Real Survival Stories - Plane Down in Africa: Search Party Lost

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Deep in rural South Africa, it’s a tough life for a farmer. John Moor has spent years tackling thieves who pilfer his livestock. One day he takes a bold step - chartering a plane to search for some missing cattle in the Drakensberg Mountains. He hopes it’ll give him the upper hand… but everything comes crashing down. John and his companion will find themselves stranded and injured somewhere in the huge range. The mission must switch from recovery to rescue… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Jacob Booth, Liam Cameron, Miri Latham, Matt Peaty | Assembly editing by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at TurboTax.ca slash business tax. It's April the 5th, 2002, in the mighty Drakensberg mountain range in South Africa's Natal province. It's a sprawling escarpment, 2,000 meters above sea level. A network of giant jutting rock formations surrounding a patchwork of lush green valleys. The area takes its name from the Dutch Drakensbergen, literally dragon mountains.

And there is something magical, even sublime, about the place. But on this particular Friday morning, 35-year-old farmer John Moore is in no mood to appreciate the view. He is dragging his friend, Mark Freeman, along the rough ground of one of the valleys. John is sweating, panting as he heaves Mark's limp frame, glancing back only occasionally to see how much distance he has put between them and the dangerous spot they were just in. They are still not safe.

There is an acrid scent of smoke in the air. Mark is conscious, but barely. His face is a bloodied mess, caused by the injuries he sustained just moments ago. John himself has a shooting pain in his neck, but he pushes on, hauling his friend towards a stony outcrop. There is a large, sloping rock here. A poor excuse for a hospital bed, but it'll have to do. As he sets his friend down, John's eye is caught by something nearby. He and Mark are not alone. Coiled up on the rock, just feet away from them, is an African puff adder, a meter long

and as fat as John's bicep. As a farmer, John knows a dangerous snake when he sees one, and the puff adder is one of the deadliest. It can strike at lightning speed, too quick for the human eye to see it coming. But the serpent's venom is extremely fast-working, leading to hemorrhage within a matter of hours. Untreated, the chances of survival are less than 50-50. Puff headers are incredibly toxic. It doesn't take long.

They attack your flesh and your vital organs in a very quick manner. If one of us had been hit by that guy, it would have been all over. John fixes his eyes on the puff adder, taking in its elegant black and yellow stripes. For a moment, the two of them seem to be looking into each other's eyes. The only question is who will strike first. Suddenly, John grabs the snake by its tail and hurls it into the long grass. It slides away.

He blows his cheeks, relieved. But getting rid of the snake is just the beginning. He's got far bigger problems to deal with right now. I had to make really good decisions, really quickly. We now needed to really spring into action to start or create some kind of rescue plan. I knew for sure that we couldn't walk out. We were miles and miles away from anywhere,

so I knew I had to do something. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet John Moore. Out in the rural expanse of South Africa, it's a tough life for a farmer. John has spent years battling thieves who pilfer his livestock. One day he takes a bold step, chartering a plane to search for some missing cattle in the Drakensberg mountains.

He hopes it'll give him the upper hand, but in the end everything comes crashing down. People might say I'm a risk taker, I don't think I am. It is a mistake, and in hindsight it is a mistake to fly in the mountains in a small plane. We are flying in what was no better than a sardine tin. When he and his companion Mark find themselves stranded and hurt somewhere in the huge range, the focus of John's mission will switch. From recovery to rescue.

I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiza Podcast Network. This is Real Survival Stories. It's early April 2002. John Moore wakes in his bed at his family's main farm, rubbing his eyes and yawning deeply. The first rays of dawn are just beginning to pierce the horizon. His wife, Gaylene, rolls over and goes back to sleep. But as a farmer, John is used to early mornings. He gets up, pours himself a cup of coffee,

goes outside to inspect his cattle. The sun-dried grassy plains fan out before him, golden runways pointing towards distant mountains. The Druckensberg range is about fifty kilometers away, towards the border with Lesotho. The farmer strides over to a metal gate and opens it, before weaving his way through the animals as they grunt and swish flies away with their tails and ears. John's family have been rearing cows in South Africa for six generations. They have a breeding herd of over a thousand, spread across a number of farms, around 8,000 hectares of land.

