It is the strange story of Hitler’s private pilot, a wandering English engineer and the first black woman or woman of any race for that matter to be qualified in building light planes.

In an inconspicuous clearing 50km east of Ghana’s capital, Accra, a group of young women aged 16-20 are sliding shut the heavy metal doors of an airport hangar. They are students at AvTech, the Aviation and Technology Academy Ghana, a school with the unusual aim of bringing light aviation to impoverished rural Ghana.

“What people haven’t realised is the use of aviation in developing nations,” says chief flying instructor Jonathan Porter, or Captain Yaw as local children call him, using a typical Ghanaian name.

Porter is an English engineer who brought his own light aircraft to Ghana in a shipping container, together with his household belongings.

“Flying has always been seen as the domain of Americans and Europeans, but I saw clearly the need for light aviation which didn’t focus on expats,” he says. “People just don’t realise what aeroplanes can do affordably.”

The potential for light aircraft to play a role in development has long been recognised in Ghana. In 1962 independence leader Kwame Nkrumah founded sub-Saharan Africa’s first flying school, after he formed an unlikely friendship with Hanna Reitsch, Hitler’s private pilot and a record-breaking aviation hero of wartime Nazi propaganda.

After the war Reitsch, who refused to renounce Hitler and was poorly received in postwar Germany, lived in Ghana, where she helped encourage a generation of Ghanaians to embrace aviation.

By arrangement with Guardian