From the quiet shores of Melkbosstrand to the burning skies of Kabul — one man’s flight for humanity.
In August 2021, as Kabul fell and the world watched Afghanistan unravel in real time, a solitary gleaming white speck appeared above the city’s smoke-filled horizon. Observers around the world watching live flight trackers assumed it belonged to the CIA. So, great was the surprise when it was identified as a 41-year-old Boeing 727 named Irene, flown by Captain Niel Steyl whose calm courage would soon save hundreds of lives.
A man now more at home with the salt air of Melkbosstrand, Niel had answered an impossible call from his base in Kulob, Tajikistan. The U.S. State Department asked him and his crew onboard the Kenyan-registered Safe Air Company to conduct mercy flights into Kabul just hours after a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate had killed 13 American soldiers and 170+ Afghans.
The request had come with the weight of fate. He’d experienced captivity before. In 2004, he, fellow pilot Hendrik Hamman and 67 other South Africans were arrested at Harare Airport while allegedly trying to collect weapons for a coup in Equatorial Guinea. However, their ownership of weapons remained unsubstantiated by evidence at the time of arrest. They pled guilty to lesser charges unrelated to carrying arms or an armed coup act. The price was hefty: 17 months in Zimbabwe’s notorious Chikurubi maximum prison. He was released on 1 August 2005, thinner, humbler, but unbroken.
Niel returned to flying with the quiet conviction that freedom—of movement, purpose and life itself—shouldn’t ever be taken for granted. So when the call from Kabul came, he didn’t hesitate.
Irene was an old aircraft soul: three engines, a freighter’s belly and none of the defensive systems of the military cargo planes crowding Kabul’s airspace. Her white fuselage gleamed against the heat haze as she descended on the under-siege Hamid Karzai International Airport among C-17s, A400Ms and C-130s.
Inside the airport, hundreds of former Afghan special forces and their families were waiting for a miracle. ‘They would certainly have been killed,’ Niel later told the Mail & Guardian. ‘They’d helped the Americans for years, so were seen as traitors by the Taliban.’
The first flight took only 40 minutes to load. Soldiers, mothers, children—308 in total—crammed into a plane designed for half that number. Irene rose triumphantly from Kabul’s dust-choked runway bound for Tajikistan. A second flight jampacked with 329 souls followed the next day.
Niel said, ‘For my crew and I, it was another day’s work. But for the hundreds of men, women and children we carried to safety, it was deliverance.’ What lingers is not the image of a swaggering aviator but of a man who chose to open a door for others.
Niel’s flying career has been vast and varied: from commercial to private airlines. He still flies and when recounting the Good, Bad and Ugly of his career, he said, ‘Flying the luxury private 727 Boeing for well-known Indian businessman Vijay Mallya (known as the “King of Good Times”) took me around the world several times. That definitely was the Good. The Bad and Ugly? Without a doubt that fateful flight to Harare.’
Off the yoke, Niel swaps the skies for gravel and surf: mountain biking and kayaking.
WHAT I LIKE
When chilling, I drink beer
My slice of West Coast paradise is Melkbosstrand
A favourite West Coast restaurant is Melkbos Kitchen
The food I can never say no to is T-bone
What’s usually in my glass: a good draught
When the remote’s in my hand, it’s set to a Netflix series.
Cheering from the sidelines? Rugby of course.
