The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.
During those terrible, destructive seconds in a microlight crash, the aircraft’s aluminium tail strut is driven through the pilot’s chest and out of his back, narrowly missing his heart. The strut has to be sawn shorter in order to load the man onto the ambulance helicopter. He’s flown to Johannesburg Hospital directly into the care of the Trauma Unit. Photographs of the man on an operating table put one in mind of the results of medieval jousts between lance bearing knights. One wonders, how can anyone survive such an accident? Today he’s flying again, once more instructing learner pilots. To what agency does that man owe his life? It’s a question that might well be asked by Joburg bomb victims during the eighties, by those hundreds of poisoned schoolgirls, by the survivors of the Ellis Park soccer disaster who were attended to and rendered safe, in a super efficient manner.
Johannesburg Hospital (The Heritage Portal)
Ken Boffard, Professor and Clinical Head, Department of Surgery, University of the Witwatersrand, which incorporates one of the world’s foremost trauma...
