It’s been a meeting filled week this week
as I think I mentioned it would be in last week’s letter.
The Aviation Safety Action Group meets
every 2-3 months, the 3 months is a limit within our procedures to ensure that
it’s not the sort of meeting that keeps on getting deferred so that it never
happens. Not that I’ve noticed too many meetings to which that applies and this
particular meeting happened on Tuesday.
It consists of a review of various
incidents and reports that have come in since the last meeting, or which are
outstanding from the previous one. Sometimes quickly, sometimes more gradually,
the items are resolved and hopefully procedures improved and the organisation
made safer as a result.
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The Operations Team meeting on Wednesday
followed a meeting with some representatives of the Australian High Commission.
They were reviewing how their drought relief efforts worked last year, meeting
with the different organisations involved and seeing what could be learnt if
similar work is needed in the future. I thought that it was a worthwhile visit
and it was also good to see a review like that taking place.
The Ops Meeting straight afterwards was a
marathon. In fact, it was approximately six hours longer than Mo Farah took to
run his first competitive marathon. As a complete aside, I cannot see how
anybody can run so fast, so continuously, over 42km, to complete the course in
just over two hours.
Anyway, back to the meeting, we cleared a lot of the
business quite quickly, but then had to spend a lot of time and mental effort
working out where pilots and aircraft will be based next year, and how to
ensure they are all trained. Progress was made and the task of talking with the
people who’ll be affected has begun.
Then on Thursday came the full Leadership
Team meeting. This meeting was more of a 10,000 metres than a marathon, but Mo
would still have run it in a fraction of the time!
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Come Friday I was able to escape the
office, but mostly due to an unanticipated reason.
What do you do when somebody at an airstrip
isn’t able to get on an aircraft because he hadn’t booked and all the seats are
full, but he then completely loses control and chases the pilot with a bush
knife? Fortunately, there weren’t any injuries, and also fortunately, this sort
of thing is very rare, probably much rarer than road rage, or even air rage, is
on western roads and airlines. Nonetheless, it’s very serious, very frightening
for the person concerned, and has major implications for everybody involved.
It would be inappropriate to give too much
detail in a letter like this, but the immediate actions include providing
appropriate support for the pilot and his family, and closing the airstrip to
further flights until the issue is resolved. Quite how it will be resolved
remains to be seen, but discussions with the communities affected have already
begun.
After any incident like this a pilot is
taken off flying duties for a while; that makes common sense. However, the
short notice withdrawal of a pilot means that there’s nobody else to fly the
programme when it’s a single pilot base due to the ‘other’ pilot being on
holiday. There was a lot of re-juggling of the flying programme for Thursday
and Friday, so I flew one Otter to cover one part of the programme, and our
other Otter picked up what was left. In the end it worked out quite well.
I hope that during this week there will be
some information back from the communities about how they intend to take
responsibility for what happened.
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Tomorrow I head out to Telefomin for the
rest of the week in order to do some training with the pilot based there. Nicki
will follow out on Tuesday on a separate flight, as my aircraft is completely
full with tourists. We’ve done several tourist flights recently as it is the time
of year for the cultural shows, with the Hagen Show over this weekend. Neither
Nicki nor I felt inclined to go as we’ve been to several at various times. Maybe
we ought to go next year if we have the chance as it may well be our last
opportunity to take some photos of the various groups in their traditional
feathers and finery.
Some of the tourists, I don’t know about
the ones we’re flying tomorrow, have arrived by private jet; we’ve had the
relatively unusual event of two shiny Gulfstream corporate jets landing at
Hagen Airport within a couple of days of each other.
Flying for an hour in one of our Twin
Otters will be a somewhat different experience, and a lot noisier one, for
them! There are also no loos, no catering and no in-flight entertainment other
than looking out of the window.
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Getting ready for Telefomin has taken up a
bit of time over this weekend, especially as it’s next weekend that Nicki sets
off on her travels to the UK via the USA. We’re trying to get everything
organised sufficiently so that there’s not too much to do after we get home
again on Friday afternoon and before Nicki leaves on Sunday morning.
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Maybe with all the travelling we’ve done
over the last four months I ought to see if MAF will buy us a private jet. I
don’t rate my chances of getting a positive answer very highly!
