S5-E5 - South Africa and Taiwan (And the Sad Story of SAA Flight 295)

S5-E5 - SOUTH AFRICAN AIRLINE DISASTER 1987

Release Date: March 11-2025 - 27:21

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On the night of November 28th, 1987, South African Airways Flight 295 departed from Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport bound for Johannesburg, South Africa. It was a routine long-haul flight aboard a Boeing 747 Kombi until disaster struck over the Indian Ocean. Somewhere near the island of Mauritius, a mysterious fire broke out.

The crew fought to control the situation, but minutes later, Flight 295 disappeared from radar. All 159 people on board were lost.

 The Taiwan History Podcast, Formosa Files, is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the Frank C. Chen Foundation.

 So, as we noted, November 28th, 1987, South African Airways Flight 295 is flying over the Indian Ocean. It had departed from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, now called Taoyuan International Airport, headed to Johannesburg.

With a refueling stopover in Mauritius, an island nation east of Madagascar, and the plane is now about a thousand miles off the African coast. And here's a bit of history repeating itself. Mauritius was a refueling stop for the Dutch East India Company for their ship sailing out to Taiwan.

The captain was 49-year-old Dawoud Jacobus Ace, and that last name is spelt UYS, interestingly. A former South African Air Force pilot with nearly 14,000 hours experience, of which almost 4,000 was on the Boeing 747 series airplane. So, he's experienced and has a good number of hours in the 747.

Likewise, the flight staff, the co-pilot, engineer, and so on. The passengers are in good hands. There were 19 crew members in total, 140 passengers.

140 passengers, John, sounds like a small number for a big plane like a 747, you know, a jumbo jet. Yeah, it's because it's a mixed-use plane, cargo and passenger plane. It's a modified 747 known as a combi.

Combi, so short for combination, a passenger plane and a cargo plane. Yes. So, it has the usual cargo hold under the cabin, but there's also a large cargo area behind the last row of economy class seats.

There's a dividing wall, which is flexible, and you could load that area behind the passengers with from six to 12 pallets. Flight 295 is carrying six large pallets of cargo. By the way, the plane was named Helderberg.

Helderberg, berg as in iceberg. Yes, it's the name of a mountain in South Africa. South African Airways named their planes after geographical features.

That is a little weird. I don't know if I want to name my plane after geographical features. Oh yeah, you're thinking about mountain crashes, yes, yes.

Everything. You want to avoid all geographical features, do you not? Yeah. Anyway.

New Zealand's worst airline tragedy was the Mount Erebus disaster flying into a mountain in Antarctica. So yeah, don't name your plane after mountains. Again, you said this is a 747, which those are huge and capable of long-range flying.

And this is important for South African Airways because in those days of apartheid, they weren't allowed to land in many places or even fly over them. The vast majority of black African states refused to allow South African airlines to fly over their airspace, which meant having to fly longer roundabout routes. But Taiwan was a close friend of South Africa.

So back to our flight. After about nine hours, the plane is approaching Mauritius for a refuel. Less than an hour before its stop in Mauritius, a fire erupts in the cargo area behind the passengers.

The crew investigates. The fire is raging too badly for it to be put out with a fire extinguisher. There's smoke in the cabin.

Passengers are choking on toxic fumes. They need to land at the nearest airport, but they're flying over the Indian Ocean and the closest airport is on the island of Mauritius, more than 300 kilometers away from their current position. What can the captain do? Well, he's going to try a dangerous and difficult maneuver, opening the doors in flight.

Whoa. Okay. So, opening the doors in flight to flush out the smoke.

Yes. And to do that, he needs to get the plane down to a low altitude where there's enough oxygen and it's not freezing and pressure differences, reduced speed, all various factors. I haven't seen this even attempted in a movie illustrated.

This is wild. Yeah. Evidently, not many successful stories of this working in history.

I can't recall any. So, the pilot calls the airport on the island of Mauritius where it's just before four in the morning and informs them of the smoke problem and the emergency descent. There is a recording available online, but it's not especially clear.

