December 31st

A Happy New Year to everybody!

As you may have gathered, I didn’t send out a weekly news last week, partly because I didn’t get around to it and partly because I knew that there’d be a lot of WhatsApp or Skype conversations anyway. Actually talking always beats emails, texts or other forms of messaging.

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We had some particularly sad news just after Christmas. The daughter, Vicki (née Butler), of the MAF General Manager who was here when we first arrived, Gil Butler, died in childbirth. It’s strange that having lived in PNG where the risks of childbirth, and maternal and baby deaths are so common, when the same thing happens in a developed country with excellent medical facilities, it is much more of a shock.

Vicki taught Peter and Philip piano, and somewhere at home I have some video of her singing a duet with Nicki at one of our staff conferences. Our thoughts and prayers are with Gil and Elaine, her brother Cameron, and of course her husband and family whom we’ve never met.

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I find that I could easily get accustomed to three day working weeks. Maybe I’m getting lazy, though I never want for things to do. The largest flower bed in the garden is looking as good as it has ever looked after the weeding, replanting and cutting back that I’ve done over the last couple of months. Yesterday saw me working at the back of the bed trying to reduce the amount of a large, deeply rooted grass that loves growing in the middle of other plants where it’s hard to get at.

One job I didn’t get around to yesterday, or over the Christmas holiday, is doing some more crate construction. I did buy some more battens yesterday, only to find I’d chosen a slightly smaller size than I intended. I don’t think it will matter providing I use them on the ends and lids of the crates, and being smaller it will make the crates lighter, which is always an advantage.

Cutting these battens to length and screwing the first crates together is on the agenda for tomorrow, when I’m also looking forward to using my new cordless drill for the first time.

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Today, 31st December 2017, is officially my last day as Flight Operations Manager. Tomorrow Brad Venter officially takes over, though for the time being I remain the official Senior Person accountable to CASA PNG. This is because I’ll cover for Brad when he’s on leave during the middle and second half of the year. As I said to him, he has the authority and I take the blame.

For the next couple of months there are some FOM projects I remain responsible for, some long-outstanding tasks to deal with from my other job as Twin Otter Fleet Training Captain, and obviously providing backup for Brad as and when he needs it. Then, ten weeks from today, we arrive back in the UK. I have no doubt that 2018 will go more quickly than 2017 has, but I hope that by this time next year we will have at least some idea of what we’ll be doing in 2019!

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I was hoping to clock my total flying hours over 11,000 before year’s end, but as of today I’m 0.5 hour short. Never mind, instead of rolling over on the last flight of 2017, I’ll do it on the first flight of 2018, which is scheduled for next Thursday.

December has been a lean month for me flying-wise. There’s been quite a lot of aircraft maintenance, as well as other things I’ve been involved in, that have reduced my opportunities or availability. Plus, of course, the holiday itself which has taken a couple of flying days out of the month. Maybe now I’m handing over the FOM role, I might, just might, have a bit more availability to fly.

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There has been the usual plethora of home-made firecrackers producing regular bangs through both day and evening (fortunately not too much during the night). I’m told they’re made out of match heads, though the particular method and formula I don’t know. Whether there are any consequential burns, eye injuries or similar I have no idea.

The drinking club up the road has also been noisy again, and even as I write, 15:50 on a Sunday afternoon, there is a thumping beat emanating from it. It’s not so loud at the moment that it would disturb sleep, though most nights recently we’ve used ear plugs, but the incessant noise makes us yearn for peace and quiet.

Very often there’s a lot of noise at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with firecrackers, sometimes fireworks, and banging on fences or anything else that’s noisy and to hand. Since neither Nicki or I see very much difference between this night and any other (what a pair of old bores!) we hope to sleep through it all.

Whether you see the New Year in, or sleep it in, may 2018 bring increasing faith, joy, encouragement and interest.

December 17th

I am pleased to say that we didn’t have another perfect storm this week.

After a lot of effort and fault-finding by our engineers it looks like the electrical fault on the Twin Otter has been solved. We’ve thought that in the past and it has recurred, so it’s not absolutely certain, but after several fault-free flying days we are optimistic.

One of the Caravans had a problem with an oil leak, which was finally tracked down to a propeller seal. Fortunately that didn’t take long to fix, but there was concern at one point that the aircraft could be out of the air for a while. Pilots don’t like oil leaks as they can lead to engine failures!

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This was a highly social week …

Dave & Karina Mills (Dave is the doctor at Kompiam hospital) and three of their children stayed with us over Monday and Tuesday nights. They were flying to Australia on Wednesday and had planned to drive into Mount Hagen to catch their flight. However, torrential rain over several nights caused four landslides along the road which made it impassable. Last Sunday night Dave called asking what we could do to help. As there was a Twin Otter passing close to Kompiam with plenty of room on board on Monday, it was quite an easy programme change to fit the extra landing in to collect them.

On Tuesday Dave & Karina took us out for a meal at “The Sweet Spot”, a restaurant just up the road from us that opened earlier this year. Previously it was called, “The Curry House” but that business closed and was taken over by the present owner, whose mother runs a trout fish farm on the slopes of Mount Wilhelm. I enjoyed a very nice smoked trout omelette, Nicki enjoyed stir-fried vegetables with mushrooms.