But in recent years, keeping tabs on that much stock has become increasingly difficult. The scourge of stock theft back then just became rampant. It was driven by poverty. In Africa, it is rife with poverty. And the district we lived in, the area we lived in was no exception to that. But there's also a very big portion of it driven by greed. So we had these gangs or teams, whatever you'd like to call them, of semi-professional thieves really, who would come into an area and either steal cattle live and drive them off, or we'd have gangs or groups of people come and slaughter cattle on the farms

and maim them by hacking their hamstrings, killing them and then carrying off the meat or the loot and possibly selling it for financial gain really. And it became a business. It became incredibly debilitating for us because it was just, the pressure was relentless. It just kept on and on and on. John and his fellow farmers have resorted to desperate measures to protect their cattle,

spending thousands of South African rand on armed guards, and even at times joining the fight themselves. The people stealing these cattle and the gangs who were involved, they were fully prepared to go all the way and we had to match that, unfortunately. We had gotten to gunfights before, trying to protect our stock, which seems pretty crazy to the average man out there, but that's the level of confrontation we had. On two occasions, we met the full force of AK-47 fire.

On both those occasions, miraculously and luckily, no one was injured or killed. With two years in the military behind him, John isn't shy when it comes to confronting the cattle rustlers. But with such a sprawling farming operation, often the thieves are long gone before he even realizes they've struck. Typically, the first he knows about a raid is when a herdsman from one of his family's satellite farms calls to give him the bad news. Which is exactly what happens on this April day in 2002. On this occasion he would have phoned me to say, look, the fences have been cut, cattle are missing, the counter's wrong.

This particular incident, I think we had 20 or 30 cows and their calves stolen. So, you know, back then that was a significant amount of livestock and a significant amount of money. John's response to the herdsman's call is immediate. The farmers in the area have an unspoken rule. When a cattle theft occurs, you have to show you're doing your best to recover the animals, to send a message to the gangs that you aren't going to let them get away with it. The farm work would come to a complete grinding halt, muster every possible man, woman and child and all the vehicles and equipment we could and we'd do it on foot, on foot and

on vehicle. But because of the remoteness of these areas, it became increasingly difficult and the stock thieves became increasingly wily to our temps. John and the others set out to search for the cattle, trundling along dusty dirt roads until they reach the satellite farm up in the highlands. Here, the search party splits up. Some take the roads, others go on foot, combing the sprawling savanna for any sign of the missing animals,

any clue as to where they might have been taken. They talk to the local people for information. Some are more forthcoming than others. When it comes to the cattle gangs, fear and intimidation are rife. Eventually, the search party is forced to concede defeat. For now, at least. They're not going to find the cattle this way. The thieves have hidden them too well.

But experience tells John the most likely place to look. We would get information from the tribal authorities or the tribal people. Between where we live and the mountains is a big tribal area and this is where the cattle were being taken into 99% of the time. They had sort of safe areas where the information didn't come from and we knew really well if we went in there we were probably up for a fight. John has been swapping notes with his fellow farmers, in particular a friend called Mark Winter. Mark has a hunch that the missing animals are being held in the foothills of the Drakensberg.

In fact, he tells John they're almost certainly in one particular area, the valley where the wattle trees grow. John knows these mountains well. Decades earlier, his dad helped carve out many of the original footpaths in the range. But trying to find the cattle on foot will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and vehicular access to the mountains is all but impossible. There's really only one way to proceed. That's from the air. Fortunately, John's uncle Hilton is part owner of a local plane,

a small two-seater Piper Cherokee 140, based at an airfield 20 minutes drive from the home farm. Its call sign is Echo Bravo Mike. Known to the locals as EBM, it's a regular sight in these skies. John decides to ask Uncle Hilton if he can borrow the plane for a few hours for a reconnaissance mission. to the locals as EBM. It's a regular sight in these skies. John decides to ask Uncle Hilton if he can borrow the plane for a few hours for a reconnaissance mission up to the Drakensbergs. I phoned my uncle and said,

look, what are the chances of us getting a couple of hours up in the air? He said, look, I'm not available for whatever reason, but Mark Freeman, I'm sure he'd be loved to add a few hours to his logbook. At just 19, Mark Freeman is a good 15 years John's junior. John's known him since he was a kid. But these days, Mark is a newly qualified pilot, and he's always keen to put in some extra flying time. They agree to meet at the airfield at 6am on April 5th. An early start on what promises to be a bright clear morning in the African savanna.

