04.09.2003
From Café Wilder to Kabul

Exactly one year ago today, a Piper Colt propeller-driven plane built in 1961 took off from a field near the Danish town of Lille Skensved heading for Kabul. The plane is now back on Danish soil.

Eighteen months ago, Simone Kærn was having a coffee at a café in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn district and reading the day’s issue of Danish daily Politiken. The paper carried an article from Afghanistan written by Danish writer and journalist Carsten Jensen. That article changed Simone’s life.

In the wake of the war, Carsten Jensen had written a moving account of a 16-year-old Afghan girl whose greatest wish was to become a pilot.

“I saw it as a symbol of freedom – the dream of flying out into the world after having been closed in for so many years. It was a beautiful thought, and right away I was ready to make her dream come true,” Simone recollects about that special morning at the Café Wilder. It was the first chapter of an adventure that took her to places and countries out of the ordinary.

The latest event, so far, took place yesterday, Wednesday 3 September, when Simone’s Piper Colt rolled into Hangar 144 at Copenhagen Airport. The light, propeller-driven plane arrived without much attention, inside a Swedish truck, and with the wings demounted. Such an arrival must have been an anticlimax for a plane that had been through so much during the past year.

However, Simone Kærn, the owner of the plane, was exhilarated to see her darling plane again for the first time in two months.

“Love,” answered Simone with a big smile to the question of how she felt about seeing her plane again.

“Just imagine how this small plane has carried me over high mountains. Of course, you build up a very special relationship,” Simone added, gazing longingly into the truck’s end trailer, where the wings of her plane were carefully tied up.

Heading for Kabul

The red and white Piper Colt was trucked to Copenhagen from Gothenburg, where it had been displayed at an art museum for the past three months. Art and flying is a combination that is key to the life of 34-year-old Simone. She is a graduate of the Art College of Copenhagen and the College of Fine Art in London. As a student, Simone took flying lessons, and this has brought her to far away places.

Thus, the Politiken article was the start of an incredible adventure, in which Simone and her boyfriend Magnus Bejmar took off for Afghanistan six months later, with the goal of teaching the 16-year-old girl from Carsten Jensen’s article to fly. In early September 2002, the light, single-engine plane took off from the field outside Lille Skensved heading for Kabul.

It took 30 stops and three months before Simone could land her Piper Colt in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

“We waited an entire month in eastern Turkey to get permission to fly over Iran,” Magnus Bejmar comments, adding that it would hardly have been possible without diplomatic assistance from the Danish embassy in Tehran.

Copenhagen Airports also lent the couple a helping hand – not only by offering space for the plane in Hangar 144, but also when, in April, the two globetrotters were setting out on the last leg of their journey back to Denmark. They had ended up in the international airport of Cologne, Germany, and could not afford to pay a huge take-off fee. Vice President Hans Christian Stigaard of Copenhagen Airports, who had followed the project from the very start, then contacted his colleagues at Cologne and negotiated a good deal; as a result, the plane touched down at Lille Skensved in late April.

“Although competition is fierce in our industry, we are always prepared to help each other. There is a great sense of community in the aviation industry,” said Stigaard, who was on the spot to greet the plane when it returned to Hangar 144.

Mission accomplished

Simone Kærn and Magnus Bejmar spent a couple of months in Kabul. They managed to find 16-year-old Farjal and, what is more important, they succeeded in teaching her the art of flying.

Mission accomplished for the two adventurous Scandinavians.

Magnus Bejmar, a 38-year-old Swede, also learnt to fly during the journey. Otherwise, his main job was to capture the events on video. Later, the footage will be made into a documentary. Both Simone Kærn and Magnus Bejmar are busy working on that project at the moment, and the return of the plane to Copenhagen Airport last Wednesday was therefore filmed intensively.

It is not yet certain when the plane will leave Hangar 144, but Simone definitely wants to fly her 42-year-old Piper Colt again.

“We have many dreams. One of them is to fly down over Africa,” says Simone, before turning her attention to helping her darling plane out of the trailer.