Alfredo Bravo had landed aeroplanes in a lot of sticky situations – as a bush pilot in Chilean Patagonia and as a commercial pilot in rural China – but it was a singular voice floating over the radio waves from air traffic control in Santiago, Chile, that set his heart aflutter, upended his concentration and reshuffled his life.
It was the 1990s and, although he was still young, Bravo had held pretty much every low-level flying gig possible. He had dumped plumes of orange chemicals on to forest fires and flown surveillance missions to detect illegal fireplaces polluting the already smoggy Santiago airspace. He had completed hundreds of flights with photo crews operating a big Hasselblad camera as they mapped tree farms, calculating the heights of trees in a forest owned by a timber company involved in a low-level guerrilla war with the Indigenous Mapuche. As a pilot for the company, Bravo was a conspicuous outsider who slept in the fields amid the Indigenous communities, and worked alone in the hangar. But Bravo had a pair of aces up his sleeve.