The weather forecast the previous evening when we looked on the telly or the radio it really gave us a great forecast. There's no wind or low wind. It was going to be a very calm day, bright sunshine. It's all stacking up to be a very calm day, bright sunshine. It was all stacking up to be a perfectly good day to fly an airplane. I had no misgivings about going up that day whatsoever. Just before he leaves home that morning, John's wife, Gaylene, makes a suggestion. He's recently brought a Nokia 3110, an almost indestructible little black brick. Take it with you, Galen tells him.

But there is an issue. I looked down at it and to my dismay, I saw one bar of power, one little bar of charge and I'd forgotten about putting it on charge overnight. So my initial thought was, well, that's just gonna be a waste of time. Why would I take that with me? So anyway, I remember clearly Gaylene, my wife saying, no, take the phone, it might be useful.

And I might've protested. Once you got up into those areas, reception was gonna be absolutely zero. Anyway, I put the trusty Nokia in my pocket, kissed her goodbye, gave the kids a hug and took off for the airfield. Prime Day is here. With great kitchen deals, greatness is a deal away. So if you love baking, you can get a deal on a new mixer, Transforming you into the Lord of the Loaves.

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It's young, Mark Freeman, guiding the aircraft forwards. He stops at a fuel bowser to fill up the tank in the plane's wings. Sitting in the passenger seats inside the cramped cockpit, John Moore watches as 150 liters of petrol are guzzled up by the tiny craft. Enough to buy them a good four hours of flying time.

With a full tank, Mark taxes up to the runway, performs his final safety checks, powers up the plane, releases the brakes. The little aircraft picks up speed, 30, 40, 50 miles an hour. As the end of the runway approaches, John feels the front wheels lift off the ground and they soar into the brilliant blue sky.

We took off from the airfield at about 6.30, turned to the west and we can fly relatively low. It would have been anywhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet above the ground and we just followed the routes that I believe we'd take to get to where Mark Windsor, my farming friend, had described would be a good place to start the search for his cattle. So we flew low, we flew very close to and almost over the house, my house. We had woken up that morning, we flew across the Wagondrift Dam, which is a beautiful big national dam, and then we followed the road, the gravel road, up into the the rural area. I still remember flying up there and Mark and I look at each other and almost having a laugh about, you know, just how perfect today was going to be for doing what we did,

because make no mistake, flying in these mountains in a Papa Cherokee 140 is probably stupid, but young and brave that wasn't really on the radar for us. And we proceeded to fly in there with absolutely no trepidation. You know, if it had been bumpy and windy and low visibility I would have pulled the plug immediately, but there was, to the best of my knowledge, there was no reason we shouldn't be doing what we were doing on that morning. The plane cruises onwards, smooth and level, as the propeller on its nose hums. Before long, Mark and John are flying through a large valley. All around are soaring rock faces, quilted with green.

Ostensibly, things couldn't be better. All of John's focus is on his missing herd, his eyes dart this way and that, scanning relentlessly for any sign of the animals. But what the two men don't know is that a freak weather event is headed their way, totally invisible to the naked eye. It's a cold front, coming all the way from Antarctica, a mass of falling air that will do its best to drag anything passing through it down to the ground. Suddenly, out of the blue, John sees a warning light flashing in the cockpit,

followed by the piercing buzz of an alarm. He looks over at Mark. The 19-year-old's knuckles are turning white on the control yoke. In a second, everything is changed. Wide-eyed, the youthful pilot turns to his passenger. We're not flying, he tells John, remaining as calm as possible. We're falling. Unable to generate enough lift, the plane's engine has stalled.

I think it's disbelief when we kind of look at each other and I don't know if we had the conversation that maybe it's a fault, but very quickly we realized there was no fault about it because we were definitely going down. We weren't plummeting out of the sky, we were just not flying anymore. The forward speed of the plane wasn't creating enough lift over the wing, so even though we were making forward momentum, the plane was no longer flying as it's designed to do and technically you are falling so you're no longer flying and your control very quickly becomes an issue. Already swooping low Mark has less than a minute to execute an emergency landing but finding a spot to sit down in the Drakensbergs

is virtually impossible. We knew we were in huge trouble. The options were pretty much non-existent because in front of us were just a series of walls of vertical rock faces with very small grass bands between them. I just said to Mark, pick a spot and make your best of it. Then we pretty much, we were preparing for impact. Mark aims the plane at a raised sloping plateau. Rocky, grassy, uneven, narrow.

