Hintons Abroad: The Eagle has Landed

Now that it has passed, we can tell the whole story.

Oh man, it was hard keeping secrets.

First, a bit of background. We live on Rosslyn’s campus, which is very close to both the UN complex and the US Embassy compound. About two weeks ago, in the midst of all of the frantic preparations for President Obama’s visit, we received an email from one of the head honchos here on campus. We found out that the embassy wanted to use several of the Rosslyn fields as a possible landing site, and that they were going to do a practice run a couple of days later. It was emphasized that we were only one of several potential sites and that we couldn’t tell anybody. However, we were allowed to go out and watch.

That Tuesday, we went out, sat next to the gym, and watched as three Osprey helicopters and two Blackhawks painted in Presidential livery landed right in front of us, scrubbing the dirt from the track and flinging tree branches to the ground. They stayed on the ground for maybe five minutes, blades turning, and then whipped back into the sky. We thought, “Wow, that was amazing! If only the President were actually landing here.”

Waiting for the practice landing.

Osprey coming in to land.

Later in the week, a couple of days before Obama arrived in Kenya, we received another email explaining that the campus would be locked down for the majority of the day on Saturday in case the President did land here.

On Saturday, we got up early, armed ourselves with coffee, juice, and muffins, and headed up to campus-right past the Kenyan police transport truck loaded with soldiers parked right outside our house.

Several hours later, and after the campus was circled for close to an hour by two Kenyan choppers and two other American Blackhawks, we saw the distinctive shape of three Ospreys approaching the campus to land, followed by the two Presidential Blackhawks. It doesn’t matter what your politics are; coming this close to such a historic event is something to marvel at. The atmosphere was electric all day. We had to explain to several Kenyans that this was special, unusual, and that we would probably never get this close to a president in the US (not that close, though, did not see the man himself-just his chopper, armored car, and entourage). Probably more exciting for us was how close we were to the action (they landed 100ft from our house) and conversations with the pilots and communications staff.

This time, they shut down their rotors and stayed for about three hours while the President gave a speech at the UN compound. Everybody took pictures of the helicopters, even though the security guys kept us back. One of the pilots who came over to talk to us said that it had taken them 2 months on a ship to get to Kenya, and now they had to wait for the ship to come back to pick them up!

We told the new people that we don’t just roll out the choppers for anybody, and that they shouldn’t get used to this sort of thing. They all laughed. The presidential motorcade came back, they loaded up, took off, and suddenly, everything was quiet again. As we walked back to our house, we saw that the Kenyan soldiers were all gone as well, and it looked like any other slow Saturday on campus.

All in all, it was an amazing and unexpected experience for all of us, and one that we will remember for a long time. Hopefully these pictures will give you a small taste of what it was like to be here, even though they can’t capture the volume and the power of the helicopters.