{"id":30557,"date":"2016-11-24T01:21:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T01:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/british-pilot-maurice-kirk-missing-in-africa\/"},"modified":"2016-11-24T01:21:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-24T01:21:08","slug":"british-pilot-maurice-kirk-missing-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/british-pilot-maurice-kirk-missing-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"British pilot Maurice Kirk missing in Africa rally ‘found alive’"},"content":{"rendered":"

{A 72-year-old British pilot who went missing while attempting to fly a 1940s plane the length of Africa has been found alive, his son has said.}<\/p>\n

Maurice Kirk, who lives in Bristol, was part of a vintage air rally flying from Crete to Cape Town.<\/p>\n

A search and rescue operation was launched after the aircraft went missing on Monday somewhere between Sudan and Ethiopia.<\/p>\n

Mr Kirk’s son, Charles Kirk, said he had been told he had now been found.
\nVintage Air Rally confirmed he has been found and said: “All participants including the hitherto ‘missing’ Maurice Kirk are safe and accounted for.”<\/p>\n

The pilot had continued to fly despite being asked to withdraw from the Vintage Air Rally event after two engine failures and a lack of navigational equipment.<\/p>\n

Mr Kirk, who also has links to Taunton in Somerset and the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales, went missing on a three-hour leg of the cross-African flight from southern Sudan into western Ethiopia.<\/p>\n

Organisers of the Vintage Air Rally said he had been asked to withdraw from the rally because of a lack of satellite tracking or a working compass on his 1943 Piper Cub plane.<\/p>\n

He previously reported suffering two engine failures, but had apparently decided to continue.<\/p>\n

On its Facebook page, Vintage Air Rally said earlier that Mr Kirk departed Ad-Damazin, Sudan at approximately 14:00 local time (11:00 GMT) on Monday on the three hour flight to Gambella, Ethiopia.<\/p>\n

The statement added that Mr Kirk had sent no radio communications or satellite tracking at any time during the flight and his location had been unknown.<\/p>\n

Organisers said they believed he made a precautionary landing before sunset.<\/p>\n

The rally describes itself as “following in the footsteps of the pioneering flights in the 1920s” connecting “some of the most beautiful and evocative points in Africa”.<\/p>\n

{{Who is Maurice Kirk?}}<\/p>\n

Once described as the “bad boy” of the veterinarian profession, the Bristol University graduate and self-dubbed “Flying Vet” is also an amateur pilot and a former drinking friend of the late actor Oliver Reed.<\/p>\n

Since 1995, he has had a string of court appearances including for hurling abuse at police while he tended to an injured dog on a beach and on another occasion for refusing to give a sample when stopped on suspicion of drink-driving.<\/p>\n

He was kicked out of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for “disgraceful conduct” in 2002 following his court cases.<\/p>\n

Most famously he was arrested for landing a replica World War One biplane on private land near American President George W Bush’s Texan Ranch.<\/p>\n

\"Maurice<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{A 72-year-old British pilot who went missing while attempting to fly a 1940s plane the length of Africa has been found alive, his son has said.} Maurice Kirk, who lives in Bristol, was part of a vintage air rally flying from Crete to Cape Town. A search and rescue operation was launched after the aircraft […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-30557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30557"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=30557"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=30557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}