"Look out!" yells Anatoly, the cargo manager, pressing his index finger against the windshield above the cockpit console. But Grigory Vanayev, the pilot, has already spotted the other aircraft's position. It is climbing from an east-northeasterly position, heading straight for them.

Vanayev reacts instinctively, pushing all gas levers forward, and pulling the steering column against his stomach. Thanks to its four 4,000 HP engines, the Antonov-12 aircraft banks, roaring, to the side. The two men watch as the other plane's lights flash past, directly beneath their left wing. They hear a loud noise, almost as if someone has hit the roof of the cabin with a stick, and Anatoly and Grigory instinctively flinch, half expecting their aircraft to come apart at the seams.

But nothing comes apart. The sturdy old Antonov is still flying. Grigory Vanayev allow the aircraft to descend into a right turn, then cautiously straighten out, steering towards the runway at Gulu with the plane's nose. "Gulu control," he growls into the on-board microphone, "we are in distress."

No response. The lights are already out in the control tower at Gulu airport in northern Uganda. The plane touches down on the runway at precisely three minutes after midnight.

A section of the tail wing has broken off in the crash, but otherwise the plane has suffered no damage. Grigory says: "If I weren't an atheist, I would think that my guardian angel has been working overtime."

A witness later said that the plane that caused the accident had landed in Gulu at around 11:00 p.m. With the engines still running, the crew had unloaded heavy crates on the runway and transferred them to a large truck.

The next morning, Vanayev found a container in the grass next to the runway. It had apparently fallen off the truck as it was being loaded. Shells littered the ground around the container, which was labeled "Product of the Czech Republic."

Not-So-Guardian Angel

Four weeks later, at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River, Grigory Vanayev's guardian angel must have had the night off. During takeoff, Vanayev's plane, bound for Burao on the Somali plains, suddenly lost power in two engines. The antiquated plane swerved past the end of the runway and turned over. The aircraft was a write-off, but there were no injuries. Vanayev says it is possible that the spark plugs were responsible for the accident. He had removed them from a scrapped Antonov in Kisangani, but had neglected to clean them properly, as he should have done, before installing them in his own engines. Now the pilot without a plane is living in a two-star hotel in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, waiting for a new job -- or a loan to buy a new plane.

The emirate of Sharjah isn't such a bad place for unemployed bush pilots who are none too cautious with spark plugs. It's an affluent and cosmopolitan. It also has cheap gasoline and excellent connections to Africa and Central Asia.

Vanayev is an experienced pilot, with more than 7,000 flight hours on ten different types of aircraft under his belt. He worked for three years as a cargo pilot in Central and East Africa. In the morning, he would fly the mail, beer and petroleum from Bukavi to Mbuji-Mayi and, in the afternoon, diamonds and precious metals from Mbuji-Mayi to Entebbe. The next day's cargo might consist of unprocessed coffee and missionaries bound for Mombasa. He says that he has even mastered steep approaches in corkscrew curves to land at destinations in risky environments, pilots' jargon for war zones.

Vanayev's air cargo business was competitive for many years, mainly because of its low maintenance and personnel costs. The pilot was his own agent and his own mechanic. The cargo manager handled the bookkeeping and made sandwiches for any passengers Vanayev might be carrying.

The skies over Africa are filled with hundreds of old Antonovs, Tupolevs, Yakovlevs and Ilyushins, most of them from the former Soviet Union. In Moscow, one of these hardy old juggernauts can be had for as little as $30,000, and if all goes well, the buyer will have recouped his investment within less than a year.

The veterans in their flying crates are tough men and have, for the most part, seen better days. They work abroad because the pay at home is so miserable. In chaotic Africa, they now handle many routes previously served by national airlines. And there are so many of them that Russian has replaced English as the predominant language of radio communication in parts of Angola and the Congo.

A Crash for more Cash

All too often, Russian and Ukrainian bush pilots are willing to take risks at the cost of safety. The trade publication Aviation Week estimates that a passenger's chances of being killed in a plane crash are 16 to 25 times higher than in Europe. In May 2003, 150 passengers fell out of a Ukrainian Ilyushin-76 at 7,000 feet, when the plane's rear cargo hatch opened after takeoff from the Congolese capital of Kinshasa.

These safety problems are not because Russian aircraft are less robust than Western models. On the contrary, these workhorses can survive the kind of bumpy landing that would probably wreak havoc on an Airbus or Boeing aircraft. Moreover, the safety regulations in sub-Saharan Africa are no less stringent than in other parts of the world. But what's lacking is a regulatory authority that enforces compliance with these regulations. Oil leaks, worn-out tires, cracked windshields, drunken crews -- almost everything is tolerated for the right price.

Vanayev knows of a fellow Russian who rattles around Angola in a two-engine Tupolev, even though his only prior flight experience upon arriving in Africa was with a smaller double-decker crop duster.

African governments often do not use the fly-over fees they collect to improve aviation safety, which is what they are meant for. Indeed, reliable monitoring of air space only occurs in the northern and southern parts of the continent, essentially leaving the region between southern Egypt and Zimbabwe in the dark. Moreover, most aircraft used on regional routes are outfitted with technology from the 1960s and 1970s. Pilots attempt to maintain contact with aircraft approaching them or intersecting their routes via VHF radio transmission. Many pilots navigate purely by sight when flying during the day. Others would rather not to be seen or heard, switching off their radios and position signals to save on fly-over fees.

The most common cause of accidents is overloading. In Africa, an aircraft is only considered full when it can hold absolutely nothing else. In December 2003, 139 people were killed off the coast of Cotonou in Benin when an ancient Boeing 727 crashed into the ocean after takeoff. The two Libyan pilots had initially refused to take off when they saw that the aircraft was overloaded, and were only convinced to continue with the flight when airport employees lied to them, claiming that some of the luggage had been unloaded again.

The Agent of Death

In Mwanza, a town on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, several large cargo planes have crashed in recent years because they were overloaded with fish bound for Croatia. Nile perch from Lake Victoria are a top seller in Europe. On the return journey to Africa, the aircraft often carry loads of weapons and ammunition in sealed crates. Until recently, Victor Bout, the Russian king of weapons dealers, was the key figure in this business. In the 1990s, his aircraft brought weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan and their opponents in the Northern Alliance. Later he also supplied Angola's Unita rebels as well as the forces of Liberian gun-toting despot Charles Taylor. Bout then shifted the focus of his business operation to the Congo, Sudan, Rwanda and Uganda.

In 1992, Bout purchased three well-preserved second-hand Antonovs for $120,000. At first, he flew flowers from South Africa to the Persian Gulf, but soon he turned to more sensitive cargo: weapons, ammunition, diamonds and precious metals.

Today Bout, who a British diplomat calls the "agent of death," is thought to live in Russian again. But the police leave him alone, because he still has friends in Moscow's secret service.

Africa's small no-name carriers do their best to stay out of the arms trade. They prefer to leave that to the larger carriers. But everyone is forced to make compromises from time to time, says Grigory Vanayev from Nizhny Novgorod.