It was our turn to be on hospitality for visitors on Wednesday and had four guests for the evening meal. Actually, two weren’t visitors, but were residents without their wives for different reasons and who were very happy to be fed and watered.

Tom & Salome Hoey, accompanied by Norm Turtle who used to work for CRMF and was our next-door neighbour when we lived in Goroka, came through Hagen on Thursday on their way back to Australia. The Cessna Caravan had been scheduled to collect them, but because of the oil leak, the flight I was doing was diverted to pick them up. In the three weeks or so they’d been at Mougolu they’d repaired the 31 year-old hydro-electric plant and had it operational for the first time in over a year.

As it was Tom’s 87th birthday, and Salome’s 81st was three days before, we had a party for them that evening which both surprised and delighted them. Tom said that the first time he flew with MAF was 51 years ago, which is a record I doubt that anybody else still regularly visiting PNG can beat.

Friday gave us a chance to accept an invitation to eat with VP and Nimmi, a new couple to join us from India. VP is giving direction and impetus to our strategic planning. Both are doctors, but VP has been involved in the management of a large group of hospitals before he came to MAF. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised knowing the sort of work VP was doing, but he knows Kim Tan, a friend of mine from school days. Small world!

I should explain that VP is short for Varghese Philip, but he’s always called, VP. I should also add that it was a very nice meal, genuinely Indian.

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Yesterday, to recover from the social whirl, I did a 10km run, cut down and cut up a tree, trimmed the hedge and cut some timber for packing crates. Following all this physical exertion I collapsed into bed early with shoulders and upper arms complaining of abuse. Today has been rather gentler.

Another task we did yesterday was to put our Christmas tree up, though haven’t bothered with other decorations. It does at least remind us of the time of year even if the other cues are absent.

December 10th

Thursday was a Perfect Storm of a day.

• There was a prolonged power cut over Wednesday/Thursday night, and we arrived at work to find that there was a fault with the main generator. No lights and no telephones. Later in the day the standby IT generator failed, so all the main servers went offline, so no access to any of the main MAF information servers and no internet, no email. Of course, the loss of power also meant no printing, scanning or anything else requiring unimpeded flow of electrons.

• The weather was appalling; not a storm, but low cloud and rain over a widespread area of the country from a bit west of Mount Hagen and covering most of the east of the country. There were some important airstrip checks planned so that service can be resumed to communities which haven’t had an aircraft land since the C208 Caravan was introduced to the Sepik area. The delayed departure of the training pilot from Hagen jeopardised whether the checks would get done, especially as the aircraft to be used was scheduled for routine maintenance the next day.

• One of the Twin Otters has had a recurrent, but intermittent, electrical fault that Engineering is having all sorts of problems locating and correcting. The fault occurred again when the aircraft was at a remote airstrip. We all agreed that it wasn’t a safety issue and that the aircraft could fly back, but then the airstrip was covered by cloud and it couldn’t take off. Fortunately, when the cloud cleared the problem didn’t recur as the aircraft started up, so it did eventually arrive in Hagen for maintenance. The aircraft is still here as the problem has still not been located.

• After half a day the main generator was brought back online. As everything was switched back on the main uninterrupted power supply in IT blew up. The positive news was that it didn’t exactly blow up, and was later found to still be serviceable, but the electrical problems had caused a cable in the main building wiring to short out and produce some sparks.

• The Finance Manager went home sick.

• Court papers were served on MAF by a disgruntled ex-employee stating an intention to sue us and demanding his job back. His employment was terminated in 2006! Is there a Statute of Limitations here?

• In the evening, we heard that there was concern at the New Tribes centre, just east of Goroka and where several MAF children go to school. There had been an adults v children soccer game and the local landowner, who gifted the land to New Tribes for their centre, had dropped dead from a heart attack during the game. Needless to say it wasn’t pleasant for anybody and initially there was uncertainty about when some MAF youngsters would arrive home. There wasn’t any trouble and, fortunately, they arrived home safe and sound, just rather late.

I was reminded of the following:

I was sitting at work one day feeling rather glum. “Cheer up”, my colleagues said, “things could always be worse!” So, I took their advice and cheered up, and sure enough, things did get worse.

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My one day of flying this week was on Wednesday when I spent a very enjoyable and welcome day out of the office, following an Operations Team meeting all day Tuesday, and a Leadership Team meeting for half of Thursday (held outside in a covered communal area because it was too dark inside and the air conditioning wasn’t working due to the power cut).

The flight went from Hagen to Wewak and then to an airstrip we don’t go to very often called Nugwaia. Brad Venter, whom I was flying with, hadn’t been to Nugwaia in the Twin Otter before, so as it isn’t the easiest of airstrips, it gave me the chance to check him in there.

All in all it was a busy and demanding week.

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Yesterday I relaxed by cutting up sheets of plywood ready to start assembling some packing crates. In the evening we had a movie night with a full lounge of friends, watching “Lion”, based on a true story of a young boy in India who accidentally gets on a train and transported 1600km across the sub-continent. It’s well worth seeing.

