Family mourns its beautiful little girls

These heartbreaking images of the youngest victims of Sunday's air crash were taken on Saturday, a day before the two planes smashed into a mountain, killing all 11 passengers and both pilots.

The Doak sisters, Alexandra, 10, and Maddison, 7, had flown into South Africa on August 6 for a holiday.

The sisters were accompanied by their mother, Bronwyn, and their four-year-old brother.

Their father, Andrew, flew to South Africa on Friday and was scheduled to attend a conference in Pretoria yesterday and today.

The photograph of the girls in the doomed Albatross aircraft was taken by Guy Leitch, of SA Flyer magazine, who was in an aircraft alongside them as they flew to Tzaneen, Limpopo, for an air show on Saturday.

At the air show that day, according to a family friend, the girls were ''playing and dancing and having so much fun''.

The family is originally from Modderfontein, north east of Johannesburg, but Andrew Doak, an information technology specialist, moved the family to Doha, in the Gulf state of Qatar, in September after getting a good job.

A family friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Bronwyn and the children decided to holiday in South Africa because all shops and entertainments in Doha were closed between 6am and 6pm because of the Islamic fasting month, Ramadaan.

"She's asking herself why she came for the holiday here and why she did not just stay in Qatar . it's a very difficult time for all of them," said the friend.

The friend said the couple were battling to deal with the trauma of the deaths and had not yet told their youngest son.

"He has been asking when his sisters will be back and she [Bronwyn] doesn't know how to answer."

The family friend said Andrew's eldest daughter, from a previous relationship, who is 15 and lives in Johannesburg with her mother, was "devastated" by the news of her sisters' death. She wanted to go to Tzaneen yesterday but her mother took her to a doctor. She had been medicated and was in bed after hearing the news.

The friend described Alexandra and Maddison as "beautiful girls" and said "they were good girls and they were much loved".

It has emerged that the pilots of the two Albatross light aircraft - Brian Gruar (Bronwyn's uncle) and Peter Gildenhuys - were flying by sight when they crashed.

The girls were accompanying Gruar to the air show.

The wreckage of the two planes was spotted in the Lekgalameetse mountains yesterday morning by a search and rescue helicopter about 40km from the Limpopo town of Tzaneen.

Late yesterday, police and Civil Aviation Authority investigators were still busy removing the bodies and collecting evidence at the first crash site, about 150m below the wreck of the second plane, which crashed at an altitude of about 1570m above sea level.

Hannes Steyn, head of Disaster Management for Mopani municipality, confirmed that the "planes were flying in formation ... and flew directly into the cliff".

Steyn said there had been no distress calls from the pilots and no flight plan had been filed because there were no air traffic control services at the landing strip from which they took off.

He said the last communication with the planes had been at about the time they took off, about 10.20am on Sunday.

The Civil Aviation Authority confirmed yesterday that the pilots were flying on visual flight rules.

Specified by the Civil Aviation Authority, the rules govern how a pilot flies when the weather is good enough for him to see the ground.

Once weather conditions worsen beyond the stipulated minimum, instrument flight rules apply.

Special training in the use of instrument flight rules is required, and a flight plan must be filed if a pilot intends flying on instruments.

Johan Schoeman, a commercial pilot, said that when flying on visual flight rules pilots had to "maintain visual contact with the ground" - which was a risk in a mountainous area such as that around Tzaneen.

Though the Civil Aviation Authority has said it is still trying to determine exactly what the weather conditions were in the area of the accident, it is known that cloud cover was at least four-eighths in the area.

Visual flight rules do not allow a pilot to fly in more than three-eighths cloud cover.

Schoeman said formation flying required a lot of "focus and concentration".

But the relative said: ''No one can point fingers at the pilots. The girls are gone and nothing is going to bring them back.''

Steyn yesterday said every effort was being made to ensure that the bodies were removed from the mountain "as kindly as possible".

"It's very emotional ... I'm constantly getting calls from family wanting to know exactly what we are doing," he said.

SA Air Force helicopters began returning members of the search and rescue operation to their base at about 4pm yesterday. The media were not given access to the crash site.