So, John and I thought we would read a transcript of it. Yeah. The captain sounds pretty calm considering the thick smoke and the fact that he's got a fire on his plane and he's losing power.

So many of his cockpit instruments not working. So, John is the air traffic controller and I'll read for captain. What was his name again? It's spelt U-Y-S, but pronounced- Ace.

Ace. That's right. Captain Ace.

So, here's the captain. Mauritius, Mauritius. Springbok 295.

Mauritius. Good morning. Good morning.

We have a smoke problem and we're doing emergency descent to 1-5-1-4-0. Confirm you wish to descend to level 1-4-0. Yeah.

We have already commenced due to a smoke problem on the airplane. Do you request a full emergency, please? A full emergency. Affirmative.

Over. That's Charlie Charlie. Roger.

I declare a full emergency. Roger. And then the plane vanished, gone to a watery grave in the Indian Ocean.

Everyone died. There were 159 people lost. So, let's go through those passenger numbers by nationality.

52 South Africans. I suppose a lot of them would have been business people because of booming trade relations. Second, 49 Japanese.

Then 30 Taiwanese. Then there's a huge drop down to several countries with two passengers, two passengers. Interesting that there were so many Japanese.

Yes. 1987. In some ways was peak Japanese wealth.

Super strong economy, strong yen. The Japanese were exploring the world. Yes.

And more practically, perhaps because of flight embargoes, restrictions on flying to apartheid era South Africa, I think they couldn't fly directly from Japan. So, they would go via Taiwan, they'd transfer in Taipei. Makes sense.

So going back to the disappearing plane, air traffic control Mauritius formally declares an emergency. Search and rescue aircraft scan the dark waters for signs of the missing plane, but find nothing. However, later searches in the daylight spot floating aircraft wreckage and before long they recover some bodies from the water.

An aviation disaster like this is big news and the speculation begins. The first thought is terrorism. As a national airline owned by the South African government, South African airlines were seen as part of the apartheid government and their offices around the world would sometimes be sites of protests.

Meanwhile, crash investigation officials are trying to understand what happened. There are the relatively easy clues like a wristwatch that likely stopped at the time of impact just three minutes after the last radio communication with the plane. An extensive salvage operation is launched.

First to try to find the wreckage and to recover it and to recover the aircraft's flight recorders. No one is sure exactly where the plane crashed. So, the South Africans turned to an American salvage company for this help.

Flight recorders, also called black boxes, even though they are painted a very bright orange, there's more than one, right? There's a cockpit flight recorder that captures all the conversations of the pilot, the co-pilot, others in the cockpit, and then ambient sounds like alarms, engine noise, all that. Yes, and there's also a flight data recorder, which captures technical data from the aircraft, such as altitude, speed, engine performance, control inputs. But the clock is ticking.

Flight recorders have built-in locating devices called pingers that, you know, literally send out pings, signals, but require battery power. The batteries are good for about 30 days. After that though, pretty hard.

Yeah. But 30 days after the crash, there's still no signal detected from the black boxes. So, they're still not exactly sure where the majority of the wreckage is.

And the search goes on and on, incredibly expensive. They're using sonar and they're actually quite lucky. They find what they think is the plane quite soon, but it's going to take a long time to get down to that wreckage.

And it's more than a year after the crash when they bring up a recorder. On January 6th, 1989, the cockpit voice recorder was salvaged by a remotely operated vehicle. So, a robot, a remote-control thing, but the flight data recorder was never found.

They also brought up wreckage, an incredible achievement from a depth of 4,900 meters. It's a, it's still a record-breaking feat. Incredible.

Yes. The wreckage was scattered around an area, some about 4,000 meters and then other, yeah, other wreckage, almost 5,000, incredible. The recorder though, it's a disappointment.

It's in poor condition. You know, it's been in the deep ocean for 13 months, but it's still functional yet it gives no clear answers to all the questions. Yeah.

No clear answers. I think they took the voice recorder right to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB in DC, both to show goodwill and to say that, you know, we're, we're giving it to a neutral observer. The idea would be to counter speculation.