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Christmas is approaching, decorations are up at work and in the shops (so I’m told, I haven’t been in any shop for a couple of weeks). Maybe if I finish this and another communication in time I’ll get our tree out. With snow in parts of the UK at the moment I expect the approaching celebration feels a bit more seasonal. In New Zealand a colleague was reminding me that their Christmas is associated with long summer days, the exact opposite of the UK (naturally since it’s on the opposite side of the planet!). In PNG the climate is much the same as always and there are no seasonal cues.

I’m very happy to miss the snow. It’s been cloudy all morning but is brightening up now and the temperature is in the mid-20s, Celsius that is! I can guarantee that we won’t have a white Christmas. Friends returning to Canada this week will be going back to a thick blanket of snow and snow ploughs out keeping the roads clear.

Have a good week. Drive carefully, as will we as we avoid over-developed potholes rather than ice.

November 26th

Nicki and I have enjoyed a quiet morning at home this morning (Sunday). There was a baptism service scheduled at the river, followed by a service back at church, followed by the annual general meeting. Inevitably it will run on late if all of this is squeezed in to one morning, so we decided to opt out.

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Irene, our friend who helps Nicki with cleaning, not only of our house, but also of other MAF houses in between guests, is in hospital with typhoid. Nicki visited her yesterday and reported that she is improving, but it’s hit her hard, as expected with a disease like that. It’s endemic in PNG and two children of one of our families were diagnosed with it last year, but made a good recovery – no doubt helped by the requirement to be vaccinated against it.

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Our car is off the road with a problem with the clutch cylinder. It had some trouble a couple of weeks ago and we hoped it had been fixed, but it looks like a new cylinder will be required. Not being a mechanic in any way shape or form it isn’t something I’d be prepared to do, so it’s waiting for Wednesday when the MAF car mechanics have a slot to fit it in. For the meantime we will use one of the MAF vehicles for any travel.

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Last week had a bit more flying than usual with four days out of the office. Monday was the most interesting, not so much in what was carried (building materials), but in what those supplies were for – a new classroom in one community and a new ward for a health centre in another.

On Friday the weather was very bad in the morning and one round had to be cancelled. Around midday, however, it rapidly started improving and come the afternoon was near perfect flying conditions with good visibility and a high layer of cloud. The airstrips were very wet, so needed to be treated with caution, but apart from that all was straightforward. One round, the most important, took one of the families that Nicki has been teaching Tok Pisin out to Dusin, and brought a young family back who have just finished their own bush orientation with the Nazarene mission.

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Our patch of rhubarb was supplied with a good load of compost yesterday, so will hopefully provide a good crop again in the near future. Considering how much vegetable matter goes in the bin, it’s amazing how it rots down to not even half full. I’ve used some of the compost mixed with tea compost that we bought for the garden earlier in the year, plus some garden soil, to make a potting mix. I don’t know why I haven’t done it before, but we now have pot plants on our veranda, including Amaryllis bulbs that proliferate wildly around the flower beds, but which make a very nice display. One flower head is just finishing and another will be open very soon.

Also out of the garden was a good crop of lemongrass for my latest batch of lemongrass and ginger cordial. It’s our favourite drink, Nicki particularly likes it mixed with pineapple juice made from the boiled up skins and centres from fruit she’s cut up, and either like this or by itself, it is very popular with guests as well. I don’t know if it’s possible to buy lemongrass stalks in the UK, but I know that the Green Bottle Company make the cordial (much too sweet!) as that’s where we first came across it.

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Tickets home have been ordered for next March. We decided that rather than travel on Monday, we might as well leave on the Saturday and get back two days earlier. Travelling over the weekend won’t make any difference to the programme here, and it gives us more time to get over the jet lag before we have our first church meeting to go to. So, we’ll arrive back on Sunday March 11th, and depart again on Wednesday June 27th.

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Having had a cold and then flown most days this week, I haven’t been able to keep up with my running. It’s amazing how quickly the edge goes off the stamina! I decided to go up Rondon Ridge this morning, which is always a steep climb, but my pace was substantially down on what I’ve done before. I’ll be able to run a bit more this week and I hope get the stamina (and energy) back to where it was.

That’s just about it for this week. Dave & Karina Mills are coming for a quick visit this afternoon (he’s the doctor from Kompiam hospital I’ve mentioned many times before) and it’ll be good to catch up with them. The intention is for us to go out there at some point, but we haven’t slotted it into our diary yet.

I hope you have a good week.

November 19th

Benedict Allen made the news in the UK at least. The intrepid British explorer, whom I admit I’d not heard of before, goes missing in the Highlands of PNG. Eventually he’s located at an airstrip north of the Porgera gold mine. I flew past it on Thursday afternoon and, if I’d known he was there, could easily have picked him up. If I’d done that then I’d have deprived the Daily Mail of its sensationalist publicity when they arranged for a helicopter to fly out from Mount Hagen on Friday. I would not have lost any sleep whatsoever if I’d done that. Unfortunately I knew nothing about the man until after I returned.