But it's about as close to a landing strip as they're going to find out here. It should be long enough just about for the aircraft to come to a halt before crashing into a wall of rock at the far end. That's if they can make it onto the plateau to begin with. At the near side, it's perched on top of a sheer cliff of rock, and the aircraft is losing altitude fast. As the rock wall gets closer and closer, John braces for impact, pushing back hard into his seat. The plane clears the barrier, just. But then there's a flurry of metallic cracks and crashes as the craft loses its landing gear and propeller, stripped away as they skim over the edge.

Moments later, the flimsy metal fuselage hits the ground. The little silver sardine tin careens through the scrubby grassland, spinning wildly. Through his side window, John watches, dumbstruck, as one of the wings breaks off and falls away. It is the longest few seconds of his life. And yet throughout it all he feels strangely serene. There's no doubt in my mind this was it because the chances of landing in up there were so remote. I just remember being enveloped in this big blue or green lights or aura or feeling about things.

And I don't remember noise, I don't remember pain, I don't remember the impact as such. I just remember it all being over. It's seconds later. The flurry of bangs and rattles that had reverberated around the hills has disappeared. Now, as John's senses slowly return to him, the main sound is that of his own breathing. The plane has come to a halt. They haven't been totally pulverized careening into a wall or plummeting to the ground. Somehow, things have just about held together. John calms his breath and tries to make sense of his surroundings.

He kicks out the door on his side of the cockpit, surprised to find that the fuselage is resting directly on the ground. No wheels and no propeller either. of disassociated state, what I certainly did, where the reality of your situation, the miracle of not having died, because that's exactly what you're expecting to have happened, kind of come back and you have to then work in the reality, I guess, of what's around you. And Mark was slumped over the dash. I think he was probably unconscious at that stage. I kind of had to pinch myself to work out whether I was actually alive or I was dead. From there, I realized that no, look, we have made it, we have survived, the plane has stopped. We found ourselves sitting on a grassy slope. So miraculously and with a

lot of skill from Mark's flying ability, we had skimmed literally over the top of this sheer rock wall and landed on a grassy slope. That's how the mountains look, these vertical bands with some grass. So we literally smeared ourselves onto one of these grass bands and now we're sitting there on the deck with no wheels, no propeller, and one wing. to grill when the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer, so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. As he becomes more lucid, John is hit by an overpowering smell of petrol.

The plane's fuel tank was in the wing that broke off. And now he, Mark, and the whole of the fuselage are covered in the highly flammable liquid. Already there's smoke rising from the instrument panel in front of him. John reaches over and turns off the key in the ignition. But as he does so, he realizes there's something wrong with his neck. His head flops forward awkwardly. The muscles that normally hold it up have been torn. Whiplash.

I thought I might've had a broken neck at that stage because I literally had to hold my head up with my hands. I wasn't able to sit in the prone position. My neck was that damaged. I thought, okay, well, I've never had that before. So if I have got a broken neck, it's only seconds from disaster, one wrong move, and this could all be over. Cautiously, John reaches behind him,

groping for something in the back of the cockpit that might support his head. His fumbling hands alight on a red jacket. He pulls it through the gap between the seats and wraps it tightly around his neck. But as he ties the knot on his improvised brace, he feels a searing pain in one of his fingers. He looks down. It's bent at an impossible angle. One of my fingers was facing backwards, so I must have put my hand on the dashboard, I think, as we came down and pushed the finger out of place.

Barely missing a beat, John grabs the disjointed digit and yanks. So I do remember pulling that back into the socket and, yeah, just getting on with it. I just knew that we had to get on with it, because at that point I didn't know if Mark was critical or just knocked out. With his finger back in place, John tumbles out of the aircraft and onto the scorched grass. He makes his way around the front of the fuselage, past the spot where the propeller was ripped off the tip of the plane.

He hauls open Mark's door. But as he goes to unclip his friend's seat belt, he finds it's already been torn away from the chair by the force of the crash. Marcus still slumps forward over the dashboard, there's blood dripping from his mouth and nose. But at least he's still breathing. The biggest danger right now is what will happen if the fuel catches a light. Having watched enough movies about planes going up in smoke, instinctively I think it was just realized that we had to get the hell away from this plane.