Yes. So, the record is a bit of a dud, but from the investigators examining both the floating wreckage and the retrieving sunken wreckage from the bottom of the ocean, they find patterns of burning. I mean, they built up a picture of a really hot fire in that cargo area, which of course raises the question, what material had caused such high temperatures? Were there arms, ammunition, some kind of fuel on board, maybe even nuclear materials? The cargo list didn't show anything unusual, mainly computers and related electronics from Taiwan, I think.

An official government inquiry headed by Judge Cecil Margo was unable to determine the cause of the fire. So, with this lack of a conclusion, you get lots of conspiracy theories, debates about the nature of Flight 295's cargo. To this day, the exact cause of the fire remains a mystery.

We don't want to go through each of the theories, but instead let's look at why they might arise by looking at connections between Taiwan and South Africa at the time. Because a lot of the speculation about dangerous and illegal cargo rested on this close relationship between South Africa and Taiwan, a relationship which involved quite a few secret things. Close but secret.

There were military connections that were very shh, including cooperation on nuclear energy and atomic weapons. But the two republics, so the Republic of South Africa and the Republic of China or Taiwan, weren't always so close as they were in 1987. Yeah.

So, in the early years, Taiwan is not a supporter of South Africa. It doesn't like the racism and the ROC feels protective of the Chinese community in South Africa. I don't know how many people there'd be at the time, but maybe 10,000, 20,000 Chinese.

But anyway, Taiwan wants votes at the UN. So, in the early 1960s, especially as you see lots of African nations becoming independent, there are more votes available at the United Nations and you want them voting for China. Voting for China, but which China? Well, many of those votes were influenced by how much economic aid which one of the Chinas was willing to offer.

But this need for African friends changed after 1971 when Taiwan was forced to give up its United Nations seat. So, within a short period of time, Taiwan lost most of its diplomatic allies, just had a few left on the African continent. So, this would mean that Taiwan doesn't need to really worry anymore about having a cozy relationship with white run South Africa.

It's not like it matters if it upsets other African countries because what's done is done. So, Taiwan and South Africa upgrade their diplomatic relations to embassy level. And this happens in 1976.

Both countries felt let down by the United States around this time. You know, Washington is going to shift recognition from Taipei to Beijing. And the U.S. is putting sanctions, putting pressure on South Africa, especially as we move into the 1980s.

Was South Africa in the UN, the United Nations, or did they get kicked out? Yes and no. South Africa was not expelled, but was effectively sidelined from the United Nations decision making for nearly two decades, 74 through to 94. Of course, because of its apartheid regime.

And as you noted a second ago, sanctions against South Africa from the West get really harsh in the 1980s. By the time this story happens, 1987, these sanctions are hurting South Africa. In the mid-1970s, South Africa and Taiwan find their common interests aligned and they become good buddies.

They're both facing communist threats. Taiwan obviously faces the threat of China. And in Southern Africa at the time, there were Russian, even Cuban troops and a lot of local African communist revolutionaries.

And both South Africa and Taiwan are looking to develop their atomic capabilities, both for energy production and weapons as well. As for nuclear power plants, South Africa had one commissioned in 1984. Commission means go into use.

That's the same year the Kenting one went into action, Ma'anshan, you can see it from the beach. But the one in Kenting was not the first nuclear power plant in Taiwan. Right.

And on the nuclear weapon front, Taiwan was close to getting one, very close. And South Africa had already crossed that line. So, South Africa sent Taiwan enriched uranium, lots of it, thousands of tons of enriched uranium.

And Taiwan sent South Africa nuclear technology expertise. There were Taiwanese engineers in South Africa. But the relationship was more about just this kind of cooperation, bombs and power plants.

Yeah. There was a lot of trade, trade agreements on air services, trade, shipping, agriculture, science, technical cooperation, and so on. Yeah.

I remember being a child in the 80s and meeting people who their father was doing business in South Africa and stuff. If you look at this academic book called Taiwan in Africa, it says, quote, thousands of Taiwanese investors and their families headed to South Africa at the height of relations in the 1990s, More than 30,000 Taiwanese had already arrived in South Africa. More than 9,000 factories had been set up and more than 40,000 employment opportunities had been created in the homeland peripheries, as they put it.