It’s dangerous to judge when I don’t know the whole story, but my initial reaction has been, “What an idiot!” What sort of person in their right mind (presumably) disappears into the sort of terrain he was exploring without a satellite phone, GPS and an emergency locator beacon. Not to do so is negligent, plain stupid and has the potential to put other people’s lives at risk when they start searching.

Or was it just a carefully orchestrated publicity scam? The cynic in me doesn’t rule out that possibility.

One thing was accurate, there is a tribal war going on in the area between the Hewa and Paiela tribes. The latter have a reputation for being violent bullies. The Paiela airstrip has been closed since the late 1990s, I’m the only MAF pilot in PNG to have ever landed there, and none of us enjoyed the experience for two reasons: firstly it was high altitude, short and flat and difficult; secondly, because the people were generally so unpleasant and difficult to deal with.

I’m sure that Mr Allen will make a substantial income from his tale as to how he heroically survived, not just the trek, but also his brush with the savages of the Highlands. I’m absolutely certain that the Daily Mail’s interest will be confined to how much it can make out of the story.

My assessment remains the same: “What an idiot!”

The place he was rescued from is where some New Tribes missionaries chose to leave some years ago because the community was so dysfunctional and violent. It’s where sorcery and witch hunts occurred that led to the murder of many women that I commented on before.

A few months ago in a Weekly News I recommended Jonathan Kopf’s book, “Canopy of Darkness”, I continue to recommend it and if you do read it, you’ll understand a bit more of what our intrepid explorer blundered into.

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On Thursday I flew to a very remote community where the Sepik lowlands begin to climb up through the foothills of the Central Ranges.

The airstrip is generally serviced from Wewak, in the past by the GA8 Airvan. Since the airstrip is a difficult one, since we’ve had the C208 Caravan based in Wewak it hasn’t been possible for the bigger aircraft to land there until the pilot gained sufficient experience.

“Please get the aircraft to come back,” was a plea from the villagers when I landed. Six people have died and the health centre and school closed directly because MAF hasn’t been going there. Six people who couldn’t get to hospital, and the heath workers and teachers unable and unwilling to remain in a place that remote without air support.

Why weren’t we told? Why didn’t a message get through to us? If I’d known and if MAF as an organisation had known, then we could have done something about it. But we didn’t, and six people died. Maybe they’d have died anyway, but I don’t know that, and I feel frustrated and sad that people whom we might have been able to help, weren’t helped.

I will be working to get the aircraft back there as soon as possible.

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On the home front, I shared my cold with Nicki, so as I recovered, she got worse. Today I’m nearly 100% again, just a slight chesty tickle, and Nicki is well on the mend from our first colds in many months. Hopefully it will have boosted our anti-cold immune system so that we don’t get another for a long while.

Organising air tickets for next March is now in hand, and by next week may well be confirmed. It moves everything nearer.

November 12th

It’s two weeks since the last update, mostly because not a great deal had happened that made for comment. Let’s look back over both the last 7 days, as well as the last 14, and see if last week’s assessment still stands.

The closure of Mount Hagen airport during the general elections seems an unlikely event to build relationships with the local community. The traditional landowners in the area are the Yamke clan, and when they asked all businesses at the airport to cease operations because of issues they had with some of the candidates, MAF complied. Later on, MAF senior managers were also involved in the settlement process.

Through this, the Yamke leaders realised that MAF is not a business, but a mission and a not-for-profit organisation. Since they are local to Mount Hagen and unlikely to use our aircraft, it’s not really all that surprising that the villagers in the area knew nothing about what we do.

To cut a fairly long story short, the churches and leaders in the area decided they wanted to hold a week-long tent meeting to honour MAF. Various MAF staff have led the evening sessions and the community has held a collection for our work.

Nicki and I only managed to get to the meeting on Monday night. As I was flying on Wednesday and Thursday I didn’t want to be late to bed, and both those nights the meetings ran on very late. Come Thursday and Friday I felt unusually tired, the reason for which started to become apparent last night as a slight cold developed. Apart from lack of energy and a bit of congestion it’s not been a problem, but being fairly quiet at home has definitely been the best option.

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While in Mount Hagen MAF has enjoyed good relationships with the local community, our partner organisation, Christian Radio Missionary Fellowship, in Goroka has had serious problems in the last couple of months with a gang of criminals, so-called raskols. The latest and most serious incident came when a gang of about 10 armed men invaded the home of one of their families. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and “stuff” can always be replaced, even if it is costly and highly inconvenient.

We’re all hoping that the gang have now crossed the line of what will be tolerated by the local community. Missions are targets like anybody else of opportunist criminals, but a home invasion raises the stakes considerably, and certainly some local people have expressed outrage, and a sense of shame, that an incident like that has occurred.

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Our plans for next year are gradually coming together, and this weekend I’ll write an email to Siama, the Dutch travel agency that we use to book our tickets. Usually they can come up with quite a reasonable deal. While it may be possible to find cheaper flights by hunting around online, it is so much easier to let somebody else do the research and have all the connections linked within the one booking.

We’re planning on arriving in the UK on Tue March 13th and leaving again on Wed June 27th, depending on the availability of seats. We’ll see if there might be an opportunity to cross the pond and see Andrew, Querida and the boys during that period, but nothing has been arranged yet.

