her dinner, mouth bloody in a thicket. We pass by other safari vehicles packed with happy visitors, and each car has about a quarter million dollars’ worth of camera gear across the happy, pale patrons. Wildebeest, zebra, warthogs, and antelope become nearly mundane in their multitude. By the end of our stay, we will have seen four of the Big Five. The leopard remained elusive, but we get to check water buffalo, rhino, lion, and elephant off our lists.

We return to Tedderfield the following morning, the world more saturated after a cool morning rainfall. The game lodge was once-in-a-lifetime (and with a last-minute deal, not far from the cost of a mid-tier chain hotel in a big city), but it is the next leg, a visit to pilot Matt Cohen’s farm, where the true adventure lies.

‘Travellers from an antique land’

Cohen invites us to his farm in the Karoo Desert about three hours away from Johannesburg, and we prep a trio of Slings for the journey. Cohen will be in the same Sling HW he and Pitman flew from Tedderfield to Oshkosh in 2023, which has been modified to be flown with hands only. Jonathan Shaw (called Jonno) will fly with Rose in a Sling TSi, and Pitman, Cabassa, and I will be in the same HW we flew to the game lodge, which has just now reached double-digit hours on the airframe.

We’re in loose formation for the almost three-hour journey to the southwest. The green of Johannesburg, one of the lushest urban capital cities, morphs quickly into dry red earth—empty, forbidding, and deadly to the unprepared. The blue of our leader Cohen’s airplane pops against the sunburnt earth below. We see and hear no one else outside our flock for the duration of the flight.

A line of green marks the edge of the farm, and we fly an aerial tour of the property before landing. Cohen’s farm is expansive and hosts the adorable white-bodied and black-faced Karoo lamb, which are known worldwide to taste particularly delicious because of their diet of local Karoo shrubs (which taste a bit like crabapple, as we learn later).

The strip is surprisingly well-manicured for being so far out, and there’s even a hangar. Avoiding rocks that end up just being tumbleweeds, we touch down easily and wait at the top for the others to land before taxiing in. Karel Kemp, who lives at and manages the farm full-time and is the former owner, greets us. He has the look of unfakeable cowboy cool, a well-beloved hat atop his head and handgun in his waistband, as much to protect the sheep from jackals as to protect himself. We hop into Cohen’s waiting Land Cruiser with Rose at the wheel and follow the leader to the farmhouse.

We load up with water and pile back into the Land Cruiser for a tour of the property, stopping at petroglyphs along the way. We bounce around in glee as Kemp maneuvers the path up to a promontory, a route that makes use of the Landie’s low 4WD. We stop to refill our water bottles at a windmill fed dam, and Pitman backflips into the reservoir which, we learn after he successfully jumps, is only a few feet deep. At the top of the hill, Kemp shows us a partly abandoned structure that once aspired to be a restaurant before he and his father realized the site was consistently too windy. It looks out onto the vast and uninhabited emptiness to the northwest, a warm upslope breeze leaving a dusting of red dirt on our skin.

“I met a traveller from an antique land…” Pitman begins, looking out at everything the light touches, before reciting the whole of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ozymandias, just another of his myriad proficiencies, this one developed on long drives between college and the family farm.

After an afternoon of ATV adventures—and watching Jonno, Kemp, and Cohen show off their marksmanship while the rest of us mostly missed clay pigeons—we sipped rooibos tea with rusks and feasted on all-day simmered oxtail stew, paired with wine from the Western Cape. We ended the day with sundowners at the Top of World. We sit in a ring at this spot so named for its expansive and idyllic sunset views and gaze on not-our-stars including, after some searching, the Southern Cross, making wishes on dying light as day turns solidly to night. I think vaguely this is the perfect weather for a first night cross-country—some student somewhere would’ve loved to fly in conditions like this, where the moon is so bright it leaves sharp shadows. Sometimes you know a perfect day when you’re living it, and this was one of those. And it was a full day—we have to remind ourselves we flew from Johannesburg just that morning.The green Johannesburg, one of the lushest urban capital cities, morphs quickly into dry red earth, empty, forbidding, and deadly to the unprepared.The journey marches on. The next day we leave the Martian landscape, waving our wings goodbye to Kemp, whom we see again only a few minutes later when we have to land again to relock the door that popped open on takeoff. Without a radio, he rushes back to us, seeing only one airplane returning, stress clear on his face before we communicate that it was just a door. Cohen returns to Johannesburg, and now a flight of two, we head south.

