Mugabe's decorated pilot dies

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By Staff Reporter

AIR VICE Marshall Ian Harvey, a retired three-star general and Zimbabwe's last white air force officer, died on Tuesday of medical complications after suffering a stroke, family said. He was 65.

Harvey, who served through four turbulent decades in the southern African country, collapsed at his Harare home on March 14, his wife, Penny, said.

Harvey began his air force career in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known under white rule. After independence in 1980, he continued to serve in the Zimbabwe air force, where he won fierce loyalty from young pilot recruits, many of them former guerrillas who fought him in the seven-year bush war that ended white rule.

Soon after, he became President Robert Mugabe's personal pilot. He was also assigned VIP duties that included ferrying American movie director Clint Eastwood, his crew and equipment to film locations in remote northern Zimbabwe for White Hunter, Black Heart, a film on fellow director John Huston's obsession with hunting and killing an African elephant.

At the time, Eastwood expressed immense respect for Harvey's flying skills and military and logistical professionalism.

Harvey made it into the Guinness Book of Records for the highest number of hours flown in the French-built Alouette military helicopter in the now obsolete Series III model.

In 1961, he took part in airborne search and rescue operations for the missing aircraft of then United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a plane crash near Ndola in the neighbouring former British colony of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.

Without modern technology, "it was all map, clock and eyeball stuff", Harvey told biographer Keith Meadows.

Later that year, he flew jet fighters with British expeditionary forces against a rebellion in the Arabian Gulf and Yemen, his first of many years of combat flying.

"As for taking flak, a pilot is too busy flying his aircraft, getting the particular job of the moment done, to worry about that. I was lucky, I suppose, I never took a serious hit," he told Meadows.

Harvey, modest and soft-spoken, retired from the Zimbabwe air force in 2001, but continued as a flight training officer and consultant to the state Civil Aviation Authority.

While in hospital, he received get-well cards from serving generals and junior air force officers.

Harvey is survived by his wife and a stepson.

A military parade and funeral are planned at the main air base in southern Harare next week. - Sapa-AP
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