I grabbed Mark and I proceeded to drag him and myself away from the plane, expecting it to go up in a ball of flames. John heaves his friend away from the smoldering wreck. Mark is semi-conscious now, groaning in pain as John drags him roughly along the ground. We were on a probably a 30 degree slope of grass. There was not far we could really go from the plane because of our environment. So I just remember pulling them away and they're quite often are these open areas between the

grass of a flat rocky area. We would have been 20, maybe 20 paces, 20 meters away from the plane. We are thought if it goes up in smoke, we are going to be okay. Doing all he can to keep his injured neck straight and steady, John inches his way towards the rocky surface. Dripping with sweat, he finally stops around 60 feet from the spitting, smoking aircraft.

Hopefully that's far enough. But just as he solves one problem, another rears its ugly head. Lo and behold, as I settle mark down on this rock, which is probably two meters by two meters, sort of in size, a bit of a flat sloping rock, there's a dirty big African puff adder coiled up just on the side in the grass. Puffheaders are incredibly toxic snakes. This guy was about one and a half meters long. Suddenly John thrusts out his arm, grabbing the snake by the tail and hurling it into

the long grass. It hastily slithers away. Another danger averted. John can at last turn to his companion and attempt to assess Mark's injuries. As the teenage pilot comes to, the pain is overwhelming. You could see the injuries he had, not that I knew what the internal ones were, but there was significant swelling starting to appear around his eyes and his jaw. I just remember saying to Mark look you're not in any state to help us get out of here. The best thing you can do is just try and be still. So I knew I had to do something. From that point I really just went into rescue mode. What must I do to get the right message, the right people so that they can

get us off here? I knew from all my training that the worst thing I could possibly ever do is leave Mark and go for help because I didn't know where to go for that help because we were that remote. And I made a very quick and conscious decision that we have to get someone to us. The emotional part was really pushed aside. I just went into rescue and survival mode and knew for a fact that every decision I made would either work for or against us from that point on. The countdown has started.

The two men need rescuing as fast as possible. But there is only one way to summon help, and it's back inside the plane. The onboard radio. The aircraft went down so quickly they didn't have a chance to put out a mayday. It's been about 15 minutes since the crash, and so far at least the fuselage hasn't gone up in smoke. Maybe with a bit of luck it'll stay that way, but with fuel coating the wreckage, it'll only take a spark. Cautiously, John makes his way back towards what's left of the plane.

His clothes positively reek of highly flammable aviation grade gasoline. He plants his feet on the burned ground, reaches inside the cockpit and gingerly lifts the receiver from its cradle. But without power it's not gonna be much use. He'll have to bring the plane's instrument panel back online. Slowly, carefully, John turns the key in the ignition. He doesn't dare breathe. It's a bit like defusing a bomb, I think. You don't know if it's going to go off.

So I was ready to roll and duck and dive and jump over the cliff if I had to, I think. It is a calculated gamble, I guess, to turn it duck and dive and jump over the cliff if I had to, I think. It is a calculated gamble, I guess, to turn it on and make the call. Was it wise? I don't know, but it was certainly one of those calculated risks I was prepared to take at the time. As the key turns, there's a flash of lights as the plane's instruments come alive again. John's shoulders relax.

For the moment at least the bomb doesn't seem to have gone off. But there is no time to waste. He presses down hard on the call button and sits about broadcasting a Mayday signal. I just called up Mayday, Mayday, May Day. This is Echo Bravo Mark. This is John Moore speaking. We've crashed in the Drakensberg. Can someone help? We're over. But all that meets his plea is a fizz of white noise. John repeats the message a few more times. It's no good. No one is there. And then a lightbulb moment. The plane's radio isn't, in fact, his only means of communication.

There is the Nokia he brought with him at his wife's insistence, with its single bar of charge. It's still somewhere in the back of the cabin. The chances of getting any reception up here in the mountains are minimal, but it's obviously worth a shot. John leans over and fumbles around behind the seats until his fingers find the chunky phone. He grabs it and hastily checks the green and black LCD display. The phone still has a single bar of power, but no signal to speak of.

I walked a couple of meters, maybe 50 or 100 meters away from the plane to a more exposed outcrop, where I thought maybe just miraculously would get some kind of signal. And initially nothing. I don't know how long I wait. I sat there for, but I do remember back then that signal, certainly in our area, came and went. So I sat there for maybe a couple of minutes.