Africae extremitas

There’s a whole lot of nothing out here on our way to one edge of the world. It is eerie to fly so many hours with barely a handful of airports anywhere near the route, a reminder that our extensive airport system in the United States truly is a privilege and something Pitman notes he loves on visits to the States. By the time we land in Cape Town, we’ve seen fewer than a dozen other airports over a week of flying.

The whole of the trip, the magnetic south has been appearing on the map as what I would normally consider nearly west, and it gets even more extreme as we approach Cape Town where the landscape becomes coastal. The red is now peppered with dots of deep green, the flatness and salt fields of the Karoo morphing into signs of water, signs of life. In the distance, finally, we can see the ocean. By this point we’ve spent enough time flying and breaking bread together to feel comfortable. It just feels like flying with friends now. Miraculously, there’s cell service here, and Pitman links up his phone to the avionics and streams the Out of Africa score.

In our misty-eyed delight that is lost on Cabassa who has never seen the movie, Pitman and I turned down the coms volume and realize as we approach the coast (and the only real airspace of the trip) that our company aircraft of Jonno and Rose are probably trying to contact us. We turn the volume up; of course, they are.

As a flight of two and now back in touch, we reach the water, the blue even bluer after days of mostly red. These are waters unlike any leisurely vacation spot. These are drowning waves, frothy and strong, their crests starting far out to sea. This is also the only time we talk to ATC, and with Table Mountain and Robben Island in the distance, we hang a left to fly among the grassy hills of the winemaking Stellenbosch region. Stellenbosch Aerodrome (FASH) is perhaps the most beautifully situated airport in the world, with a final approach over a gently winding river, a backdrop of steeply rising terrain, and a narrow sloping runway surrounded by green hills. The pavement is limited—just the runway and a few taxiways—and we park on the grass and begrudgingly start the unloading process. This is our last stop before home.

This airport is idyllic, with umbrella tables at the Stellenbosch flying club and a restaurant full of families watching the airplanes pass by, gorgeous green mountain peaks in the background, the airplanes all looking brighter and more elegant parked on the grass. Pitman and Jonno will leave early the next morning, and the youngest Pitman brother, Guy, scoops us up and drives us the half hour or so into town.

Cape Town, which is dressed up like any European capital, is the cultural and physical foil to Johannesburg. In place of Johannesburg’s raw vibrancy is a manicured, rule-following, tightly wound society where the social order seemingly hasn’t changed much at all over the past few decades. Townships are jigsawed into some of the world’s most expensive coastal real estate. Each bend on the winding cliffside roads brings an even grander views of Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, and the Twelve Apostles. In town, paragliders float down onto the main thoroughfare. Security guards flank restaurant doors, but we pass by without trouble. Things during the day are just fine, but Pitman advises us for our few solo days, despite the relative safety of Cape Town, to still keep our wits about us. He notes that approximately half of the thousand wealthiest South Africans all live within a few square miles of us, which is not at all surprising.

Dinner that night is extra special, as Mike Blyth, one of Sling’s founders and its aircraft designer joins us. It is funny to see Pitman who has been in the role of co-CEO and eldest sibling all week now the younger man next to Blyth who is 10 years his senior. Blyth’s an artist and by his own admission loves the design and flying part of Sling far more than the business aspects. He reduced his role and moved to Cape Town a couple years ago, although he is and seemingly always will be deeply involved. Blyth knows what we’ve been up to this week, asks over the table with complete sincerity what we thought of the airplane he designed. Thankfully, he did an excellent job, so we can say honestly what a wonderful adventure it has been and what a great airplane the Sling HW is.

All too soon, it’s time to head home, and it is hard to say goodbye. Every day was wildly different from the day before, full of new experiences in a new place. The birthplace of Sling, which is now poised like so many to embrace MOSAIC, South Africa is a land of singular beauty and a reminder as well that back home, airports and otherwise, we’ve got it pretty good. Before we arrived, we couldn’t have accurately imagined one day of this trip, as it was that far from normal. When we were at the farm, watching the sunset, and every moment since, we couldn’t imagine going home.

“Africa gets under your skin,” said Jonno. Once you visit, you can’t leave without taking it with you.

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