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Richard gave us a surprise phone call yesterday. The great move of all their stuff from our house to their new one was about to take place. Richard was wondering where our car keys were so that it could be moved out of the way, but since Dave & Jane look after them, and they were away for a few days, it had to be worked around.

By now he and Bekah and not-so-little-anymore Ithaka will be in their own house, though no doubt with plenty of unpacking still to do. Even if we weren’t around to help, it was good that our home could be used for storage, while Bill & Maggie were able to cover their board and lodging until their house was ready!

So, a bit more to comment on this week, but my cold is inhibiting much creative thinking and writing :-(

October 29th

The pilots’ meetings are over for another year. At the end of them, and particularly after two days flying on Thursday and Friday, I was more than ready for the weekend. The best part of ten hours sleep over Friday night was both very unusual (for me) and extremely welcome.

 As usual, the amount of effort that went into preparing for them was worth it in the end. There was good interaction and as the Country Director (Todd Aebsischer), Operations Director (Doug Miles) and Finance Manager (Geoff Boer) were all way in Cairns for regional management meetings, there were some vacant time slots as each of these would normally take a session. With a bit of leeway it meant that we weren’t under pressure to fit everything in, so there was more time for discussion and for everybody to catch up with each other.

After having the meetings in the Goroka area, either at a mission station just outside the town, or at Aiyura, last year, this year we’ve held them back in Mount Hagen, where they always used to be based. It’s worked well; there’s been less time spent travelling and, particularly this year, the venues have been good. In the past we used the Highlander Hotel, but last year their quote was very high, whereas this year it was much more reasonable, so we used one of their function rooms and enjoyed some excellent pizza from their restaurant on Monday evening.

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 A couple of weeks ago Todd recommended a book to me called, “Turning the Ship Around”. His brother is a senior officer in the US military and coming up for promotion. Todd had asked him what was on their required reading list and this was one of the titles. Although his brother is not in the navy, this account is nonetheless on the reading list.

 The author is now a management consultant, and his style and method was born out of his experiences on the USS Sante Fe. When he took command it was reckoned to be the most dysfunctional ship in the US Navy. It’s somewhat scary to think that a nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine was in that state! Anyway, he relates how it went, to quote, “from worst to first” by encouraging all levels of the crew, officers down through the ranks, to take responsibility for their roles, rather than expecting to be told what to do.

I recommend it. It’s easy reading, but very interesting and, because it’s born out of front-line experience, carries an authority that a theoretical management book is less likely to. I haven’t tried reading too many management books as they’ve never caught my interest when I looked at them, so this is definitely more attention-grabbing.

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Our garden is making good progress. The hedge is clipped right down its length and through Brandon & Sharlene Coker’s garden next door. Neither of them enjoy gardening so they are happy for me to use my hedge clipper through their patch.

 On our main flower bed, I’ve thinned out the rampant cannas and gingers, removed loads of amaryllis that had proliferated wildly, put in some other plants for both colour and shape from other parts of the garden, and eradicated as many weeds as possible.

 This afternoon I picked a very good load of rhubarb, which doesn’t grow brilliantly well in a warm climate, but still provides a reasonable crop every now and then. A rhubarb crumble is on the menu for this evening’s meal. We usually eat midday on Sundays, but it was the annual Thanksgiving service at church this morning and the guest speaker went on for over an hour. By the time we got home we decided a snack with the main meal later would work better.

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If any of our sons had been badly cut with a bush knife while attempting to break up a fight, and ended up in hospital for a couple of weeks, I cannot imagine that Nicki and I wouldn’t be on the phone every day, maybe more if necessary, to them, especially if it wasn’t possible to visit them.

There’s a family we know who live in a village on the outskirts of Mount Hagen. The father is uneducated and virtually illiterate, the mother can read and write a bit. Their oldest son has been in Port Moresby for a couple of years trying to find work and recently has had a job with a security company. Their second son has just finished his grade 12 exams and is waiting for his results. Two younger daughters and two still younger sons complete the family.

It was the oldest son who was injured and he has been phoning Nicki, or she has phoned him, just about every day this week. Nicki has passed on his phone number (he’s using a phone from another patient as he doesn’t have his own phone) to his family, and also provided them with some phone cards so they can afford to call him. As of this morning, he has not had one call from either his parents or extended family. His parents obviously can’t visit him, but extended family members in the capital haven’t either.

We saw his parents in church this morning. Nicki passed on the phone number (again) and both of us made it very clear that it was their responsibility as parents to speak to their son, to encourage him and to let him know he isn’t forgotten.

Nicki rarely gets cross, but this has been one of the rare occasions. She commented this afternoon that if he’d been killed, money would have come out of the woodwork to ensure his body was brought back to the village for burial. However, he hasn’t been killed and they can’t be bothered to find a way to call him. Grrr!!!

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The internet has been poor for the last few days and at the time of writing there is no connection. We had a problem with our phone line that was sorted out very quickly after we reported it, but now I can’t connect to get our internet account recharged. Grrr again! Hopefully it will be restored soon so that this is the Weekly News for Oct 29th and not the one for Oct 29th and Nov 5th combined.