And eventually to my amazement, I looked at my phone again and there was one bar of signal. So now I had to make the choice of who do I call? Because five out of my ten friends would think I'm joking. So I decided in that moment to call Hilton, my my uncle who is a co-owner of the plane because I believed he would be the person who would be the most receptive to the story he is about to hear and he wouldn't say well you're pulling my leg. So anyway I called Hilton and I said Hilton it's John here we've crashed the plane and before he could say well haha I said look just listen to me I've probably got one call and I need this call to count

and I relayed him the story I said to Hilton get hold of Mark Winter my farming friend he probably knows more or less where we are and I said look we need a doctor Mark Freeman my pilot is in serious and deteriorating state. John's uncle confirms that he has understood. Barely has Hilton finished talking, and the phone goes dead, the weak signal lost. John pockets the device, then makes his way back to Mark. He has to have faith in others now. He has done all he can. The next part is the hardest, the waiting game.

An hour passes with no news and no sign of rescue. On his rocky bed, Mark is looking increasingly unwell. The bruises on his face are swelling up so much that he's starting to have trouble breathing. He was physically deteriorating. As the adrenaline faded, he was in more and more pain and more and more trouble. I had a real concern that what I'd managed to get in place wasn't going to be quick enough or good enough or anything in fact because I just didn't know what was coming from that phone call. I still remember that feeling really well. It was like, it was a bit of a void. We're sitting in no man's land knowing that we'd made comms but not knowing what they were able to pull off and what was going

to transpire. The sun's rays hammered down on the two men as time seems to pass slower and slower. But then, finally, after an hour and a half of waiting, John's little phone, still hanging in there on its final bar of charge, starts ringing. Remarkably, it's caught a bit of signal again. This time it's Mark's dad on the line. He tells John that a rescue helicopter is on its way from Durban to search for them. Help is coming, if they can both just hold on. But by now Mark's condition is deteriorating rapidly. He was in a significant amount of pain.

I couldn't administer any pain relief. We didn't have any of that. I remember recovering a jacket of his from the plane because as he went into shock, he started suffering the symptoms of getting cold and hot. So I managed to find his jacket, which I remember putting under his head because I thought he was really struggling to breathe. So I put him on his side, I put him in the recovery position. I also at one point managed to find one of the silver blankets, the emergency blankets, which I covered him in. So I covered him in the jacket, put the blanket over him.

Also found a water bottle. I knew he was dehydrating, so some points along the way, I managed to get him to drink water with much difficulty because his lips and that were swollen up. He started to look more like a football than a face. I didn't know if he had a cracked skull, but he was compass-mentored. I assumed that he had facial injuries,

not brain injuries at that stage. Another hour slithers by, then a third. Higher and higher, the sun climbs in the sky, the temperature brutally increasing as it does. John does his best to keep busy. He spreads out a large orange blanket on the ground, attempting to make the crash site more visible. If the chopper is coming all the way from Durban, 200 kilometers away, it'll only have enough fuel for a brief search of the area. Minutes, not hours. And Mark

might not survive long enough to wait for a second rescue attempt. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Rogers Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fares, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday, anywhere along the Go network. And the Weekday Group Passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go Pass ahead of the show at Gotransit.com slash tickets. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavours.

So what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Finally, after more than four hours, John hears the telltale sound of rotor blades in the distance. He looks up to see the burly outline of an Atlas Oryx helicopter, a 15-meter-long military chopper that he recognizes from his time in the army. But as the Oryx comes closer, it's clear that the pilot hasn't spotted John and Mark. No sooner had I located it visually than it turned and went up a valley to the south of us, and that valley

could have taken him the best part of 10 or 15 minutes to scout. Anyway they came back out of that valley and that's when I first knew that they were really struggling to find us. John has just one final trick up his sleeve or rather in his pocket. Quickly he pulls it out. It's a tiny signaling mirror salvaged from the wreck of the plane. It glints in the bright sunshine. It's not much bigger than a coaster or a CD. Right now this tiny bit of equipment is their best chance of making it off the mountain alive. I think it's called a heliograph. It has a little art piece, it's got a small hole in the middle of a fairly small mirror, something you can hold in your own hands, probably six inches above, five inches. As I saw them come into view the second time, that had been 10 or 15 kilometres away, I reckon, in a straight line, I again moved out to where I was pretty exposed and I used this little mirror and literally