Taiwan was a big investor in South Africa and drawing on labor from the South African homelands, these ethnic areas where people had been forced to move to. These places needed jobs and the South African government aimed to bring in Taiwan investors. Manufacturing, right? At that time, manufacturing had become too expensive in Taiwan, making bicycles and stuff.

And they were brought to South Africa on very lucrative terms, subsidized infrastructure, tax exemptions. So, this book, Taiwan in Africa, has chapters from a few different people. This chapter was written by Jermaine Pretorius.

So again, the book Taiwan in Africa, quote, exemption from paying minimum wages in areas where the monthly incomes of laborers were already below the breadline. So that was one of the other perks that Taiwan was giving. Wow, that's really nasty.

Yeah. Shameful. Perhaps we should explain what apartheid was.

Okay. So, it comes from the Afrikaans word for separateness. And it was a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa that lasted from 1948 until the early 1990s.

So, we had something in the United States in many places that was a similar idea, but this went one step further. It was designed to maintain white minority rule over the country's nonwhite majority. There was racial segregation for pretty much everything, right? Schools, hospitals, public transport, beaches.

Okay. So, you have this influx of Taiwanese in apartheid South Africa, a country using racial segregation. This is odd.

Uh-huh. Okay. So how do you classify Taiwanese? Exactly.

Yeah. Tricky, right? Hard to lay out the welcome mat for investors. Welcome, Mr. Chen.

Happy to see you. A pleasant flight, but you can't use that toilet. Don't drink over there.

No, it couldn't have worked. I think I might be on the next plane home, yeah. Yeah.

So that obviously couldn't have worked. So how did they figure this out? Well, Taiwanese were designated honorary whites. Honorary whites.

Right. This solution had been first used, I think, in the 1960s for the Japanese and then done on a case-by-case basis for other East Asian countries. And clearly based on the Nazi honorary Aryan concept that was also given to the Japanese and whoever they decided was useful for them.

But think about it, right? There's already been a community of Chinese in South Africa for a while, and how annoying that must have been. These guys are honorary whites, but not you. Exactly.

Small community of Chinese, but they're not honorary whites. Insulting to see these new arrivals given a higher status than yourself. Yeah.

The law was changed, I think, so that they could apply for a permit and get YT privileges. Eric, apologies for this tangential detail I'm about to launch into. But oddly enough, South Korea, unlike Japan and Taiwan, South Korea was unwilling and uninterested in accepting honorary white status.

Hmm. Okay. A bit of a surprise.

The South Korean government at the time was a right-wing capitalist anti-communist authoritarian government. They're also becoming a manufacturing powerhouse at the time. Right.

So quite similar to Taiwan, right? Mm-hmm. And South Korea actually severed ties with South Africa in 1978 in protest of apartheid. Okay, so 20 seconds of thinking here.

Call me cynical, but I'm thinking South Korea was not primarily motivated by the lofty goals of fighting racism in this decision of not accepting honorary whitehood. Lucky guess. Lucky guess.

South Korea was looking for international recognition and they were competing for global support in competition with North Korea. They wanted international support to join the United Nations. This only happened in 1991 and the North Koreans were given membership that same day as well.

That's late, 1991. So clearly the South Koreans could not be campaigning for UN membership and at the same time being pro-white supremacy. But okay, back to Taiwan.

Taiwan's close relationship with South Africa is on borrowed time by the early 1990s. There was criticism of Taiwanese companies exploiting laborers, low pay, demanding bosses, pretty similar to situations in Taiwan today in many places, unfortunately. And from the Taiwanese bosses' point of view, at least many of them, they would say things like, you know, the workers are lazy, this kind of, you know, you get the picture.

Yeah. And things would unwind pretty quickly. There was the cutting of subsidies, so it's not worth being there.

You know, you mentioned bad labor relations, competition from China, they're pumping out cheap goods now, and most of all, political changes in South Africa. You have the ANC coming to power in 1994. Yes, the African National Congress.