October 22nd

For the last month the Seventh Day Adventists have had open air meetings on the sports ground across the road from us. In all fairness, it has been nothing like some previous events of theirs, either in volume or length of each day’s service as they’ve usually finished about 8:30 p.m. Nonetheless, some speakers were loud enough to make conversation a challenge, so it will be nice to have our evenings back.

On two occasions in the last couple of years the SDAs have led the Hagen community in organising a massive clean-up of all the rubbish and filth that gets dropped around the town. Since the town authority seems incapable of doing the job itself, it is falling to the churches to keep the place clean. The SDAs took the initiative, organised their folk and vehicles to transport the bags of rubbish to the tip, and made the town look much cleaner and nicer. At the end of this month the Lutherans are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the reformation. With due acknowledgement to the SDAs, which was nice, they also organised a clean-up of the town, which took place yesterday morning. Eric Eribiang, our Administration Manager, is very much involved in the Lutheran Church, so he was authorised to use the MAF truck to transport collected rubbish to the tip.

Nicki and I went for a walk first thing in the morning and intended to join in to tidy up around our compound, but by the time we got back, they’d already done the job and moved on. It was very noticeable driving to church this morning how much better the town looked.

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Walking, running or driving in town or around the area it is now sadly commonplace to get children and youths call out, “Waitskin”, “Waitman” or, for Nicki, “Waitmeri”. In Tok Pisin “Wait” is the colour white and is pronounced the same, so you can work out what the words mean. I can’t recall seeing or hearing a child corrected by an adult, so they continue doing it. Yesterday, while out for our walk, a woman deliberately walked up to us with her young child saying, “Waitman, waitman”. Children who are unused to mixing with white people are often nervous, so this woman was deliberately freaking her child out. What sort of woman does that sort of thing to their child?

Fortunately, the vast majority of people are pleasant and greet us with a smile and a friendly, “Hello” or “Good morning”. The name calling behaviour irritates and annoys; it’s unnecessary and backward. Not infrequently when youths do it they’re drunk or have been smoking marijuana, so we just avoid and ignore them. Now put yourself in the position of a single young woman working for MAF (or anybody else for that matter). She was driving past the airport terminal concentrating on the potholes when a well-dressed man in a suit yelled out, “Waitmeri!” She ignored him, sensibly, so he yelled out again, “I said, ‘Waitmeri!’”. Behaviour like that is inexcusable in any country and against any race. It is rude, vulgar, ignorant, abusive, intimidating and whole lot more adjectives.

Any country that wants to drag itself into civilisation will have to rise above its citizens calling other people names. Then I look around the world and don’t see many countries that are dragging themselves into civilisation. If anything, it looks like we’re all heading back to the stone age and tribal warfare, hopefully not nuclear. PNG can provide global education on tribal warfare if required, albeit with conventional weaponry.

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Tomorrow is the start of the annual pilots’ meetings. They’re always a lot of work to prepare for, and I will have to work evenings next week to complete my sessions. It’s good to get everybody together to cover the legally required training, rather than doing it piecemeal with other checks throughout the year. The interaction always provides a more thorough refresher of things like emergency procedures, knowledge of procedures and air law, or safety management system and so on. By themselves these topics would be pretty tedious to review, but delegate them out and encourage creativity, and we usually have some very enjoyable sessions.

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The Flight Operations department has a very efficient and effective assistant, Doris Kelwau. She is excellent and highly appreciated; without her Flight Ops would definitely not function as well as it does. For the last couple of years Doris has been working at an Australian TAFE (Technical Further Education) Cert. IV course in Business Administration under MAF sponsorship. She completed her assignments and heard that she’d passed the course a couple of months ago, but last weekend her certificate arrived. I formally presented to her after our morning devotions on Tuesday. She had every reason to be proud, and we are all very proud of her.

Have a good week, hopefully without anybody calling you any names!

October 15th

The best part of conducting flight tests is when the pilot passes the check. The worst part is when they don’t. I did a total of three flight checks this week, two for one pilot and one for another, and both passed. It was a good week!

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MAF PNG is in the process of adding Electronic Flight Bags, or EFBs for short, to the equipment pilots carry. Everybody else knows the devices as iPads, but EFB is the aviationese word for them.

At their best, they can carry all necessary documentation, including the aircraft flight manual (a weighty tome), all the avionics manuals, and every manual, operating procedure, advisory document, operational memo and so on that any organisation can dream up. Believe me, MAF is very good at dreaming up manuals and paperwork!

Our EFBs link to our satellite tracking system, which is one of the best safety improvements MAF has ever invested in as we know where our aircraft are all of the time. Dream on Air Malaysia and MH370. With the link comes the ability to send alerts for any emergencies, and text messages. The latter is hugely useful when it comes to sending information such as changes of plan, medical evacuations, arrival times, fuel requirements and load available. Overall, this must be saving us money already.

Additionally, they have the potential for calculating load data, aircraft weight and balance values, load manifests and more. But this will have to wait until they have official approval.

There are some teething issues that I’m sorting out to make them a bit more user friendly.