used the hole as a peep site and put the helicopter in the center of that thing. And I just sat there with the determination of knowing that if I stayed long enough that eventually set. enough that eventually said John grips the heliograph in his hands trying to angle it in just the right way bright flashes of white light bounce again and again off its surface but away in the distance the helicopter seems to be moving further away until John thinks he sees a change in direction. A few seconds later he's sure of it. It's coming their way. I just stayed there for a good five or seven minutes and yeah it brought that little shiny mirror brought that chopper right

to our feet. Closer and closer the chopper comes into land. The heavy slope of the crash site will make a proper landing impossible. But the rescuers improvise. The pilot manages to get just one wheel onto the ground. Good enough. Then, with the rotors still turning, a medic jumps down and begins tending to Mark's injuries. By now, John's friend is in a very bad way, barely able to speak. The medic fits in with an IV and hands John an oxygen mask.

He checks them both for spinal injuries. Assured that they can be moved safely, John and Mark are then bundled into the aircraft. Before long they are airborne once again. We were flown to a town called Peter Maritzburg. They closed the main street off. They landed this big military helicopter in the middle of the street. An ambulance was there ready to pick us up and we were taken away, taken up to the ER department and assessed. What Mark suffered was severe facial fractures. Both his jaws were broken. One of his eye sockets was quite severely damaged. When they assessed me, it was literally just whiplash. So they strapped on a neck brace and I spent a couple of hours in a hospital bed and was discharged that afternoon.

All things considered, John has gotten off extremely lightly. And while Mark suffered far more extensive injuries, in time he too is able to make a full recovery. John says he recognizes how lucky the two of them were to cheat death in the Drakensbergs, but he tries to move on as quickly as he can to get back to his life. I don't know, I just kind of was a bit the same old, same old. I just knew how to get on with it. I wasn't not allowed to fly again. I was quite happy to fly again. And in fact, the funny story behind this was that I think the very next week we were flying overseas with my wife and some friends. And every time we landed,

everyone would cheer and say, one out of two safe landings. And give me a big round of applause. one out of two safe landings, and give me a big round of applause. It is a mistake, in hindsight, it is a mistake to fly in the mountains in a small plane. Certainly it was a mistake in not knowing or understanding that the weather system's better. The reality of the life we were living at that stage was that there was risk involved in doing what we did.

Obviously we never planned to wind up in the position we did. Certainly it was a rain check. It certainly made me, my young family, more aware of the risks we were taking. Ironically, we got those cattle back many, many weeks later and through no aerial observation whatsoever, but through information on the ground,

I think we got 18 of the 20 cattle back which was yeah great results It could have ended very badly, but it was the silver lining at the end of a very long difficult story But the realities of farming in South Africa begin to take their toll on John and his family. As the years go by, the scourge of stock theft shows no sign of abating, and in 2015 they decide a change is needed. The family starts a new life, a new country. Though he never forgets South Africa, his near-death experience, and the lessons he's learned from both.

We left in 2015 and now live in Australia. It's a different lifestyle, the safety and security is quite different here. And we don't have to face these kind of challenges. But yeah, at the same time, they are what they are and they've forged who we are. And as I've got older, I've realised that, yeah, it's shaped us, certainly moulded who we were, who I am. The survival, I was quite proud actually. I wrote, I still remember writing a letter to the owners of the plane describing not only how proud I was of how I did what I needed to do, but also how proud I was of what Mark did in his part of getting us onto the ground.

I wasn't sad about it and I wasn't distraught about it. I was probably more proud that we had actually learned through the experience of what we did. It was a miracle, it was a miraculous event, and then beyond that we saved ourselves. Next time on Real Survival Stories, we meet cave diver Martin Robson. In 2012, he is in a remote region of southwest Russia exploring the depths of Blue Lake, a murky, fog-laden body of water which holds a mystery beneath its surface. Martin is experienced and cool-headed, but hundreds of feet below the surface,

a mysterious, invisible, excruciating force suddenly overwhelms him. Semi-paralyzed and sinking underwater, Martin will go through an ordeal that will ultimately last not for hours, but days. That's next time on Real Survival Stories.