And then there's the announcement of the switch. So, at one point, Taiwan was South Africa's sixth largest trading partner. But after the ANC comes in, there was an announcement in 1996 that we will be switching to Beijing.

And then in 1998, it officially happens and we lose yet another of our allies. Of the thousands of Taiwanese who had immigrated to South Africa, only a few hundred would remain, and the majority of factories would eventually relocate. And other relations and links would be cut too, including that South African flight from Taipei to Johannesburg.

But the 1987 tragedy of the crash of the Helderberg, that's the name of the plane, it would live on, and it's still a mystery. Yeah, we don't know for sure, but probably a case of electronics catching fire. And it's the design faults of that 747 Kombi.

It's poor fire suppression as well. And I was just thinking that I'm old enough to remember the days when we had smoking sections on airplanes. Oh, yeah.

Something young people today could never imagine, but we used to have that. Anyway, remember that the Kombi, right, is a 747 that has passengers up front and cargo in a section behind them. The smoke should not have entered the passenger cabin.

And, you know, early on in the investigation, an investigator went to Boeing's headquarters in Seattle. He wanted to learn how the Kombi was tested for fire prevention and suppression. And the test was surprisingly weak.

Get this. Boeing's fire tests were conducted by setting a bale of tobacco leaves on fire, then have a person enter the cargo area and fight the fire with a fire extinguisher. So, a smoking section.

A smoking section, yes. Of tobacco leaves. Exactly.

It's hardly much of a test, and there were problems with their test replicating the air pressure conditions and so on. So, the computer equipment and other cargo probably had something flammable, packaging material and... Yeah, but as you said, still a mystery. I don't like speculating.

Unanswerable questions, I guess. We'll never know. Something caught fire.

Maybe something that shouldn't have been there. But regardless, the important thing is the sad fact that 159 people lost their lives. And still remember, the crash is commemorated in several places by memorials, including one in Taoyuan, Taiwan.

After the crash, the families of the Taiwanese victims were unable to travel to Mauritius to retrieve their loved ones' spirits. So, after the crash, they gathered at Zhuwei Fishing Harbor, that's near the airport, and they had a so-called ceremony. Yeah, if you don't know what that is, you'll see it after a person dies in a motorcycle accident or anything.

Often on the news, there'll be some sort of a priest, and they'll call quite emotionally, come back, come back. It's a very important part for some Taiwanese people, a tradition after death. And on the eve of the first anniversary of the crash, South African Airways donated funds to erect the South African Airways Flight Disaster Memorial.

This memorial was in an unused military camp near Zhuwei Fishing Harbor. Eryk, I've not been to that memorial, have you? No. Okay, let's go there now.

Okay, yeah, on Google Maps, we can do that. Yes, yes, Google Maps. So, you got it.

Okay, it's hard to see from the road. It certainly looks like an abandoned military camp. Memorial's overgrown with weeds and bushes, I guess.

Yeah, very hard to see. Okay, if we go up Freeway 61, an elevated freeway, you can see a white pointed monument there, still visible above the bushes. There's a kind of ruin of a building nearby.

There's a fishing port in the distance. The date in the bottom corner in Google Map is January 2024. Sad to see it like that.

The disaster faded from public memory, but of course, for family members, still a great sadness. And I've seen local newspaper reports saying that people can still be seen regularly leaving flowers at the memorial. Yeah, not sure how accessible it is inside an unused military camp.

I've read complaints, so I wouldn't head off there without checking if it's actually open first. Right. Okay, so before we sign off, just a shout out to our many South African listeners, especially those here in Taiwan.

I've found that South Africans are among the expats here who have the best attitudes towards Taiwan. They're among the most appreciative of Taiwan, more so than New Zealanders, I'd say, and other Westerners. Yeah, it's nice to have them.

All right. Thanks for listening to Formosa Files, and there's more to explore with regard to South Africa and Taiwan and Africa in Taiwan in general, and we will be doing that in season five. Thanks again for listening.

I'm Eryk Michael Smith. 

I'm John Ross. Bye.