Firstly, with the mass of manuals and documents that MAF has, many will never be needed while a pilot is flying, so to thin down the volume of documents I want to sort out only those that are necessary to have in an aircraft.

Secondly, working with others we’ll develop a user-friendly way of renaming the manuals to make them easier to find. For example, our Twin Otter operating procedures are grandly titled: MPGO.SOP.09 - DHC6 SOP - Amdt 13  - 10 Aug 2016 – Print.pdf. I reckon that DHC6 SOP 13 would do just fine! Some negotiation on renaming may be necessary, but I’m sure a better protocol will be achievable.

The next hurdle to full utilisation is officialdom. The government Advisory Circular on having EFBs approved is, if I remember correctly, 52 pages long. The time and energy to drive this project is more than I can give at the moment, so for the moment we’ll have to settle for getting rid of some manuals in our aircraft that aren’t legally required, which at least is a start.

A practical challenge to using iPads is that periodically Apple, like any other manufacturer, issues updates. The latest big update came out recently, all 1.15GB of it. I had 15 devices in my office this week trying to download 1.15GB each over a not very fast internet connection. I got there in the end and it was a slow process, though obviously I let them get on with the download and didn’t have to sit watching them.

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Yesterday a 12.5km run up Rondon Ridge, followed by some energetic hedge cutting and flower bed digging, left me sufficiently weary to not want to run again today. I still have an ambition to make it to the top of Rondon Ridge, 10km from home, and back, without stopping. I’ve done it once with periodic stretches of walking, but we’ll see if one day I make it all the way.

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The garden is beginning to look much better from the effort I’ve put into it recently. Nicki has done quite a lot of pruning, including our extremely vicious but very tasty variety of blackberry cum black raspberry that grows well in our garden. When I say vicious, I mean vicious! It makes the worst-thorned UK blackberry seem positively benign.

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I don’t have any flying scheduled for this week. Two days are tied up with meetings, and the other three will have to include preparation for pilots’ meetings which are at the start of the following week. While I’ve kept on top of the organisation of the pilots’ meetings, working with Brad Venter, who’s Crew Training Manager, I haven’t yet done anything at all for the sessions I’m taking. That will have to change!

Have a good week.

October 8th

The week in Telefomin was very enjoyable. Consistent flying, rather than the sporadic opportunities I usually get, enabled me to regain my proficiency. It’s nice, and very helpful, to be able to put the wheels down where you want to on airstrips that don’t have very much in the way of margins!

During the week, the aircraft was used as a hearse (three times), a delivery truck (for building and food supplies) and a bus (for passengers). There was no need this time for it to be a fuel tanker since fuel stocks in Telefomin were quite good.

I was told that the hospital in Tabubil is requiring that the bodies of deceased patients are removed promptly. I think that in the past relatives took their time to make the transport arrangements, consulting with all the family members and so on, whereas now, they have to get on with the flight. Consequently, charters to repatriate bodies back to their home community for burial are happening regularly.

Since MAF provides the only service out of Tabubil to surrounding communities, I presume that if we can’t do a flight, the body has to be driven three to four hours to Kiunga, and then flown using one of aircraft operators based there.

When the aircraft is used as a truck or a bus it is very easy to miss exactly what, or who, you’re carrying and why. One lot of building materials looks just like any other load. An aircraft full of passengers seems the same as any full passenger flight. However, looking down the load manifest I found that on one flight the building materials were for a school classroom.

On another flight the bales of rice, tins of fish, bottles of oil and boxes of soap were for the high school in Tekin, the one run by Glenda Giles whom I’ve mentioned before.

The passenger list showed medical transfers from Telefomin hospital, which hasn’t had a doctor for several years (though there is hope one, or more, may arrive in the near future) to Tabubil. Students were flown to school, as well as passengers going about their own business.

We stopped at one airstrip to pick up two medical evacuations. The first was an older woman who had fallen on one of the mountain tracks and broken some ribs. She was moving very carefully as you’d expect, but not a squeak of pain or complaint. I don’t know when she fell, but she’d probably been waiting for us for at least a day, possibly two.

From the same community was a man who was jaundiced and who, we were told, was passing urine the colour of coffee. I’ve no idea how long he’d taken to reach the stage where it was thought a good idea to send him to hospital, but I’m sure it was longer than I’d have been prepared to wait! I hope that he’ll be OK.

It is so nice to get out of the office and back to the sharp end of our work.

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In the meantime, Nicki did her usual amazing job of making Telefomin home and keeping up with her safety work, preparing for the two orientation courses she has coming up, working on a photobook (the internet in Telefomin is good these days) and planning accommodation for staff in Mount Hagen.

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On Friday I was flying again, but this time in my role as a checking pilot, so not so much fun. Then back to the office for a while and some problems to solve which will occupy me somewhat during the next few days.

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Most of yesterday was spent in the garden, trimming our hedge and weeding and reorganising one of our larger flower beds. The latter is a work in progress which will take a while longer to complete. Butterfly gingers, red cannas and amaryllis (now known as hippeastrum, I think) had taken over and need to be brought under control. The white and pink candy-striped amaryllis are the same as the ones grown in pots in the UK, but which flower and reproduce very freely here.

That’s all for now. Have a good week.

October 1st

At the end of our first week back, it is good that the jet lag is over. It hit fairly hard this time, me especially, proving yet again that there is no rhyme nor reason as to why one time you get over it quickly, and another time you don’t.

Our flight from Singapore to Port Moresby was three hours late leaving, making our transfer to the domestic flight very marginal. A young woman greeted us off the aircraft, showing that it was known that we were due on the first Moresby-Hagen flight, but there wasn’t a great deal she could do to expedite us through immigration and customs. We made the flight, just, but two of our bags didn’t, arriving on the second flight in the early afternoon.

As always, we were both straight back into work. Once we’d collected our bags we went up to the office, I was immediately called into some meetings and Nicki got on with her work, driving back to town mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, our car broke down for her on the way, the clutch stopped working! She managed to get it into first gear and limped the rest of the way slowly.

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Some friends, Larry & Ruth Nicholson, were staying with us that first night home. They’re normally based in Aiyura, but were passing through Hagen and it was our only chance to catch up. Larry looked at the car and bled the clutch slave cylinder, and though he couldn’t get any fluid to come out, the clutch has been fine since. I’m hoping that the MAF mechanics will have time to check the system while we’re in Telefomin this week.

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I was due to do two flight tests on Monday with two First Officers who’ve just been trained on the Twin Otter. Over the weekend I’d had a text to say one of them needed a bit more training, and then on Monday morning the other called in sick. What with jet lag and needing some office time, it probably wasn’t a bad thing, but the checks have had to be rescheduled and there are the inevitable knock-on effects in that neither FO is available to fly until the flight checks are completed.

Having started with meetings on Friday, more followed last week, with an Operations Team meeting on Tuesday and a Leadership Team one on Wednesday.

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Nicki worked very hard to get everything ready to come out to Telefomin for a week on Thursday, and it is from Telefomin that I’m writing this email. It is so nice to have some consistent time flying and to get my head back into actually doing what we’re here to do!

Having said that, one of the flights on Friday wasn’t so pleasant …

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The apostle Paul wasn’t afraid to state things bluntly. In his letter to his friend Titus he quoted a Cretan as saying, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” To be that blunt in today’s churches would be decidedly non-politically correct!

Friday’s first round out of Tabubil was to take a man’s body back to his home community of Kopiago for burial. Kopiago, home of the Duna people, is a place with a reputation and one of a very small number of communities where I would really prefer not to spend a night. A long time ago one of our aircraft was hijacked there; they don’t look after their airstrip; people crowd around the aircraft and won’t follow instructions to get out of the way and out of the parking bay; and so on.

They lived up to their reputation on Friday. The grass either side of the centreline must be a metre high, certainly much too long and grounds for me to close the airstrip for further operations until it’s cut.

A huge number of people crowded around the aircraft, even when the coffin had been removed, along with the passengers and their bags. They wouldn’t move back when the pastor arranging the passengers on the backload asked them to. They wouldn’t get out of the parking bay when other leaders asked them to, nor when I did the same. When I raised my voice most just stood looking at me as though they were deaf and incapable of understanding the instruction: “Get out of the parking bay”.

Eventually some semblance of crowd control was established but only after making threats to leave all the passengers and cargo behind.

Once the aircraft was loaded and the passengers were on board, two men climbed into the cabin and demanded to be taken to Tabubil saying they had urgent business. They refused to leave the aircraft following polite requests, less polite requests, warnings that they would be arrested and charged by police at Tabubil and similar requests by those responsible for the charter. Once removed, one demanded that other passengers shouldn’t travel if he couldn’t, and when denied that, threatened very aggressively to damage the aircraft.

Eventually he was taken away and some local people were obviously embarrassed by the situation. For now, the airstrip is closed to MAF flights until the grass is cut and an effective way of keeping people out of the parking bay is put in place. I don’t anticipate either will be completed in the near future.

To return to Paul’s non-PC statement about Cretans (and recognising it is a generalisation), my non-PC statement about the Kopiago people is: “The Dunas are always uncooperative, aggressive and awkward.”

The silly thing is, if the two men had asked nicely when the load manifest was being prepared and passengers and cargo weighed, we did have space on the aircraft and could actually have taken them. Being uncooperative, aggressive and awkward when the aircraft was ready to leave didn’t help themselves at all.

Oh, the joys of working as an MAF pilot!

The next round, taking building materials for a church from Tari to Tekin was much more pleasant and much more the norm for rural PNG.

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A weekend away from home should mean an opportunity to relax without needing to think about all the chores on the ‘to do’ list. That’s true up to a point, though the solar electricity system has given us some challenges which we’re only just mastering.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening, we had a Skype interview with a MAF UK event where they wanted a real live pilot and his wife to answer some questions about what we did and the work in PNG. I didn’t mention anything about Friday’s challenges at Kopiago!

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Nicki is looking at Facebook as I write and we’ve just had a good laugh from one of her school friend’s post that her granddaughter had just asked her if she wrote with a quill when she was young. We have yet to field any questions like that.

May all the people you meet this week be pleasant, kind and helpful.